Indigenous Leaders – 150 Years of Women

Professor Caitlin “Katie” Keliiaa is an Indigenous Feminist Historian focused on Native American experiences in the Western Pacific region. She earned a B.A. in Native American Studies and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley; an M.A., American Indian Studies from UCLA; and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2019. She explores the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity and their historical consequences. As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor of History and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Scuz, her scholarship centers Native agency and community engaged research. She draws from interdisciplinary fields and a variety of methodologies, including qualitative data analysis, digital humanities, oral history, in-depth interviews and archival research.

Olivia Chilcote (Luiseño, San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians) received her B.A. in the Ethnic & Women’s Studies Department at Cal Poly Pomona and both M.A. and Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2013 and 2017 respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University. Her research and teaching focus on the areas of interdisciplinary Native American Studies, federal Indian law and policy, Native American identity, and Native California. Professor Chilcote grew up in the center of her tribe’s traditional territory in the North County of San Diego, and she is active in tribal politics and other community efforts. She is the first person in her tribe to earn a Ph.D.

On January 8 2020, Deborah Ann Begay became the first Native American to be elected as a judge with the Moon Valley Justice of the Peace in Maricopa County. Judge Begay earned her B.A. in Native American History from UC Berkeley in 2002 and her J.D. from Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law with a focus on Federal Indian Law. Begay is Naakai Dine’é born Kinyaa’áanii. Known as “Ann”, Begay was a McNair Scholar at UC Berkeley and worked in software project management in Silicon Valley post-graduation. She was an Udall Foundation Congressional Fellow at ASU and worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Begay is also a veteran of the United States Navy, having served 14 years in the Naval Reserves.

LaNada War Jack is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and majored in an Independent Major of Native American Law & Politics, graduating in 1970. While a student at UC Berkeley, War Jack participated as the Native American component of the Third Worlds Strike to establish the first Ethnic Studies Program in the UC statewide University system. In 1969, War Jack and other students throughout California took over Alcatraz Island in a peaceful protest of the federal government’s ill treatment of Native people and broken treaties with tribes. This facilitated certain subsequent government funded policies for Indian tribes nationwide while recovering millions of acres of land back.

Dr. Jen Rose Smith is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied ​knowledges. An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Geography Department (opens in a new tab) and American Indian Studies program (opens in a new tab), she earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies and a  Master’s Degree from the same department. Smith graduated with a BA in English Literature and the Environment from the University of Alaska, Southeast.

Smith serves on an all-Native women advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings, and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska. She is also an Editor as part of the Editorial Collective at the journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Smith’s research has been funded by the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (opens in a new tab), and the Ford Foundation (opens in a new tab).

Amy Lonetree is an enrolled citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation and an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly research focuses on Indigenous history, visual culture studies, and museum studies, and she has received fellowships in support of this work from the School for Advanced Research, the Newberry Library, the Bard Graduate Center, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Her publications include Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012); a co-edited book with Amanda J. Cobb, The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and a co-authored volume, People of the Big Voice: Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1942 (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2011). 

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. Her current projects include a series of scholarly essays on Indigenous law through sensory representations of sound, vision, synaesthesia, and haunting in the long 20^th century literary works; essays on Indigenous language revitalization; a novel, a poetry collection, and further development of her play, Antíkoni, which was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays at the Autry. She has held several artist residencies and frequently teaches writing at Fishtrap: Writing and the West and other workshops. In 2021, she will serve as a judge for the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.