About

I’m a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and hail from NE Oklahoma (the part with hills, water, and trees). I currently live in Illinois, where I’m an associate professor of Anthropology,  American Indian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies and the Director of AIS at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. My research and activism center around Indigenous and collaborative models of research & research ethics; Indigenous language futurism (including revitalization);  Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer identity and community; and NAGPRA and the repatriation of collections taken from Native communities.

My 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and her creative work has recently been published in Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and exhibited at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Before joining the faculty at UIUC, I earned a PhD in Linguistics in 2013 from the University of Colorado, Boulder. I was the Henry Roe Cloud Fellow in American Indian Studies at Yale University in 2011-2012 and the Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Kentucky in 2013-2014.