Co-Director – Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is a Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School at UCLA. She is also the inaugural Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (University of Nebraska Press). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies from NYU Press forthcoming in October 2021. Her community work is devoted to several digital humanities project, including participation as a Co-PI on community based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A(2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities, and Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019), a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is also heading up the new Mukurtu California Native Hub housed at AISC through an NEH grant. She also publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. In 2020-2021 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University of Buffalo located in her home territories.
Co-Director – Dr. Erin Debenport is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. A linguistic anthropologist, her research and writing focuses on issues of secrecy, literacy, knowledge circulation, and the ethics of community/academic partnerships. Since 2003, she has worked with several Tanoan-speaking Pueblo tribes on ongoing language reclamation projects, including aiding in the creation of dictionaries and teaching materials. In her community language work as well as her academic publications, she centers the local control of language materials.
Co-Director and Project Manager – Dr. María Montenegro is an Assistant Professor in Global Indigenous Studies at the Department of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine. She holds a Ph.D in Information Studies from UCLA and was a 2021-2022 UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine’s Department of Global and International Studies. Originally from Chile, her research sits at the intersection of Indigenous studies, critical archival theory and tribal law and policy, and is in close conversation with the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. She has more than ten years of experience working and collaborating with Native communities in academic, archival/museum, and community-based contexts. The bulk of this experience has been in work with Dr. Kimberly Christen at Washington State University, as the project coordinator of the Sustainable Heritage Network and with Dr. Jane Anderson as a researcher for Local Contexts and the Traditional Knowledge Labels. She is the digital archivist of UCLA’s repatriation program Carrying our Ancestors Home (COAH) and a consultant for Chile’s Ministry of Cultures’ Department of Indigenous Peoples in matters of cultural revitalization, digital return and knowledge organization. For this project, María is the co-director and project manager.
Digital Trainer/Archivist – Celestina Castillo is a doctoral student in Gender Studies at UCLA with a concentration in American Indian Studies. She is interested in understanding the role gender has played in the leadership and development of American Indian social movements and organizations in Los Angeles and other urban centers. She is also interested in the intersections and tensions between theories guiding community-based research, Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies, and feminist approaches to scholarship, particularly in partnership with communities outside of the academy and for advancing social change. She is currently working on a community-based archival research project with United American Indian Involvement (UAII) which consists mostly of photos. She is building this community archive in partnership with UAII and community members through conducting oral histories in order to interpret source materials, as well as apply a visual culture lens to describe the creative, artistic expressions of the photos. Celestina is Tohono O’odham and Chicana/Mexican-American. Her family has lived in Los Angeles/Tongva territory for four generations.
Joy Holland is the Librarian at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center Library. She previously served her own community as Executive Director of Kona Historical Society, a multi-site, 10-acre, Smithsonian affiliated museum and archive in Hawaiʻi. She served on a variety of boards, panels, and councils in the State including Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities, Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Association of Hawaiʻi Archivists, and others. Joy has a Masters in Library and Information Science from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she also worked in Special Research Collections. She currently serves on several boards and committees, including as an Advisory Board Chair at LACMA related to a significant collection on Hawai’i and the Pacific, and as a project Advisory Board Member at the Autry Museum pertaining to ethical protocols and repatriation in repositories.