Speakers

Brianna Burke

Brianna R. Burke is an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and American Indian Studies in the English Department at Iowa State University. Currently she is working on a book titled Becoming Beast: The Humanimal in Climate Justice Literatures, which explores the morphing ideology of what it means to be (considered) animal in a world of decreasing resources, and she publishes on environmental and social justice, as well as on the pedagogy of both. Her most recent publication, on conjoined extinction, is called “Resonant Silences in ‘The Great Silence’ by Ted Chiang and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau” and is forthcoming in Nonhuman Animals, Climate Crisis and the Role of Literature.

JoAnn (Jo) Ducharme

Jo is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes of Montana. She spent 40 years living in Alaska working in Alaska Native education.

She left Alaska in 2013 to return home to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Northwest Montana.  She has been a full-time faculty member in the Tribal Governance & Administration Program at Salish-Kootenai Tribal College since 2014. She has come “full circle.” She has a B.Ed. in Secondary Education and a M.Ed. in Guidance and Counseling from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

She is the proud mother of one son, Benjamin, who relocated from Alaska to Montana 2 years ago.

Birgit Hans

Birgit Hans received her Ph.D. in English with a specialty in American Indian Literature from the University of Arizona in 1988. In addition she has two M.A. degrees (English and American Indian Studies) from the same university. Since 1991 she has been teaching at the University of North Dakota as a faculty member in American Indian Studies and holds the rank of Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor. 

She has published in American Indian literature and history and is also interested in the portrayal of Native peoples in popular literature. At present her research is ethnohistorical in nature; she is researching the early federal attempts at formal education for Native people on the Northern Plains as well as the resistance and/or accommodation of the federal government’s attempts to “civilize” Native women.

Susan Kollin

Susan Kollin is CLS Distinguished Professor at Montana State University—Bozeman where she teaches courses in western American literature, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. Her recent publications include essays on the films of Kelly Reichardt; the coming-of-age novels of Portland-based author Willy Vlautin; and recent literature on gender, race, and the global West. She is the editor of A History of Western American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and is a past president of the Western Literature Association.

Lloyd Lee

Lloyd L. Lee, Ph.D. is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation. He is Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House), born for Tł aaschíí (Red Cheeks). His maternal grandfather’s clan is Áshįįhí (Salt) and his paternal grandfather’s clan is Tábąąhá (Water’s Edge). 

He is Professor and Faculty Graduate Director in the Department of Native American  Studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He is the Director of the Center for Regional Studies (CRS) at UNM and editor of the Wicazo Sa Review journal. He sits on the Council for the American Indian Studies Association (AISA). 

He is the author of Diné Identity in a 21^st Century World (2020), Diné Masculinities: Conceptualizations and Reflections (2013), co-author of Native Americans and the University of New Mexico (2017), and edited Navajo Sovereignty: Understandings and Visions of the Diné  People (2017) and Diné Perspectives: Reclaiming and Revitalizing Navajo Thought (2014). His research focuses on Native American/American Indian identity, masculinities, leadership, philosophies, and Native Nation building. 

Hana Maruyama

Hana Maruyama (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor in History and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. During the 2022-2023 school year, she is a public history postdoctoral fellow at the National Archives, where she joins a team working on an upcoming exhibition on racism and prejudice in US history and policy. Her project, “What Remains: Japanese American World War II Incarceration in Relation to American Indian Dispossession,” examines the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans to shed light on the deeply-held settler colonial imperatives that undergird U.S. settler state-making even in purportedly unrelated racial projects. She analyzes how the incarceration advanced the dispossession of American Indians and Alaska Natives through the non-consensual use of reservation lands, the sweeping up of 55 Alaska Natives in the forced removal, and the use of Japanese American labor in the conversion of Indigenous lands into white settler-owned private property. She completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. During that time, she co-produced/hosted the podcast Campu on Japanese American Incarceration during World War II and was a research fellow for American Public Media’s Order 9066. Before returning to graduate school, she worked for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. She is a yonsei (or fourth generation Japanese American) descended from the Heart Mountain, Jerome, and Gila River concentration camps on her father’s side.

Scott Manning Stevens

Scott Manning Stevens is a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and earned his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. Dr. Stevens was the former Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He is currently the Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Syracuse University. There he also teaches courses in the departments of English and Art History. During the academic year 2021-2022, he was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Stevens is the co-author of two books on Native American history and visual culture, Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (U Chicago 2013) and Art of the American West (Yale UP, 2014).  Dr. Stevens is also a co-editor and contributor to the 2015 collection of essays Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. His recent book chapters and articles include: “From ‘Iroquois Cruelty’ to the Mohawk Warrior Society: Stereotyping and the Strategic Uses of a Reputation for Violence,” in Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present (Northwestern UP, 2021) and “On Native American Erasure in the Classroom,” in Teaching Race in Perilous Times (SUNY Press, 2021). Stevens also serves or has served on advisory committees at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the New York Historical Society. In the past he has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Leif Sorensen

Leif Sorensen is Professor of English at Colorado State University where he teaches courses in modern and contemporary multi-ethnic American literature and culture, speculative fiction, and theory. He is the author of Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism (Palgrave 2016). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook to North American Indigenous Modernism, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, ASAP/Journal, Modernism/Modernity, Contemporary Literature, and MELUS. He is currently working on a monograph titled Worldbreaking: The Racial Politics of Speculative Worldbuilding.

Jace Weaver

Jace Weaver is the Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and the founding director of Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia.  He is a leader in the field of Native American Studies and a founder and former president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the professional organization in the field. A recognized expert in Native literature and the author or editor of more than fifteen books, his most recent book is Restless Spirits, plays by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (SUNY Press, 2020).