Talk Stories - Stories unedited

Stories: unedited

View the unedited interviews here: our protocols, methodology, exchanging of life, emotions, and learning as we talked stories with these people.

Dr. Clint Kuahiwi Pasalo Anderson

CLINT KUAHIWI PASALO ANDERSON has had the great privilege to spend the past 20 years in service towards educating those in our indigenous communities, near and far. He currently serves as the Dean of Studies at Kamehameha Schools Hawai`i, and as a lecturer for the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. Prior to his position as an administrator, he was a secondary English teacher in public and private schools in East Hawaiʻi, as well as an adjunct professor in Education and English for Saint Louis University and Hawai’i Pacific University. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, and holds a MA in Education, and a BA in English, with a certificate in Creative Writing. His work focuses on artivism, digital citizenship and the ways in which Education intersects with new media literacies, civic engagement, social media, and culture. When quarantines aren’t in effect, you can usually find him coaching high school cross country and track & field, running roads and trails, and spending time with his family in and around Hilo.

Dr. Anita Huizar-Hernández

ANITA HUIZAR-HERNÁNDEZ (PhD, Literature, University of California, San Diego) is Associate Professor of Border Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Arizona, Huizar-Hernández's teaching and research focus on the literatures and cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and investigate the ways that stories—past, present, and future—shape our ability to cultivate just and inclusive communities within the borderlands. Her book Forging Arizona (Rutgers, 2019) examines these themes through a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme in which a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to present his wife as the heiress to a spurious Spanish land grant with the intention of claiming ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Forging Arizona argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis’s scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. Huizar-Hernández's other writing has appeared in edited volumes as well as MELUS, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and English Language Notes, among other places.

Melissa Tatum, J.D.

MELISSA TATUM specializes in tribal jurisdiction and tribal courts, as well as in issues relating to cultural property and sacred places. She was a contributing author to Felix Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, and has written extensively about both civil and criminal procedural issues, as well as about the relationship between tribal, state, and federal courts. Professor Tatum consulted with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe as it became one of the first in the nation to implement VAWA 2013's special domestic violence criminal jurisdiction. She has also served on task forces in Michigan and New Mexico charged with developing procedures to facilitate cross-jurisdictional enforcement of protection orders, and has taught seminars on domestic violence and protection orders throughout the United States for judges, attorneys, law enforcement, and victim advocates, including at the National Tribal Judicial Center. Between 1999 and 2006 she served as a judge on the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals. Professor Tatum joined the University of Arizona faculty in January 2009, after serving as a faculty member at the University of Tulsa for more than thirteen years.

Dr. Reid Gómez

REID GÓMEZ is a writer and scholar from San Francisco, California. Her research focus is quantum entanglements—slavery/colonization, Black/Indian, and storytelling/translation. Black and Indigenous studies, and the work of Leslie Marmon Silko, shape her epistemic and writing practice. She is interested in what can be done in English, and what can be done in writing—not like a native speaker. She works on and in Black English and Navlish. She is currently completing a scholarly monograph: The Web of Differing Versions: Where Africa Ends and America Begins. This monograph challenges the limits created by the grammar of colonialism. Her work is in conversation with Silko studies, Indigenous studies and Critical Black studies. She approaches grammar through the “translating consciousness” of multilingualism, theorized through language studies (translation, language revitalization, and linguistics) and feminist theory. Her relationship to language leads to questions of matter and meaning in terms of quantum physics. Gómez’s central intervention is an understanding of language and land as archive, based in Indigenous epistemologies.

Professor Bojan Louis

BOJAN LOUIS (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). His fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Numéro Cinq Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review; nonfiction in Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Louis has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony and was the inaugural Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence at Arizona State University. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona.

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