Native Feminisms

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program and Associate Director of American Indian Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her doctorate from Stanford University’s Modern Thought and Literature and was a UC Presidential Post-doctoral fellow at Berkeley. Her research involves thinking through colonialism, geography and literature in ways that generate anti-colonial tools in the struggle for social justice. Her book, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) was honored at the American Association for Geographic Perspectives on Women and a finalist for best first book from NAISA. The Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrance Malick’s the New World, is in progress with the Indigenous Film Series, University of Nebraska Press. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Wicazo Sa, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Transmotion, and American Indian Cultures and Research Journal. She has guest edited journal volumes on Native Feminisms and another on Indigenous Performances. She has also co-authored a book chapter in Handbook for Gender Equity on “Gender Equity for American Indians” and single authored chapters in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge 2016), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies (2016). Other book chapters include a piece on visual geographies and settler colonialism in Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, (Duke University Press, 2014) and a chapter on trauma, geography, and decolonization in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (ed. Joanne Barker, Duke University Press, 2017). She is also a Co-PI on a community based digital community project, Mapping Indigenous L.A., that is working toward creating a self-represented storytelling, archival, and community orientated maps that unveil multi-layered Indigenous LA landscapes. The created storymaps begin with The Gabrieleño Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam while including those from diasporic Indigenous communities who make LA their home. The current phase develops curriculum for K-12.

Dr. Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar teaching Indigenous Planning, Community Development, and Indigenous Feminisms. She is an Associate Professor in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She was raised in Sapulpa by Mvskoke parents that were active in Mvskoke community and Muscogee (Creek) Nation politics; Harjo is a lifelong student of emancipatory community processes. Dr. Harjo earned a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Southern California, and her research and teaching centers on Indigenous spatialities, community caretaking, Indigenous feminist community planning praxis, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and anti-violence, artivism and community engaged knowledge production. She is the author of Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke epistemologies, and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community praxis of futurity.