My goal as a Native American studies (NAS) professor is to foster a landscape where students develop as tribal critical thinkers. Through innovative and engaging online and in-person activities, I present students with opportunities to respect and dialogue the diversity of Indigenous realities at local, regional, hemispheric, and global echelons. At the same time, I aspire to build possibilities for students to forge and/or further meaningful and real-world relationships with their own Indigenous settings, ecologically, linguistically, culturally, politically, and inter- and intra-personally. I compliment my extensive NAS content knowledge and teaching experience with personal encounters of not seeing Indigenous standpoints within a greater “American” narrative, of questioning this exclusion, and finally, of bringing these experiences to the forefront, including that of Native led online NAS classes. This approach not only enriches students’ engagement with NAS content, but it also welcomes undergraduate, graduate, Indigenous, and non-Indigenous students to intimate Diné ways of knowing disciplined into me by Diné medicine woman, Louella Deswood, and the Protection Ways she performed. While not all students identify as Indigenous, with a basis of online pedagogical trust and accountability, we build a healthy and productive learning environment that dissects Indigenous stereotypes and explores the beauty and messiness of Indigenous realities and futurisms that both bleed and bloom.
At my grandparents home in Sand Springs.