This October we are highlighting Native Bruin Caitlin “Katie” Kaliiaa, from the Yerington Paiute and Washoe Nation. , M.A. in American Indian Studies, UCLA – 2012.
Caitlin “Katie” Keliiaa is an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is an interdisciplinary historian specializing in 20th-century Native experiences in the West. Her scholarship engages Indian labor exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance of Native bodies especially in Native Californian contexts. She is currently working on her book which examines how Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged an early 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area-based Indian labor program. In this work Dr. Keliiaa centers Native women’s voices uncovered from federal archives. She earned her first M.A. in American Indian Studies at UCLA, her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and most recently was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department at UC Santa Cruz. She is Yerington Paiute and Washoe and her tribal communities inform her scholarship.
“UCLA’s American Indians Studies M.A. program was a great stepping stone on my path towards my Ph.D. I learned hands-on research methods from stellar faculty and benefited from the American Indian Studies Center, AICRJ, and the Institute of American Cultures. I left well prepared for my graduate career and made lifelong friends. UCLA and it’s Native community always holds a special place in my heart.”