Affiliated Faculty

The UCLA American Indian Studies Center has affiliated faculty from all over campus.

• 
  Professor Stephen Acabado
  UCLA Department of Anthropology
  Email: acabado@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Historical ecology, landscape archaeology, agricultural systems, settlement patterns, emergent complexity, indigenous peoples; Southeast Asia, Philippines, Guam, Micronesia.
• 
  Associate Professor Randall Akee (Native Hawaiian)
  Department of Public Policy
  Email: rakee@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Areas of interest include economic development, ethnicity and development politics, immigration, labor and employment.
• 
  Assistant Professor Nicole Barry (McDaid)
  School of Education & Information Studies
  Email: nikkibbarry@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  1) psychological research about the cognition of human reasoning and decision-making regarding environmental issues and applying these findings to the design of learning environments that support learners to build better climate futures. 2) community-based design research with Indigenous communities to co-design learning environments that support Indigenous learners as we – intergenerationally – continue leadership in addressing climate change and environmental problems. 3) community-based design research to build learning environments where Indigenous, Black, Latin@ and Asian/Asian-American students are seen, heard, supported, believed, and loved toward socio-ecologically just world-building.
• 
  Assistant Professor Tria Blu Wakpa
  Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance
  Email: triabluwakpa@arts.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  A scholar and practitioner of Indigenous contemporary dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), martial arts, and yoga. Her research combines community-based, Indigenous and feminist methodologies with critical race theories to examine the politics and practices of dance and embodiment historically and contemporarily in educational and carceral institutions for Indigenous peoples.
• 
  Associate Professor Keith Camacho (Chamorro)
  Department of Asian American Studies
  Email: kcamacho@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Chamorro cultural and historical memory, as well as American and Japanese colonialism in Asia and Oceania. Current research includes Samoan youth violence, health, and justice in Auckland, Aotearoa, and Los Angeles, California.
• 
  Associate Professor Jessica Cattelino
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: jesscatt@anthro.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. She studies and teaches about sociocultural life in the contemporary United States.
• 
  Lecturer Jaye Darby
  TEP Faculty Advisor
  Department of Education
  Email: jdarby@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
• 
  Associate Professor Erin Debenport
  Department of Anthropology
  Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
  Email: erindebenport@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  I am a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, interested in technologies of language circulation, secrecy and (in)visibility, indigeneity and sovereignty, and critical language documentation. My work is concentrated in the Pueblo Southwest and the Mexico-Texas-New Mexico border region.
• 
  Professor Linda Garro
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: lgarro@anthro.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Health care decision making; health and illness in everyday life contexts; cultural models; narrative and illness; remembering

• 
  Professor Hanay Geiogamah (Member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma)
  Department of Televison, Film, and Theater
  Email: hgeiog@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  American Indian dance and theater.

• 
  Professor Patricia Greenfield
  Department of Psychology
  Email: greenfield@psych.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  My central theoretical and research interest is in the relationship between social change, culture, and human development. I have studied three generations of child development and socialization in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico as the community experienced a radical shift in their way of life and economy from subsistence and agriculture to money and commerce. This research led to a theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, first published in 2009. With collaborators in many parts of the world, the theory has generated studies of social change, cultural evolution, and human development in the U.S., Israel, China, and various regions of Mexico.

• 
  Professor Felicia Hodge (Wailaki Tribe)
  School of Nursing and Public Health
  Email: fhodge@sonnet.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Health issues and developing and testing culturally sensitive intervention models for American Indian populations.

• 
  Professor Paul Kroskrity
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: paulvk@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Language and culture, language contact, language and identity, language ideologies, anthropology and verbal art, and the ethnography of communication; American Indian Languages (especially the Kiowa-Tanoan and Uto-Aztecan families); the Pueblo Southwest, Central California.

• 
  Dr. Jory Lerback
  Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences
  Email: jlerback@g.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Lerback studies how water connects life and land. They use environmental science tools (chemistry, geology, ecology, biology) to support Indigenous water sovereignty and other environmental justice issues. These tools can help understand issues of groundwater and spring ecosystem sustainability, and Lerback strives to use this lens to describe the complex responsibilities involved with strong relationships to place. She also researches how Indigenous and non-Indigenous STEM scholars can ethically engage with and support tribal and Indigenous community partners, particularly when data is often the language of colonial legal systems.

• 
  Associate Professor Benjamin Madley
  Department of History
  Email: madley@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  He writes about California Indians as well as colonial genocides in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach.

• 
  Assistant Professor Ananda Marin (Choctaw)
  Department of Education
  Email: marin@gseis.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  I explore questions about the socio-cultural dimensions of learning and development in everyday and intergenerational contexts. In one line of work I examine the practices that children and families use to reason and build knowledge about the natural world. I am particularly interested in (1) how families coordinate attention and observation while participating in science activities, (2) how mobility and place structure activity and (3) cultural variability in sensemaking practices such as question-asking and explaining. I also investigate Native American participation in STEM and cultural models of self as related to senses of capability and competence. Across my scholarship, I take a participatory approach and employ a variety of research designs and methods including: community-based design research, cognitive tasks, studies of everyday practices, content analysis, discourse analysis, interaction analysis and video-ethnography. Through my work I aim to answer basic research questions about development, innovate methods, and design teaching and learning tools that contribute to the goals and well-being of Indigenous and non-dominant communities.

• 
  Assistant Professor Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Anishinaabe)
  Department of African American Studies
  Email: mayskyle@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous popular culture.

• 
  Professor Vickie Mays
  Department of Psychology
  Email: maysv@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Mental health in ethnic minority communities and women.

• 
  Professor Teresa McCarty
  UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
  Email: teresa.mccarty@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Social Research Methodology: Educational-linguistic anthropology, Indigenous/minority education, educational language policy, youth language practices, education equity, ethnographic studies of education, and language endangerment, revitalization, and rights.
• 
  Professor Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache)
  Department of Gender Studies
  Email: mithlo@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Visual anthropology, Indigenous visual arts and curation, gender analysis, film studies, photographic archives, museum critique, arts education and Indigenous knowledge production; Native North America, globalized popular culture.

• 
  Assistant Professor Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne
  Department of English
  Email: moehahne@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Critical Indigenous studies; Indigenous literature of North America, Queer Indigenous Literature; Sexuality and Gender studies; Queer theory; Decolonial thought; Settler imperialism; Comparative studies of empire and race; Cultural studies

• 
  Distinguished Research Professor Pamela Munro
  Department of Linguistics
  Email: munro@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  My primary research involves the study of all aspects of the grammar of a number of different American Indian languages (currently focusing on Chickasaw, San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec and other varieties of Tlacolula Valley Zapotec, Pima, Gabrielino / Tongva / Fernandeño, Lakhota, Tolkapaya Yavapai, and Garifuna, and among others) and language families (especially Muskogean, Uto-Aztecan, Yuman, and Zapotecan) — their syntax, phonology, lexicon, history — both through fieldwork with native speakers and through comparative research and analysis of existing descriptions. In the field of syntax, I am often concerned with problems of agreement, reference, and subjecthood. I consider it vital to make linguistic findings available to native speakers and other interested laymen through accurate, accessible descriptive and pedagogical materials, including dictionaries. I am particularly interested in working out better ways to make dictionaries, since I feel that this process generally illuminates most aspects of grammar.

• 
  Associate Professor Stella Nair
  Department of Art History
  Email: snair@humnet.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Stella Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas and is shaped by her interests in construction technology, spatial theory, material culture studies, landscape transformations, cross-cultural exchange, and hemispheric networks. Trained as an architect and architectural historian (University of California, Berkeley), Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes.

• 
  Professor K-Sue Park
  UCLA School of Law
  Email: park@law.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  he writes and teaches about property law, race and law, and migration and settlement in American legal history. Specifically, her scholarship examines the development of American property law and the creation of the American real estate market through the histories of colonization and enslavement.
• 
  Professor Ellen Pearlstein
  Department of Information Studies
  Email: epearl@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Conservation and preservastion practices in tribal museums; inclusion of community prinicples in conservation practice.

• 
  Distinguished Professor Sherene Razack
  Department of Gender Studies
  Email: sherenerazack@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Her research focuses on racial violence.

• 
  Professor Angela R. Riley (Citizen Potawatomi Nation)
  School of Law
  Email: riley@law.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Her research focuses on issues related to indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance.

• 
  Dr. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
  Director of UCLA Center for Mexican Studies and Project Director at the UCLA IRLE-Labor Center
  Email: griverasalgado@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  He teaches classes on Work, Labor and Social Justice in the US and immigration issues. He also directs the Institute for Transnational Social Change. He has extensive experience as an independent consultant on transnational migration, race and ethnic relations and diversity trainings for large organizations.
• 
  Assistant Professor Christine Samuel-Nakamura
  School of Nursing
  Email: cnakamura@sonnet.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Areas of Scholarly Expertise and Interest Community environmental health research, heavy metal contamination, AI health, behavioral health, healthcare, and research.
• 
  Associate Professor Greg Schachner
  Department of Anthropology
  Email: gschachner@anthro.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Transformations in leadership and social structure in ancient farming societies.

• 
  Professor David Shorter
  Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance
  Email: shorter@ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Cultural studies, epistemology, ethnography, history of science, ontology, paranormal studies, and colonialisms.
• 
  Assistant Professor Desi Small-Rodriguez (Northern Cheyenne
  Department of Sociology
  Email: desisr@soc.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Survey research in partnership with Indigenous communities and other marginalized populations. Indigenous studies, sociology of race and ethnicity, political sociology, sociology of knowledge, critical demography, health policy research, and science and technology studies.
• 
  Professor Shannon Speed (Chickasaw)
  Department of Gender Studies and Anthropology
  Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
  Email: sspeed@aisc.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Indigenous Latin American women migrants and gender violence
• 
  Professor Ramesh Srinivasan
  Department of Information Studies
  Email: srinivasan@gseis.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities.
• 
  Professor Kevin Terraciano
  Department of History
  Email: terra@history.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Latin American history, especially Mexico and the Indigenous cultures and languages of central and southern Mexico (especially Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec) in the colonial period.
• 
  Associate Professor Aradhna Tripati (Fijian)
  Center for Diverse Leadership in Science Director & P.I., Institute of Environment and Sustainability, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Earth, Planetary, and Space Science
  Email: atripati@g.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Climate change; the history and dynamics of changing Earth systems including climate, ice sheets, oceans, the water cycle, carbon dioxide levels; tool development; and clumped isotope geochemistry.
• 
  Assistant Professor Lauren van Schilfgaarde (Cochiti Pueblo)
  School of Law
  Email: vanschilfgaarde@law.ucla.edu
  Research Focus
  Lauren van Schilfgaarde supervised live-client projects concerning tribal governance and justice systems, ethics, cultural resource protection, voting, child welfare, and more.