14th Annual Emerging Research Speaker Series, Dr. Shannon Speed (Chickasaw)

Please join UCLA Staff Assembly as we host the 14th Annual Emerging Research Speaker Series. We are honored to have Dr. Shannon Speed (Chickasaw) present her talk on Chickasaw Spring: Resurgent Sovereignty of a Native Nation.

Over the last 50 years, the Chickasaw Nation has undergone a remarkable resurgence of tribal sovereignty. Once suppressed almost into non-existence, through effective economic development, responsible governance and the construction of tribal legal, medical, and social service infrastructure, the Nation has regained full self-determination over tribal governance, and provides over 200 services to its citizens, including universal health care in state-of-the-art facilities. This research documents this remarkable journey, and particularly the role of law, in rebuilding tribal sovereignty.

Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC) and Professor of Gender Studies, Anthropology and American Indian Studies at UCLA, where she also serves as a Special Advisor to the Chancellor on native American and Indigenous Affairs. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. She has published more than forty journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, and has published six books and edited volumes, including her the award-winning, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (University of North Carolina Press Critical Indigeneities Series 2020) and the recent co-edited volume with Dr. Lynn Stephen, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press 2021). She received the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year award from the Chickasaw Nation in 2014, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the State bar of Texas Indian Law Section in 2016, and the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2021. Dr. Speed recently served as the President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA 2018-2021).

The talk will be recorded. Please access the Zoom link here.

To view the full context of Dr. Speed’s accomplishments, please click here.

For questions, please contact UCLA Staff Assembly.