Nicholas A. Brown is a scholar and artist based in Iowa City. He teaches in the American Indian and Native Studies Program and the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on land, justice, settler colonialism, and the politics of indigeneity in the Great Lakes and Alberta–Montana borderlands.
Sarah E. Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist examining landscape, public space, and cultural memory. Her research-based creative work takes many forms, including web platforms and multimedia, print materials, group events, and audio-visual projects. Her critical essays have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Leonardo, Acme, and Art Journal, and she is a core collaborator with Compass. An associate professor of art at the University of Iowa, she teaches courses in video and time-based media and art and ecology. Her work can be viewed online at www.readysubjects.org.
Contributor Bios
Johnathan Buffalo has spent thirty years researching tribal history and recovering Meskwaki artifacts. As the tribe’s historic preservation director, he preserves Meskwaki cultural heritage and conducts educational programs, as well as enforcing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. He holds a degree in history from the University of Iowa.
Sandra Massey is the historic preservation officer for the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma.
Dylan A. T. Miner (Métis) is a border-crossing artist, activist, historian, and curator. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian). As a member of Justseeds, he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Twenty-Eighth Biennial of Graphic Arts in Slovenia, and installed a solo Justseeds exhibition at the Twenty-Ninth Biennial. Miner holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of New Mexico. He has published and lectured extensively, with two forthcoming books on art and indigeneity from the University of Arizona Press and IB Tauris. To date, he has published more than forty journal articles, book chapters, review essays, and encyclopedia entries. Currently, Miner is an associate professor at Michigan State University, where he teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, coordinates the Michigan Native Arts Initiative, and curates at the MSU Museum. His artwork can be viewed at www.dylanminer.com or www.justseeds.org.
Yolanda Pushetonequa is the former Meskwaki Language Department director for the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, and is currently a graduate student at University of Minnesota Twin Cities Institute of Linguistics. Raised on the Meskwaki Settlement, she holds a BA in finance from the University of Northern Iowa.
George Thurman was elected to serve as the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation in August 2007. Prior to this position, he served as tribal secretary from 2000–2007, being elected to two terms in 2001 and 2005. He currently serves as the vice chairman/secretary of the Self-Governance Communication and Education Tribal Consortium Board, Bellingham, Washington; a member of National Congress of American Indian and National Indian Education Association; a Central Tribes Shawnee Area Board Member; the secretary of the Inter-Tribal Monitoring Association Board; a Southern Plains alternate to the Self-Governance Advisory Committee, Department of Interior; and as a liaison to Sac and Fox Nation Historic Preservation Office, the Education Department, the Environmental Department, the Self-Governance Department, the Law Enforcement / Juvenile Center, and the Rodeo Committee. Thurman received his bachelor of science degree in organizational leadership from Southern Nazarene University. He is a member of Shawnee First Indian Baptist Church and resides in Shawnee, Oklahoma. He is a member of the Thunder Clan and a direct descendant of Black Hawk.
Waziyatawin is a Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Village) in southwestern Minnesota. Waziyatawin received her PhD in American history from Cornell University in 2000 and earned tenure and an associate professorship in the history department at Arizona State University, where she taught for seven years. Her work centers on Indigenous decolonization strategies such as truth telling and reparative justice, Indigenous women and resistance, the recovery of Indigenous knowledge, and the development of liberation ideology in Indigenous communities. She is the author or editor of five volumes, including Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives; Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities; For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook; In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century; and, her most recent volume, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland.