Dr. Mishuana Goeman – Director
Dr. Goeman received her PhD from Stanford University in Modern thought and Literature in 2013 and joined UCLA faculty in 2009. Since that time, she has participated on the NAGPRA committee as well as several diversity and inclusion committees on the UCLA campus and now will be heading up work at the University at Buffalo in Seneca territory. Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021), which won the Choice award in 2021. Digital Projects where she is a co-pi include Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), Carrying Our Ancestors Home (COAH, 2019), Mukurtu California Native Hub (2020), and the new Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark, 2023). She has also published in several Journals and participated in several anthologies over the years.
Dr. Wendy Giddens Teeter – Director
Dr. Wendy Giddens Teeter is the cultural resources archaeologist for the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. After serving for 24 years, she retired from her positions as Senior Curator of Archaeology for the Fowler Museum, UCLA Repatriation Coordinator, and teaching in UCLA American Indian Studies. Teeter has collaborated nationally and internationally with institutions and Indigenous communities on issues of repatriation and cultural heritage protection. She is Co-PI for Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles, a community-based website devoted to storytelling through cultural geography and map making as well as providing educational resources and curriculum and for Carrying our Ancestors Home, which tells the history of repatriation at UCLA and stories of repatriation from Indigenous communities. Since 2007, Teeter has been co-director of the Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project, which seeks to understand the Indigenous history of the island and Tongva homelands through multi-disciplinary and collaborative methodologies. The Project provides a field school that has educated over 150 students on the importance of community-based archaeology. Teeter helped to develop the Tribal Learning Community & Educational Exchange Program in the Native Nations Law & Policy Center, UCLA School of Law in 2003 and serves as on its Advisory Board. She serves on several boards and committees including the Indigenous Archaeology Collective, Chair of the Society for California Archaeology Curation Committee and as a founder and advisory board member for the UCLA Tribal Learning Community & Educational Exchange Program.
Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky – Project Manager
Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky (Tonawanda Seneca descent) is a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, conducting research in Western New York regarding Haudenosaunee land access. Her current research is a continuation of work toward understanding Indigenous epistemologies and practitioners’ work regarding land and water access in the forms of co-management, stewardship, and Land Back. She utilizes archival research, ethnographic interviews, and oral histories to ground her theory. This research builds upon her experience with the theory and practice of Indigenous archaeology, particularly archaeological research that results in repatriation. Her interest in questions of Indigenous conceptions of land access began as she worked in repatriation as a NAGPRA project manager at UCLA, as she noticed the ill effects of a lack of land access on cultural and environmental wellbeing for Los Angeles and Indigenous people from L.A.
María Montenegro – Mukurtu Website Developer and Digital Archivist
María Montenegro is a doctoral candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of critical archival theory, Indigenous studies, and tribal law and policy, and is in conversation with anticolonial theory and the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. Her dissertation project explores the role that archives play structurally in the U.S. Federal Acknowledgement policy. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and a BA in Aesthetics from Universidad Catolica (Chile). María is a researcher for the Local Contexts project and used to work as the project coordinator of the Sustainable Heritage Network. For this project, María is in charge of developing and managing the COAH website powered by Mukurtu CMS.
Erin Debenport-- Co-Pi on Centering Tribal Stories Grant
Erin Debenport is an Associate Professor in the UCLA Departments of Anthropology and American Indian Studies and the Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. A linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on issues of literacy, secrecy, knowledge circulation, and ethics, she works with several Pueblo Nations on ongoing language reclamation projects. In her community language work as well as her academic publications, she centers the local control of language materials. Dr. Debenport is the Co-Director of the California Native Hub Project which aims to train tribal members in this digital archiving platform, and the Mellon Foundation Arts & Culture Grant "Expanding Cultural Heritage and Language Learning Programs at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Texas." Her monograph Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy and Perfectibility in Indigenous New Mexico (2015) was published by School for Advanced Research Press and her work has appeared in journals including American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Dictionaries, and American Anthropologist.