Phil Bellfy (Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures) is a member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota Chippewa. Dr. Bellfy teaches first-year writing for WRAC, as well as History and IAH courses which deal with the Native People of North America. His research is concerned with the comparative experience of the indigenous people in both the United States and Canada, especially those who live on the border. His manuscript, Three Fires Unity: The Anishnabeg of the Lake Huron Borderlands,was selected as the winner of the 2003 North American Indian Prose Award by the University of Nebraska Press. Phil is the Founder and Co-director of the Center for the Study of Indigenous Border Issues. He is also involved in website development, including the online journal, Indigenous Policy.

Sheila Contreras (Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures) is the Director of the Chicano & Latino Studies program at MSU, and does comparative research on Indigineity. In 2008 she published Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism and Chicana/o Literature (University of Texas Press).

Suzanne Cross (Bneshiinh kew/Bird Woman) (Social Work) is a member of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, and an Associate Professor at MSU-School of Social Work. Her research topics include American Indian Grand families, Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), Historical Trauma - U.S. Indian Boarding Schools and Elder Abuse.  She served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Council on Social Work Education (2004-2007), and received a Council on Social Work Senior Scholar Award (2007-2008) for a research study on The Status of American Indians in Social Work Higher Education. Dr. Cross is the current Chair of the CSWE Native American Task Force (2008-2009).  Her most recent publications focus on kinship care issues. Dr. Cross is dedicated to the collaboration between academe and Tribal Nations for the benefit of both entities.  She continues her commitment as a mentor to numerous students to assist in the development of their professional social work skill sets including cultural competence with American Indians.  On a more personal note, Dr. Cross is a traditional American Indian dancer, beadwork artisan, and her and her husband have been foster parents for American Indian children.

Ellen Cushman (Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a member of the Cherokee Nation Sequoyah Commission. She is an associate professor of WRAC, has recently published about Indian identity politics and self representation for College Composition and Communication. She has received an IRGP grant to finish her book on the Cherokee syllabary, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing Linguistic, Historical, and Cultural Perseverance. She's also working on a book with Tom Holm Native American History for Beginners. Pepper and Ellen are pictured here (Ellen's on the right).

Matthew L.M. Fletcher (MSU College of Law) is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University College of Law and Director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center. He also sits as Chief Justice of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians Supreme Court, as an appellate judge for the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the Hoopa Valley Tribe, and is a consultant to the Seneca Nation of Indians Court of Appeals. Professor Fletcher will be co-author of the sixth edition of Cases on Federal Indian Law (Thomson West) with David Getches, Charles Wilkinson, and Robert Williams. He recently published American Indian Education: Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law with Routledge. Professor Fletcher graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1997 and the University of Michigan in 1994. He is a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, located in Peshawbestown, Michigan.

Lynne Goldstein (Anthropology) is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research has generally focused on Great Lakes archaeology, and her work has been conducted at the Aztalan site (ca. AD 1000) in southeastern Wisconsin. Goldstein has authored several books and numerous scientific articles on archaeological topics, and she has been active in public education, including radio broadcasts and teacher training. She has conducted field work in Illinois, Wisconsin, and California, and has worked with American Indian tribes in Wisconsin and elsewhere, including collaborative work in developing Wisconsin¹s burial law. Goldstein has served in many roles concerning repatriation issues, including a 15-year position on the Smithsonian¹s Repatriation Review Committee; she was the first committee member who was nominated by both Indian tribes and the scientific community. Goldstein also served a four-year term as Editor of American Antiquity, the major archaeology journal in the United States.

Robert Hitchcock (Geography) works primarily with Sancommunities in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, though his work involvesindigenous communities across the United States and Latin America as well. Heis actively involved in land and resource rights claims, as well as peace andjustice efforts throughout southern Africa and assessments of impacts of large-scale projects such as dams. In additional, he has been workingwith Native American resource management programs in the Great Plains and Great Lakes, and with refugees and immigrants in the Midwestern U.S.

Heather Howard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She teaches cultural and medical anthropology courses, including Indigenous Peoples’ Health. Her Native research interests include women and youth, the role of history in community and social service organizing, and transformations in community-based health knowledge and practice. She is currently developing research projects which examine Native experiences with and approaches to Type-2 Diabetes in Michigan, and in Toronto where she has worked with the Native community since 1995. She was a founder of the Toronto Native Community History Project and continues to work with Native youth in the city in connection with this program. Dr. Howard has also worked as a professional ethnohistorian for tribes in California and in the Great Lakes area on projects involving resource rights, tribal jurisdiction, federal acknowledgment and land claims. She is preparing publications of research she conducted on connections between Canadian boarding school and contemporary Native experiences of chronic illness, as well as on the impact of the vicissitudes in federal policy on Native people’s health in early twentieth century central California. She has recently published an edited volume with Susan Applegate Krouse, Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women’s Activism in Urban Communities (2009, University of Nebraska Press), and has under review at Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s Aboriginal Studies Series, another co-edited volume, Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities.

Kimberli Lee (Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures) Dr. Lee has taught American literature and writing courses at various institutions including Tarleton State University, Central Texas College, and McLennan Community College. Lee has published several works on Mari Sandoz including a book review in Great Plains Quarterly, an essay in Reclaiming Native Cultures, and an online finding aide to the University of Nebraska's Mari Sandoz Collection. She has just completed a book about Mari Sandoz and her political activism on behalf of the Northern Plains tribes during the termination era, which is forthcoming from Texas Tech Press in the fall of 2009. Additionally, Lee has begun another book-length project entitled Rez-N-Nation that focuses on contemporary Native American music as sites of resistance. Native musicians Lee is researching are Buffy St. Marie, John Trudell, Joy Harjo, Jim Boyd, Keith Secola, and Robbie Robertson. Additional areas of interest are Lakota Studies and multiethnic literatures of North America, with a particular interest in American Indian rhetorics, nonfiction, and film. Lee currently teaches racial and ethnic experience in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Department.

William A. Lovis is Curator of Anthropology at the MSU Museum and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, where he teaches courses in North American Archaeology and Anthropology & Archaeology of Hunter Gatherers. Dr. Lovis' primary research interests are in the ethnography and archaeology of hunter gatherers, and the transition from hunting and gathering to indigenous horticulture in the Great Lakes region, primarily in the Saginaw Valley of Michigan where he has conducted extensive fieldwork on Archaic age sites predating 2500 years ago. He has also been engaged in comparative field studies in northern England focusing on the Mesolithic period. Lovis has recently published on stable isotope analysis and the absolute dating of carbonized cooking residues on early ceramics, long distance hunter gatherer logistic mobility in the Saginaw Valley, and the relationships between long term environmental change and human adaptation in the Great Lakes. His recent book with G. W. Monaghan addresses issues of site preservation on the floodplains of southern Michigan, taking a geoarchaeological perspective. He is currently engaged in collaborative multidisciplinary and inter-institutional research analyzing the formation processes of stratified archaeological sites in the coastal dune complexes of Lake Michigan.

Dylan Miner is an artist, critic, and historian interested in the complexities of culture in contemporary society. Originally from Michigan's Thumb, Dylan is an Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, as well as Core Faculty in Chicano/Latino Studies. He is Metis and active in the Campesino Collective, Just Seeds Collective, and the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. Dylan's interests focus on the cultural practices of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle. He is particularly interested in Indigenous critical theory, as well as Native, Chicana/o, and Latin American cultural expressions. Dylan has published articles in Latina/o and Native community newspapers, in addition to academic journals and encyclopedias. Recently, Dylan's artwork has been exhibited at the Nokomis Learning Center, the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, La Galer de la Raza in San Francisco, the Cherokee Heritage Center in Oklahoma, and the Art Museum of Southwest Manitoba.

Mindy Morgan (Anthropology) Interim Director of AISP Spring 2009 Research and teaching specialization includes North American Indian languages, language pedagogy, literacy and ideology and ethnohistory. Morgan works extensively with the Anishnabemowin (Ojibwe Language) projects on campus and is active in issues of Language revitalization and preservation among Native Peoples. Dr. Morgan teaches courses in Native North American Ethnography, Language and Culture, and special topics in Native North American languages. She hopes to develop more courses regarding both contemporary Native American communities and topics such as literacy and language endangerment.

Robert McKinley (Religious Studies) Principal scholarly interests include: Religion patterns in South East Asia, including indigenous Anthropology and ritual; trends within Malaysian Islam; revival of Native American ritual.

Faculty Bios Continued