Contributors
- Contributors
Gordon Adams (Pawnee) is a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and master’s candidate in public policy at Arizona State University (ASU). He holds a BS degree in justice studies from ASU. Gordon is active in NAGPRA and prisoner rights issues. Gordon also represents the first generation in his family to rise above a grammar school education. He intends to pursue his doctorate in 2005.
Rebecca Bales (Choctaw/Cherokee/ Chicana) received her PhD in history from Arizona State University and teaches history at Diablo Valley College. She is the first in her family to receive a doctorate. Her work focuses on Native American history, women’s history, and race relations in the United States.
Myla Vicenti Carpio (Jicarilla Apache/Laguna/Isleta) is assistant professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University (ASU). She earned her PhD in history at ASU and is currently working on a book on American Indians in Albuquerque.
Wallace Coffey (Comanche) received his master’s degree in education from Harvard University. He served as tribal liaison and cultural resource specialist for the Institute of American Indian Arts prior to being elected to his third term as chairman of the Comanche Nation. He has served the Indian community as master of ceremonies for powwows, cultural events, and celebrations for thirty-six years.
Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) is a senior staff attorney of the Native American Rights Fund (NARF). He is a lawyer, tribal judge, scholar, and activist. His litigation includes cases involving Native American religious freedom, prisoner rights, water rights, treaty rights, and repatriation rights. In 1994 he represented the Native American Church of North America to secure passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments to protect Indian religious use of peyote. He is the author of the award-winning book Battlefields and Burial Grounds.
Lenny Foster (Diné) is director of the Corrections Project within the Navajo Nation Department of Behavioral Health Services in Window Rock, Arizona. Since 1993, he has been a spiritual adviser for approximately two thousand Navajo and Native American inmates in ninety-six state prisons and federal penitentiaries across the United States. For his work he has received the Dr. Martin Luther King Civil Rights Award in Phoenix, Arizona (1993), and Kansas City, Missouri (1996); the Petra Foundation Fellowship Award in Washington, DC (1997); and the Citizen’s Award for Commendation of the Governor’s Religious Advisory Task Force in Salt Lake City, Utah (1997). He is a member of the Native American Church and is a Sun Dancer. [End Page 202]
Donald A. Grinde Jr. (Yamasee) is professor of indigenous studies and history at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has written over fifty articles on Native American history and policy and authored or coauthored ten books on American Indian issues.
Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee) is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of land and numerous sacred places. She has developed key federal Indian law since 1975, and is president and executive director of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization founded in 1984 for Native peoples’ traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion, and research.
Douglas Long, former president of the Native American Church of North America (NACNA), is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Buffalo Clan, from Wisconsin. In 1959 he married Myrtle Thunder in the NACNA. They have one son, Lance Fairbanks.
Chief Arvol Looking Horse (Minneconjou Sioux) was born on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota in 1954. Raised by his grandparents Lucy and Thomas Looking Horse, he learned the culture and spiritual ways of the Lakota. At age twelve, he was given the enormous responsibility of becoming the nineteenth-generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, the youngest in history. His life has revolved around his commitment to work toward religious freedom, cultural survival, and revival. He has been instrumental in leading the Bigfoot Unity Riders, participated numerous times in the annual World Peace and Prayer Day, and in 1996 was awarded the prestigious Canadian Wolf Award, given to a person who has dedicated his or her life to...
