Contributor Biographies

Debra K. S. Barker, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Nation, is an associate professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where she teaches introductory and advanced courses in American Indian literatures. She has served as Chair of the American Indian Studies Committee and Co-Director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her publications include articles on the boarding school system, American Indian biographies, American Indian grave desecration and the commodification of native art, as well as articles on Louise Erdrich and John Steinbeck.

Ginny Carney (Cherokee), a native of East Tennessee, holds a PhD in English from the University of Kentucky. She is a past president of ASAIL, an Executive of MLA's Division of American Indian Literatures, and a member of MLA's Committee on Community Colleges. She is currently chair of the Arts and Humanities Division of Leech Lake Tribal College in Northern Minnesota. She has published essays and short stories in several anthologies and journals. Her book, A Testament to Tenacity: Cultural Persistence in the Letters and Speeches of Eastern Cherokee Women, is forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press.

Ron Carpenter received his BA in English from the University of California-Riverside, and his MA in American studies from the University of Utah. He holds a PhD in British and American literature, having recently defended his dissertation on Native American women's autobiography. He currently teaches, fishes, and dreams in Salt Lake City.

Patrice Hollrah is the director of the Writing Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and teaches for the Department of English. She is the author of "The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell": The Power of Women in Native American Literature (2003).

M. A. Jaimes * Guerrero is a tenured associate professor in the College of Humanities, Women's Studies Department, at San Francisco State University. She has also taught American Indian studies in the College of Ethnic Studies. Before coming to San Francisco, she was at her alma mater, Arizona State University, as a visiting professor in the School of Justice Studies, and teaching on "Indigenism and environmental ethics for justice." Prior to that, she was at the University of Colorado at Boulder, contributing to the development of and teaching in American Indian Studies, under the umbrella of the Center for Studies of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA; now an ethnic studies department). She is well published, with Humanities fellowships (Cornell University, 1991-92; ANU, Canberra, Australia, summer 1996) on women and feminism and ethnic studies and "multicultural" journals, anthologies, and so on. Her best-known work is as editor of The State of Native America (South End Press, 1992), in which she also contributed two chapter essays on "federal Indian identification policy" and on American Indian women.

Caskey Russell is an enrolled member of the Tlingit Tribe of Alaska. He received his BA and MA from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, and earned his PhD from the University of Oregon in 2001. He is currently a lecturer in the American Indian Studies Program at Iowa State University.

Lee Schweninger is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he teaches Native American and early American literatures and coordinates the Native American Studies minor program. In addition to a book-length study of N. Scott Momaday, he has recently published essays on Louis Owens, John Joseph Mathews, and a study of Native American literary responses to the Old World. In summer 2003 he participated in an NEH Summer Institute in Native American art and literature.

Jeffrey P. Shepard is an assistant professor of American Indian history at the University of El Paso, where he teaches classes in American Indian, Western, and public history. He received his doctorate from Arizona State University and studied under Peter Iverson. He has published work on American Indian education, political economy and culture, and indigenous uses of history in struggles for sovereignty. Presently he is working on a monograph...