‘siyo ginali. I’m an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, born and raised in Colorado. (See Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation below.) Professionally, I work on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory as Full Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and Department of English Languages and Literatures at UBC. I received my B.A. from the University of Northern Colorado and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before coming to UBC in 2012, I spent ten years as a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Toronto in Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory, where I was also an affiliate of the Aboriginal Studies Program.

My work in Indigenous cultural and literary studies takes up questions and issues of nationhood, kinship, and belonging, with increasing attention to the intersections between Indigenous literatures, speculative fiction, and other-than-human peoples. More information about my work can be found on my website.

Current Research and Writing

Current and forthcoming projects include the twentieth anniversary “Citizenship and Sovereignty” edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm focusing on Cherokee citizen writers, a book-length cultural history of the “Cherokee Princess” phenomenon, and a young-adult fantasy novel.

 Areas of specialization

• Cherokee studies
• Indigenous cultural and literary studies
• Animal studies
• Speculative fiction/Indigenous wonderworks

Authored Books

• Raccoon. Animal Series, ed. Jonathan Burt. London: Reaktion, 2021. 224 pp.
• Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018. 284 pp.
• Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 277 pp.
• Badger. Animal Series, ed. Jonathan Burt. London: Reaktion, 2015. 224 pp.
• The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles. Fully revised, one-volume omnibus edition of The Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2011. 616 pp.

Selected Co-Edited Books

• Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege. Co-edited with Jean M. O’Brien. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2022. 376 pp.
• The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Co-edited with James H. Cox. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 741 pp.

Selected Journal Articles, Book Chapters, and Short Stories

• “Hack the Orcs, Loot the Tomb, and Take the Land: Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Otherwise Futures of Dungeons and Dragons.” Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons. Eds. Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and Jose Zagal. MIT Press, May 2024: 259-273.
• “R is for Raccoon.” Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our  Eds. Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani. Duke UP, 2020. 153-161.
• “Tatterborn.” Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island. Eds. Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, and David Gaertner, Wildrid Laurier UP, 2017. 327-336.
• “The Boys Who Became the Hummingbirds.” Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology. Ed. Hope Nicholson. Toronto: Bedside Press, 2016. 54-59.
• “Reflections on Indigenous Literary Nationalism: On Home Grounds, Singing Hogs, and Cranky Critics.” Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies. Eds. Jean O’Brien and Chris Andersen. Routledge, 2016. 23-30.
• “Indigenous Writing.” The World of Indigenous North America. Ed. Robert Warrior. New York: Routledge, 2014: 291-307.
• “Notes Toward a Theory of Anomaly.” Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ed. Mark Rifkin, Bethany Schneider, and Daniel Heath Justice, 16.1-2 (2010): 207-42.

I’m not currently accepting additional graduate supervisions.

Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation

I’m an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a federally recognized Native Nation of over 468,000 citizens with reservation lands extending over nearly 7000 square miles in northeast Oklahoma. Through my father I’m a direct lineal descendant of Spears and Foreman Cherokee citizens and survivors of the Trail of Tears (Old Fields detachment) as well as Riley Cherokee Old Settlers who emigrated to Indian Territory before Removal, along with extended Treaty Party relations and intermarried white Shields, Crockett, and Bandy kin. My mother was of English, Jewish, and mixed European heritage. Although a Cherokee Nation citizen through kinship, heritage, and political affiliation, I was not raised culturally Cherokee; my parents raised me in my mom’s Gold Rush-era hometown of Victor, Colorado, on the south slope of Evening Star Mountain in the stolen homelands of the Southern Ute people.

Like most Cherokee Nation citizens in Indian Territory at the time, my great-granddad and original Dawes allottee, Amos Spears, was forcibly enfranchised as a US citizen on 3 March 1901 through a unilateral Congressional amendment to section 6 of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act, even as our Nation was fighting to maintain its sovereignty and distinct political identity. Amos’s oldest daughter, my paternal grandmother, Pearl Clara Spears, was raised on his homestead allotment outside of Vera, Cooweescoowee District, Cherokee Nation (now Washington County, Oklahoma), before the family moved to Colorado when she was a teenager. Pearl was a by-birth dual citizen of Cherokee Nation and the United States, born in the narrow period between the closing of the final Dawes Rolls and Oklahoma statehood and so didn’t receive a land allotment of her own. Her 1945 death from tuberculosis disrupted my dad’s relationship to her family as well as my own. He and his sister became estranged when I was about five but were reconciled when I was a teenager, and that familial restoration has rooted much of my subsequent life’s work.

My direct lineal ancestors are listed on all key rolls, censuses, treaty lists, compensation claims, and other records used by Cherokee Nation authorities and community genealogists to determine verified kinship since the early nineteenth century. These include the 1814 Cherokee muster roll for the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the list of reservation grantees from the 1817 Treaty of the Cherokee Agency and the 1819 Treaty of Washington (the Calhoun Treaty), the 1835 Cherokee Nation census (the Henderson Roll), the 1839 Cherokee Nation Constitution of reunification, the 1842 post-Removal despoilation claim records, the 1851 Old Settler Roll, the 1852 Drennen Roll of By-Blood Cherokees, the 1880 Census by Blood, the 1883 Census of Cherokees by Blood, the 1886 Pay Roll by Right of Cherokee Blood, the contested 1896 Census of Cherokees by Blood, Cherokee Male Seminary records (particularly the Primary Department, Indigent School, and High School), the 1906-1909 Eastern Cherokee Applications of the US Court of Claims and final 1911 Eastern Cherokee Guion Miller Roll, and the final 1907 Dawes Roll for Cherokee Nation (the base roll for citizenship). Other close kin are listed in the above as well as US Civil War service records (Union Company B of the First Indian Home Guard, Second Regiment, and Union Company I in the Third Regiment, and Confederate Cherokee Mounted Rifle regiment, Company K) and additional student records of both the Cherokee Male and Female Seminaries.

The US government suspended the Nation’s citizenship and enrollment processes with Oklahoma statehood in 1907, but they were restored with the Cherokee Nation Constitution of 1975 (ratified 1976). My family has consistently affirmed political, kinship, and cultural commitments in an interrupted but unbroken line of Cherokee belonging. My own citizenship status can be verified by contacting Cherokee Nation Tribal Registration department directly by phone or email: 918-453-5058, registration@cherokee.org. Detailed documentation confirming the summary above is available. As a signatory to the Digadatseli’i ᏗᎦᏓᏤᎵᎢ Cherokee Scholars’ Statement on Sovereignty and Identity, I don’t consider this information confidential (http://bit.ly/3QKwzT6).