Biography
Kim TallBear, Ph.D., is Dakota, a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota. She grew up in Flandreau, South Dakota and the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. After a career as an environmental planner for U.S. tribes, federal agencies, and tribal organizations, TallBear is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book, Native American DNA: Origins, Ethics, and Governance (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press). She has contributed chapters on genetic conceptions of race and indigeneity and the challenges for Native American sovereignty to volumes including Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson, 2008) and indivisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas (Tayac, 2009). She has also (co)authored research and review articles in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Science, the International Journal of Cultural Property, and the Wicazo Sá Review. TallBear seeks to understand how U.S. tribes and other indigenous peoples resist, regulate, and initiate scientific research, and how they use science and technology to govern. She teaches courses that bring into conversation indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to science, technology, and nature. Such approaches call attention to the dangers of Western, masculinist science that sets apart humans from nature and privileges the views of “First World” men. Challenging the nature/culture dichotomy and the idea that science can view “everything from nowhere” can help make research and technology more just and accountable to a wider variety of people and non-humans.

Statement
I am honored to be nominated for the NAISA Council. I have attended the annual meeting since its inception and hope to help grow NAISA in the coming years. I was previously on faculty in a department of American Indian Studies and am committed to doing intellectual work that serves Native American sovereignty. But because more democratic and culturally responsive technoscience is vital for the exercise of indigenous governance in the 21st century, I moved to an interdisciplinary department in which 60-plus natural and social scientists and humanists cohabitate. I am able to teach courses and supervise students whose research crosses hard lines, say between geographic information systems and feminist science studies, or ecosystem sciences and indigenous ecological knowledge. Navigating disciplinary cultures is every bit as challenging as crossing national and cultural lines. Having lived in rural South Dakota; West Java, Indonesia; and Berkeley, California, I know this well. I am committed to the development of Native American and Indigenous Studies as a coherent field. We need explicit treatment of our histories and practices from our eyes, development of unique analytical frameworks, and an academic association that nurtures the development of scholars committed to indigenous life, but we cannot be provincial. We must also be able to speak with those working in disciplines that impinge on our practices, lands, and abilities to govern. To that end, I will work to increase the representation in NAISA of scholars working at the intersections of science, technology, and indigeneity. And I am committed to facilitating participation in NAISA by indigenous scholars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America while respecting the nuanced ways in which indigeneity works on different continents.