Biography
Joanne Barker is a citizen of the Lenape nation (the Delaware Tribe of Indians [Bartlesville, Oklahoma]). She earned her Ph.D. in June 2000 from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she specialized in Native law and politics, women's/gender studies, and cultural studies. She is an associate professor of American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University. She has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has published articles in numerous journals and edited and wrote the introduction to Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). She is currently completing her book, Native Acts: The Law of Cultural Authenticity, contracted with Duke University Press. She has been much involved in NAGPRA and related issues of Native cultural self-determination at SFSU and with local tribes and tribal communities.

Statement
I see the main responsibility of the Nominations Committee to be the active recruitment of NAISA members to roles of leadership in the association. This has to include a diverse geographic and interdisciplinary breadth of members on the council as well as the committee’s open communication with the members about the election process. I would bring several years of experience in university governance and community organizing and look forward to its particular challenges given the diverse perspectives about the association even among its members.