Biography
Kathryn Shanley teaches in Native American Studies at the University of Montana and serves as Special Assistant to the Provost for Native American and Indigenous Education. She earned an MA (Diaspora Literature) and a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Native American literature at the University of Michigan in 1987. An enrolled member of the Ft. Peck Assiniboine (Nakoda) Tribe, Dr. Shanley grew up on the reservation. Her research interests include the work of James Welch, Blackfeet/Gros Ventre writer, gender issues in Indigenous studies, Native American religious autobiography, and Indigenous Knowledge-based theory. She is the University of Montana project director for a collaboration with the Sami Studies Center at the University of Tromso, Norway, and also collaborates with faculty at Maori Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Dr. Shanley serves as the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship regional liaison and on boards for National Academy of Sciences Fellowships, the executive committee of the Modern Language Association, Division of American Indian Literatures, and (for eight years) on the American Indian Graduate Center. Recognition of her leadership extends to her inclusion in Notable Native Americans and the Dictionary of American Indian Women. Before coming to the University of Montana in 1999 to become the first chair of Native American Studies, Dr. Shanley previously held positions at Cornell University and the University of Washington. As chair of NAS at UM, she worked for seven years to raise funds to build a new Native American Center which will be dedicated in the spring.

Statement
Although I have been a part of transformational struggles in the academy for almost thirty years, I learn new things every day about the need for vigilance: about the legacies of oppression that trail after us and about the difficulty of keeping heart, mind, and spirit free enough to envision new modes of being. The formation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association rests on the challenge to us as intellectuals to pull together to make our unity count positively toward transforming scholarship and the academy in Indigenous ways. That’s no easy thing. But more than that, what we do has to link crucially to the protection of Native American and Indigenous peoples, their lands, their resources, their ways of life on the community level. The phrase “seven generations,” even though it has ironically become the label of a “progressive” laundry soap, still holds the power of principle—protecting and preserving the best of what we have and know for our great -great-grand-children who may never even speak our names. To do that we will have to work together in deeply committed ways respecting and continuing the work of the people who brought us together through their visionary hopes and those who came before us. Solidification of our new intellectual movement into a new organization was the first step. Making it blossom is up to us all to move from “survivance” to “thrivance.” We face real challenges: climate change, threatened homelands, environmental racism, gender inequity, poverty, and violence against our families from without and within. Supporting each other as intellectuals who are working for Native empowerment, that’s what matters.