Liberal Arts

While my training is in 19th and 20th century American literature, my interests have always been in the cultural components of environmental concerns, often seen from the angle of sport hunting and fishing. Which is to say: I like to mix my outdoor recreation with hard questions about climate change, equity, and environmental justice.

Most of my research and teaching takes shape as a response to historical violence, transgenerational trauma, and memory. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation living in the Raven bioregion, I am especially interested in staging dialogue between descendants of victims and perpetrators of colonial violence. In 2012, I started the Flying University—a prison education program that brings university students inside the prison for mutual and collaborative study.

All systems and spaces have space for Indigenous languages, knowledges, arts, and peoples. You can study with us and stand up for Indigenous languages, ways of knowing, and decolonization in revolutionary self-love. Kakḵwa.áaḵw aag̱áa yakḵwadláaḵ: I will try, and I will succeed!

My passion is for poetry. I’ve been studying, writing, and publishing poetry for 20 years. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of a connected and supportive writing community throughout Alaska.

Literary Theory; Literary Urban Studies; Material Cultures of Education; Nineteenth-Century Labor and Economic Theory; Allegory and the Essay; Cultures of Finance Capital

Growing up in rural Alaska, we were always reading, especially the snow. Today I am still reading, nose in a book, nose to the air. As a teacher, and scholar of literature and environment, my work attends to the ways that our experiences are both socially constructed and materially grounded, shaped by stories and signs that are often curved along the contours of a more-than-human world.