Elizabeth Archuleta (Yaqui/Chicana) received a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University, and she has worked as an assistant professor of English at the University of New Mexico since 2002 where she specializes in contemporary American Indian literatures and serves as the pre-law advisor. In 2004 she received an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and she currently mentors two Native American students who are McNair Scholars. She has current and forthcoming articles and reference entries in Wicazo Sa Review, American Indian Quarterly, UCLA Indigenous Peoples' Journal of Law, Culture & Resistance, American History Through Literature, 1870-1920, Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American Nature Poets, Encyclopedia of Native American Literature.
Paul Austin, a member of the Sequoyah Research Center Advisory Board, has been director of the American Indian Center of Arkansas, Inc. for more than twenty years.
Cristina L. Azocar (Mattaponi) is the director of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism (CIIJ) and an assistant professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. Azocar earned her doctorate in Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in 2001. Her research and teaching focuses on portrayals of people of color in the news. She received her master's degree in Ethnic Studies and her bachelor's degree in Journalism from San Francisco State University. Dr. Azocar's interest in diversity in the news media spans more than fifteen years, and began with her concern about negative representations about Native Americans. Dr. Azocar serves on the board of the Native American Journalism Association and is a former president, the California Society of Newspaper Editors, Grade the News, the Sequoyah Research Center’s American Native Press Archives. The Journalism Association of Community Colleges honored her as the Journalism Educator of the Year for 2005.
Kimberly Blaeser (White Earth Anishinaabe) is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing. An enrolled member of the
Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation, Blaeser is the author of Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, a critical study, and three collections of poetry: Trailing You, winner of the first book award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Apprenticed to Justice. She is the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. Blaeser's poetry, short fiction, essays, and critical works have been widely anthologized in national and international collections such as Force Majeure; Earth Song, Sky Spirit; Reinventing the Enemy's Language; Narrative Chance; Women on Hunting; The Colour of Resistance; This Giving Birth; Dreaming History; Eating Fire, Tasting Blood; As We Are Now, Returning the Gift, Talking on the Page, Other Sisterhoods, Unsettling America; Skins; Sister Nations; Nothing But the Truth; After Confession; Here First; Imaginary (Re-) Locations; and Blue Dawn, Red Earth. Selections of her poetry has been translated into several languages—Norwegian, French, Spanish, and, most recently, into Indonesian. A recent long essay, "Cannons and Canonization: Native Poetics through Autonomy, Colonization, Nationalism, and Decolonization" is included in Columbia History of Native American Literature of the United States. Blaeser lives with her husband and two young children in the woods and wetlands of rural Lyons Township in Wisconsin and is currently at work on a verbal and material collage tentatively titled Tinctures of a Family Tree.
Paul DeMain (Oneida) a member of the Wisconsin Oneida Nation, is a well-known newspaperman, CEO of Indian Country Communications, Inc., and managing editor of News From Indian Country, an award winning national newspaper with news about Native Americans published and sold throughout the United States, Canada, and 17 other countries. In 2002 his fellow journalists presented him with the Wassaja Award, the highest award for journalism excellence given by the Native American Journalists Association.
Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota) was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation and attended Holy Rosary Indian Mission School for 10 years. Following a stint in the Navy and studies at the University of Nevada at Reno, he became a journalist. He was awarded the prestigious Nieman Fellowship in Journalism to Harvard University for the years 1990-1991 and is a nationally syndicated columnist with the McClatchy News Service in Washington, D. C. In 1981 Giago founded the Lakota Times, renamed Indian Country Today in 1992. He was its editor and publisher for 18 years before selling the paper in 1998. In 2000 he founded the Lakota Journal and served as its editor and publisher until his retirement in July, 2004. He founded the Native American Journalists Association in 1984 and served as its first president. He recently retired as president of the Native American Journalists Foundation, Inc., and as editor and publisher of the monthly magazine Native American Review. Giago’s editorial challenge to South Dakota Governor George Mickelson in 1989 resulted in the elimination of Columbus Day in SD and the day renamed as a state holiday as Native American Day. Giago has received many professional awards, including the H. L. Mencken Award and the University of Missouri School of Journalism Distinguished Journalism Award. He has appeared on many television shows including the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992. His published books include The Aboriginal Sin and Notes from Indian Country Volumes I and II. He also edited and helped write The American Indian and the Media. His latest book is Children Left Behind," based on his experience in mission boarding school. (Biography adapted from Clear Light Publishing, Corp.)
Patricia A. Loew (Bad River Ojibwe), Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Life Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a producer for WHA-TV (PBS) and host of In Wisconsin, a weekly news and public affairs program that airs statewide on Wisconsin Public Television. She is the author of dozens of scholarly and general interest articles on Native topics and has produced several award-winning documentaries, including No Word for Goodbye, Spring of Discontent, Throwaway Future, and Nation Within a Nation. Her latest documentary, Way of the Warrior, will air nationally on PBS Nov. 1, 2007. Loew is author of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal and Native People of Wisconsin, a fourth-grade textbook currently used by 15,000 Wisconsin school children.
Selene G. Phillips , Wabigonikewikwe, is a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe Nation. She holds a Ph. D. from Purdue University in American Studies with emphasis in Native American studies, communication law and journalism. She has been a humanities scholar for the Great Plains Chautauqua Society with which she presented a first-person characterization of Sacagawea. Her chapter, “Surviving Cultural Suppression: Sharing and Transferring Ojibwe Identity in Lac du Flambeau,” documents how cultural identity is socially constructed for Ojibwe people, especially Ojibwe women, on the Wisconsin reservation. It appears in From Generation to Generation by Wendy Leeds Hurwitz. Her research on the precursor for one of today’s premier Native American newspapers, News From Indian Country, appears in the book, Papers of the Thirty-first Algonquian Conference. Her other research interests focus on Native American newspapers, First Amendment issues and communication law. She has taught classes in communication law, popular culture and journalism at Purdue University and as a visiting professor in the
School of Communication at the University of North Dakota. She has served on the Indiana Governor’s Native American Council; on the Indiana University School of Journalism Alumni Association Board; as a contributing editor to the Community Times in Lafayette, Indiana; and on the Lafayette YWCA board of directors. She co-founded Clean Air Now Lafayette, an environmental organization dedicated to fighting air and noise pollution, and she worked with the UNITY Journalists of Color, Inc. mentor program. She currently serves on the American Native Press Archives National Advisory Board. Previously she has worked as a television news anchor, a radio and television news reporter and producer, a communications specialist for Purdue University's Affirmative Action Office, a business writer and publicist for Purdue University’s News Service, and a vocational counselor and job developer for the American Indian Business Association. She is an assistant professor at the University of Louisville.
Loriene Roy (White Earth Anishinaabe) is Immediate Past President of the American Library Association (ALA). With a membership of 68,000, ALA is the oldest and largest professional organization in librarianship in the world. She is Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where she joined the faculty in 1987. Roy received a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MLS from the University of Arizona. She co-edited Library and Information Studies Education in the United States (London, Mansell, 1998) and Getting Libraries the Credit They Deserve: A Festschrift in Honor of Marvin H. Scilken (Lanham, MD, Scarecrow, 2003) and published over 100 articles, chapters, documents, and short stories. She has given over 400 formal presentations in the United States and internationally and currently serves on the advisory boards for the International Children's Digital Library, Web Junction, the Sequoyah Research Center, and the Knowledge River Center for the Study of Hispanic and American Indian Library and Information Resources. She is the Director and Founder of "If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything," a national reading club for Native Children. Dr. Roy is Anishinabe (Ojibwe) and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation (Pembina Band). She is Principal Investigator for Honoring Generations, a scholarship program for Native students specializing in tribal librarianship, funded through the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. In March 2005 Roy was selected by Library Journal as a "Mover & Shaker" and recognized as a `rebel' in the field of librarianship. She is the Chief Editor for Greenwood’s “American Indian Experience” and advisor and consultant on WBGH-Boston’s American Experience series, “We Shall Remain.”
John Sanchez (Yaqui/Apache) Professor John Sanchez is formerly with The American University, in Washington, DC, where he served as the Director of the American Indian Leadership program and taught American Indian Leadership and Politics. Under his leadership President Clinton's panel on race initiatives recognized this program as one of the five top programs in the country. Now an Associate Professor at Penn State University he teaches in The College of Communications where he specializes in News Media Ethics and American Indians in the News Media. Sanchez also continues to work in Washington, DC and in Indian Country as a consultant in education and diversity initiatives specifically as it relates to American Indians. Professor Sanchez's research interests are focused primarily at the intersection of contemporary American Indian cultures and the American News Media and he publishes his research in American Indian journals, Teacher Education journals, and Communication Studies journals. He is the recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award at Penn State. Professor Sanchez is currently working on a book about American Indian Identity in the 21st Century and as a co-editor for a textbook on American Indians in the Media.
Mary Young (Prairie Band Potawatomi) writes about herself, “My parents are both Prairie Band. My mother was born and raised in Mayetta, Kansas, and my father in Arpin, Wisconsin (Skunk Hill). I have been living in Kansas since 1999. My education includes a Bachelors of Art (BA) in Mass Communication/Journalism sequence and a minor in Philosophy; a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS); and a Title II-B Fellow from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. My library experience includes working in an academic, public, and special library setting. Currently I am a co-editor for the Prairie Band Potawatomi News in Mayetta, Kansas and a certified drug and alcohol counselor from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. Membership includes the Native American Journalist Association (NAJA), the Kansas Association of Addiction Professionals (KAAP), the PBPN group of the NE Kansas Methamphetamine Prevention Coalition, and the Red Ribbon Committee. Former memberships include the National Congress of the American Indian (NCAI), ALA, AILA, Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), New Mexico Library Association, the Santa Fe Librarian’s Consortium and the Means and Ways Committee for the Santa Barbara Urban American Indian Health Board, and the Prairie Band’s American Legion Auxiliary Unit 410.” Mary Young is a member of the Advisory Board of the Sequoyah Research Center.