UCR California Center for Native Nations

People

About the Director

Michelle Raheja, Assistant Professor

Professor Raheja’s area of research is Native American literature, with a special interest in autobiography and film and visual culture. Her training and teaching cover all periods and genres of American literature up to the present, with a special emphasis on literature covering the period from oral narrative to 1630, autobiography, comparative minority discourses, critical race theory, and film and visual culture.

In 2005-2006, Raheja was invited to Oberlin College as part of the Indigenous Women’s Series to present a lecture entitled, “’Molly Spotted Elk is a Dancer… But She Also Knows How to Punch a Typewriter’: Gender, (Auto)Biography, Race & Performance.” She also presented “(Northern) Lights, (Hand-held) Camera, (Ethnographic) Action: Filming the Arctic,” an invited talk at Sarai: The New Media Initiative in Delhi, India, and “John Ford’s Indian Fighters: An Introduction to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” an invited talk at the Hollywood and the Cavalry Exhibit at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. Her most current publications include “’I leave it to the people of the United States to say’: Autobiographical Disruptions in the Personal Narratives of Black Hawk and Ely S. Parker,” in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (Vol. 30, No. 1, 2006) and “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner, Visual Sovereignty, and the Persistence of Ethnography” (accepted for publication in The Race and Independent Media Anthology co-edited by Chon Noriega and Eve Oishi).

Her book manuscript, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press and explores the personal narratives and visual aesthetics of indigenous actors, entertainers, and filmmakers from the inception of the motion picture industry in the United States and Canada to the present. She is also co-editing two anthologies: Pretending to Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing with Joe Lockard and Melinda Micco and Red Rhythms: Contemporary Methodologies in American Indian Dance with Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Raheja’s research has been supported by an Institute of American Cultures/American Indian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA, the Center for Ideas and Society at UCR, and the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History/Lannan Foundation.

On campus she serves on the executive committee of the Film and Visual Culture Program and has co-organized two major conferences, Filmmaking @ the Margins: A Film Symposium and Red Rhythms: Contemporary Methodologies in American Indian Dance.

(951) 827-1799
michelle.raheja@ucr.edu

Ian Chambers

Dr. Ian Chambers obtained his BA and MA from the University of Warwick in England before moving to America where he gained a doctoral degree in Native American history from the University of California, Riverside. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the John D. Rockerfeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.

His focus work focuses on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Atlantic world, with particular reference to the American southeast. Specifically, exploring the way in which members of the Cherokee and British nations understood space, both physically and intellectually, during the colonial period and the role that these understanding played during the colonial era.

William Medina

William Medina is a Ph.D. candidate in Native American History at UC, Riverside. He was born and raised in Riverside, California, and he managed his family’s business for many years before returning to graduate school. His area of research is Indian educational policies in the early twentieth century. In particular, he has studied Sherman Institute and its exploitive practice of using Indian children to market the school to the public and government leaders. However, as he has discovered, student found ways to negotiate this exploitive relationship. Moreover, his ties to Sherman Institute are personal. In 1917 his grandmother, Lillian Franklin Atencio, a Miwok Indian from northern California, attended Sherman Institute and unwillingly became a “cog” in the school effort to use as marketing utility for school administrators. Presently Medina is the first associate researcher of the California Center for Native Nations and also teaches history at Riverside City College.

Dr. Dawn Marsh Riggs
Purdue University
765-496-2787
UNIV 128

College of Liberal Arts
Department of History
University Hall, 672 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2087

Assistant Professor of Native American History currently serves as a member of the Tecumseh Project, which helps recruit indigenous students into Ph.D. programs at Purdue. She also sits on the Education Committee of Historic Prophetstown, a program that develops educational programs for K-12 students and the general public about the history of Prophetstown settlements and the indigenous communities of the Wabash River. Recent publications focus on the Lenape in Pennsylvania. Her new research exams the creation of homelands for those indigenous people who were dispossessed in the nineteenth century.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert
Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies & History
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is enrolled with the Hopi Tribe from the Village of Upper Moencopi, Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in History, and an M.A. in Public History (Historic Preservation), from the University of California, Riverside, and also holds an M.A. in Theology from Talbot School of Theology (Biola University). Centering his research and teaching on Native American history and the history of the West, Professor Gilbert examines the history of American Indian education, the Indian boarding school experience, and federal Indian polices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In addition to publishing articles on Hopi history and producing a documentary film (Beyond the Mesas) on the Hopi boarding school experience, Professor Gilbert is finishing a book manuscript titled Education Beyond the Mesas: Hopi Student Involvement at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929 (University of Nebraska Press). Along with his work on Hopi education, Professor Gilbert has been conducting research on Hopi long distance runners, and the encounters/relationships of American Indian leaders with United States presidents (1880-1930).

Prior to his current post in American Indian Studies & History, Professor Gilbert served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006-2007), and as an adjunct faculty in history at the University of Redlands, San Bernardino Valley Community College, Azusa Pacific University, and The Master’s College.

Kate Kate Spilde Contreras, Managing Director

Kate Spilde Contreras, Ph.D., is Managing Director for the Center for California Native Nations at the University of California at Riverside (UCR). Previously, Kate was a Sr. Research Associate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where she worked for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Prior to her appointment at Harvard, she was the Director of Research for the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), an association of 184 tribal governments based in Washington, D.C. While at NIGA, Kate developed the National Indian Gaming Library and Resource Center. In addition, Kate was a policy analyst/writer for the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a federal commission that produced a comprehensive study of U.S. gambling policy for Congress and President Clinton in 1999. In 2003, Dr. Contreras was named one of the “Top 10 People in Gaming Under 40” by Global Gaming Business Magazine; in 2007, she was named one of 10 “Great Women of Gaming” by Casino Executive Magazine.

She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Hawaii (1991), a Master of Arts from the George Washington University (1993), a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California in Santa Cruz (1998) and a M.B.A. from the University of California in Riverside (2007.) Her areas of research include the economic and social impacts of gambling and Indian gaming, responsible gaming and corporate social responsibility, needs assessment and program evaluation, federal recognition, and tribal governance.

Dr. Contreras works at the University of California at Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center and can be reached at kates@ucr.edu or 760-533-9387.

Rebecca Kugel, Associate Professor

"Rebecca Kugel received her BA degree in English from the University of Iowa in 1974; her Masters degree and Ph.D. degree in History from UCLA in 1978 and 1986 respectively. Her research focuses on the Native peoples of the western Great Lakes, in particular the Ojibwes. She is also interested in Native women's history. Her first book, To Be The Main Leaders of Our People; A Political History of the Minnesota Ojibwe, 1820-1898, examines historical Ojibwe political processes and the successes different leaders had in dealing with the United States. It won the Choice Book Award for 1998. An anthology on writing Native women's history that she co-edited with Lucy Eldersveld Murphy was published in the Fall of 2007. It is titled Native Women's History in Eastern North American Before 1900; A Guide to Research and Writing. An Ojibwe and Shawnee descendant, Prof. Kugel is currently at work on a book about the cultural construction of "race" in the western Great Lakes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."


Home About CCNN Purpose History Partnerships Publications News & Events In the News Conferences Events Archive California Indian Conference Photo Gallery People Contact Contact Info How to Subscribe/Contribute Related Links	People About the Director Michelle Raheja, Assistant Professor Professor Raheja’s area of research is Native American literature, with a special interest in autobiography and film and visual culture. Her training and teaching cover all periods and genres of American literature up to the present, with a special emphasis on literature covering the period from oral narrative to 1630, autobiography, comparative minority discourses, critical race theory, and film and visual culture. In 2005-2006, Raheja was invited to Oberlin College as part of the Indigenous Women’s Series to present a lecture entitled, “’Molly Spotted Elk is a Dancer… But She Also Knows How to Punch a Typewriter’: Gender, (Auto)Biography, Race & Performance.” She also presented “(Northern) Lights, (Hand-held) Camera, (Ethnographic) Action: Filming the Arctic,” an invited talk at Sarai: The New Media Initiative in Delhi, India, and “John Ford’s Indian Fighters: An Introduction to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” an invited talk at the Hollywood and the Cavalry Exhibit at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum. Her most current publications include “’I leave it to the people of the United States to say’: Autobiographical Disruptions in the Personal Narratives of Black Hawk and Ely S. Parker,” in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (Vol. 30, No. 1, 2006) and “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Atanarjuat/The Fast Runner, Visual Sovereignty, and the Persistence of Ethnography” (accepted for publication in The Race and Independent Media Anthology co-edited by Chon Noriega and Eve Oishi). Her book manuscript, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press and explores the personal narratives and visual aesthetics of indigenous actors, entertainers, and filmmakers from the inception of the motion picture industry in the United States and Canada to the present. She is also co-editing two anthologies: Pretending to Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing with Joe Lockard and Melinda Micco and Red Rhythms: Contemporary Methodologies in American Indian Dance with Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Raheja’s research has been supported by an Institute of American Cultures/American Indian Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA, the Center for Ideas and Society at UCR, and the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History/Lannan Foundation. On campus she serves on the executive committee of the Film and Visual Culture Program and has co-organized two major conferences, Filmmaking @ the Margins: A Film Symposium and Red Rhythms: Contemporary Methodologies in American Indian Dance. (951) 827-1799 michelle.raheja@ucr.edu Ian Chambers Dr. Ian Chambers obtained his BA and MA from the University of Warwick in England before moving to America where he gained a doctoral degree in Native American history from the University of California, Riverside. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the John D. Rockerfeller Library, Colonial Williamsburg and the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. His focus work focuses on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Atlantic world, with particular reference to the American southeast. Specifically, exploring the way in which members of the Cherokee and British nations understood space, both physically and intellectually, during the colonial period and the role that these understanding played during the colonial era. William Medina William Medina is a Ph.D. candidate in Native American History at UC, Riverside. He was born and raised in Riverside, California, and he managed his family’s business for many years before returning to graduate school. His area of research is Indian educational policies in the early twentieth century. In particular, he has studied Sherman Institute and its exploitive practice of using Indian children to market the school to the public and government leaders. However, as he has discovered, student found ways to negotiate this exploitive relationship. Moreover, his ties to Sherman Institute are personal. In 1917 his grandmother, Lillian Franklin Atencio, a Miwok Indian from northern California, attended Sherman Institute and unwillingly became a “cog” in the school effort to use as marketing utility for school administrators. Presently Medina is the first associate researcher of the California Center for Native Nations and also teaches history at Riverside City College. Dr. Dawn Marsh Riggs Purdue University 765-496-2787 UNIV 128 College of Liberal Arts Department of History University Hall, 672 Oval Drive West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2087 Assistant Professor of Native American History currently serves as a member of the Tecumseh Project, which helps recruit indigenous students into Ph.D. programs at Purdue. She also sits on the Education Committee of Historic Prophetstown, a program that develops educational programs for K-12 students and the general public about the history of Prophetstown settlements and the indigenous communities of the Wabash River. Recent publications focus on the Lenape in Pennsylvania. Her new research exams the creation of homelands for those indigenous people who were dispossessed in the nineteenth century. Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies & History University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is enrolled with the Hopi Tribe from the Village of Upper Moencopi, Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in History, and an M.A. in Public History (Historic Preservation), from the University of California, Riverside, and also holds an M.A. in Theology from Talbot School of Theology (Biola University). Centering his research and teaching on Native American history and the history of the West, Professor Gilbert examines the history of American Indian education, the Indian boarding school experience, and federal Indian polices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In addition to publishing articles on Hopi history and producing a documentary film (Beyond the Mesas) on the Hopi boarding school experience, Professor Gilbert is finishing a book manuscript titled Education Beyond the Mesas: Hopi Student Involvement at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929 (University of Nebraska Press). Along with his work on Hopi education, Professor Gilbert has been conducting research on Hopi long distance runners, and the encounters/relationships of American Indian leaders with United States presidents (1880-1930). Prior to his current post in American Indian Studies & History, Professor Gilbert served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006-2007), and as an adjunct faculty in history at the University of Redlands, San Bernardino Valley Community College, Azusa Pacific University, and The Master’s College. Kate Kate Spilde Contreras, Managing Director Kate Spilde Contreras, Ph.D., is Managing Director for the Center for California Native Nations at the University of California at Riverside (UCR). Previously, Kate was a Sr. Research Associate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where she worked for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Prior to her appointment at Harvard, she was the Director of Research for the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA), an association of 184 tribal governments based in Washington, D.C. While at NIGA, Kate developed the National Indian Gaming Library and Resource Center. In addition, Kate was a policy analyst/writer for the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a federal commission that produced a comprehensive study of U.S. gambling policy for Congress and President Clinton in 1999. In 2003, Dr. Contreras was named one of the “Top 10 People in Gaming Under 40” by Global Gaming Business Magazine; in 2007, she was named one of 10 “Great Women of Gaming” by Casino Executive Magazine. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Hawaii (1991), a Master of Arts from the George Washington University (1993), a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California in Santa Cruz (1998) and a M.B.A. from the University of California in Riverside (2007.) Her areas of research include the economic and social impacts of gambling and Indian gaming, responsible gaming and corporate social responsibility, needs assessment and program evaluation, federal recognition, and tribal governance. Dr. Contreras works at the University of California at Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center and can be reached at kates@ucr.edu or 760-533-9387. Rebecca Kugel, Associate Professor "Rebecca Kugel received her BA degree in English from the University of Iowa in 1974; her Masters degree and Ph.D. degree in History from UCLA in 1978 and 1986 respectively. Her research focuses on the Native peoples of the western Great Lakes, in particular the Ojibwes. She is also interested in Native women's history. Her first book, To Be The Main Leaders of Our People; A Political History of the Minnesota Ojibwe, 1820-1898, examines historical Ojibwe political processes and the successes different leaders had in dealing with the United States. It won the Choice Book Award for 1998. An anthology on writing Native women's history that she co-edited with Lucy Eldersveld Murphy was published in the Fall of 2007. It is titled Native Women's History in Eastern North American Before 1900; A Guide to Research and Writing. An Ojibwe and Shawnee descendant, Prof. Kugel is currently at work on a book about the cultural construction of "race" in the western Great Lakes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

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