Chase Bryer (Chickasaw) is a current Ph.D. student in Behavioral and Social Health Science at the Brown University School of Public Health. He joined NAISI in 2022, and serves as a liaison between NAISI faculty and students, while contributing to various initiatives focused on building a stronger intellectual environment for undergraduate and graduate Native American and Indigenous and NAIS students at Brown. Through his research, he uses community-based participatory methods to create interventions that will improve health outcomes, with a particular focus among Indigenous queer and Two-Spirit communities. His research, ultimately, aims to inform state actors including social workers, public health professionals, and biomedical researchers with ways to more sensitively engage with marginalized communities through resilience-based approaches to disrupt cycles of historical trauma. Chase holds an MSW from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in Human Rights and Media from the University of Oklahoma.

Harper is an anthropological archaeologist working in the northern Maya lowlands (Yucatán), and is broadly interested in food security/food sovereignty, political economy, and people-plant relations. Harper's research involves the use of paleoethnobotanical and archaeological methods to examine local household food production and consumption in the context of grand-scale political and economic change across the landscape of the Yaxuna-Coba region in the Classic period (250-900 AD). 

As a historian and archaeologist, Dan works within cultural heritage institutions to decolonize and instill ethics in collection management and repatriation. 

Luiz Paulo Ferraz's research examines the struggles for Indigenous rights and environmental protection in Brazil, exploring the interconnection of Indigenous and environmental history during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) and its aftermath from both a national and transnational perspective.

Rachel “Ray” Friedlander recently served as city manager in Seldovia, Alaska and spent the last decade in public service to Alaska at the nonprofit, municipal, and state level. Her policy focus is democracy and human rights, specifically preserving local control for municipalities while respecting the sovereignty of Native Nations through collaborative governance. She received her associate's degree from Santa Fe College in environmental science and her bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in political ecology. Under the mentorship of Professor Nancy Peluso and Dr. Noer Fauzi Rachman, she studied the agrarian reform movement of West Java while attaining fluency in Bahasa Indonesia through the US Department of State Critical Language Scholarship Program. She is currently assisting Dr. Miriam Jorgensen with a project in partnership with the National Indian Child Welfare Association. 

Billie is a cultural and historical sociologist interested in questions of tribal belonging and community agency. Her work employs a DuBoisian approach that aims to incorporate Indigenous knowledges in linking the lived experiences of community members to macro level structures of policy, social movements, and ideologies. Her current research is a collaborative project with her tribal community (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), in which she explores how actors across multiple generations have made space for themselves within the ever-changing American Indian identity. In doing so, Billie aims to create an empowering and informative archive for her community and shift the often damage-centered academic narratives around tribal communities toward ones of self-determination and survivance.

Laurel is a Ph.D. student in the Slavic Studies department at Brown University. Her research focuses on the women and gender history of Russian Alaska. She applies Indigenous methodologies to this area in hopes of helping decolonize the field of Slavic Studies.