Mark Agostini attended the University of Vermont, Burlington as an undergraduate majoring in Anthropology and Film. While there he became interested in archaeology of the American Southwest. Through the support of an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Fellowship, he completed an honors thesis exploring shifts in pottery traditions and communities of practice at sites in the Silver Creek region of East-Central Arizona. He later worked at the Abbe Museum (Smithsonian Affiliate) in Bar Harbor, Maine and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO as an archaeology intern, and as a ceramics lab manager at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. In 2016, he entered the Anthropological Archaeology PhD program at Brown University and since then has focused on methods of ceramic analysis like archaeometry and petrography while adopting new and less invasive approaches like LiDAR analysis, and surface artifact surveys of archaeological sites. His dissertation project is a collaborative archaeology partnership with the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, which aims to address questions concerning the modern Pueblo’s archaeological and ethnographic ties to their earliest ancestral sites atop the Pajarito Plateau and in the Rio Grande Valley (1300 – 1600 CE).

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.

Kimonee Burke's research analyzes the role that Christianity and tribal churches have played in some New England tribal petitions for federal acknowledgment. Her primary research interests focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century New England Indigenous History and the impact of federal Indian policies in the region.

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). 

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.

Fitzpatrick is a historian whose research examines the intersection of colonialism, environmentalism, and the impact of forest fires across Turtle Island (North America). Focusing on the Syilx Okanagan and Secwepemc nations, spanning sections of central British Columbia and Washington State, her work traces the history of Indigenous land stewardship, its disruption through colonial processes, and the environmental consequences that have followed. A member of the Syilx nation, Fitzpatrick employs a community-engaged approach to document under-researched narratives and Indigenous epistemologies. Her research seeks to advocate for sustainable environmental practices informed by long held knowledge held within oral traditions.

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. 

Phoebe Labat graduated from Loyola University Maryland with a Bachelor of Arts in History. Her senior thesis investigated Native American and European explanations for the Charlevoix earthquake of 1663 and other “wonders” in New France and New England. Her research interests lie in the British and French Atlantic from the seventeenth into the nineteenth centuries. She is especially interested in interactions between religion, natural knowledge, and the environment in the context of Native-European encounters.

Allyson LaForge's research engages Native American and Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and histories of the Native Northeast. Allyson's dissertation, “Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Organizing in the Northeast,” examines the role Indigenous material culture played during transnational Native Northeast movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led by coalitions of Native leaders who worked to resist settler colonialism and ensure Indigenous survival.

Dominique belongs to the Zuni, Navajo, and Comanche Tribes. She grew up on the Zuni and Navajo reservations. She graduated high school at the age of 15 and later graduated from the University of Utah at the age of 20 with a bachelor’s in chemistry. She also completed two research internships at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School. Dominique is currently a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Brown University in the Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry Department. Her thesis research seeks to identify new therapeutic target genes and candidate small molecules to treat glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). She was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship in 2022 and plans to use her Ph.D. to open a research training lab in Gallup, New Mexico for high school students attending surrounding reservation schools. Dominique also plans to attend medical school to practice obstetrics and gynecology on the Navajo reservation. She plans to use her insight and training to create a cultural-based birthing program that can be implanted nationwide at hospitals serving large Native American patient populations.

Ben Salinas is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology department at Brown, where his research focuses on how the relationship between language and music affect Indigenous activism. These interests are animated in his dissertation, “Flow Maya: An ethnography of Yucatec Maya Rap,” that addresses the growing Indigenous language rap movement in the Yucatan Peninsula and beyond.

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 second-year Ph.D. student in the Slavic Studies department at Brown University. She completed her bachelor's degree in History at Mississippi State University and her master's in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the history of women and gender in Russian Alaska. She applies Indigenous methodologies to this area in hopes of helping decolonize the field of Slavic Studies. This summer, Laurel visited Kodiak Island in Alaska, where she examined museum archives and met with local Alutiiq community members to discuss her research on Kodiak Alutiiq oral histories as a means of rematriating Alutiiq motherhood and birthing practices.