Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Jessica Fremland (she/her/hers; Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) obtained her BA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the London School of Economics, and her PhD in Gender Studies from UCLA. Jessica’s research examines the ways Dakota women critique the violence of the settler state and create anti-colonial geographies through aesthetic expressions of relationality and sensorial insurgence. Jessica analyzes the gendered forms of settler colonial carcerality that surround Native women in boarding schools, activist spaces, and everyday geographies. Her research highlights the methods by which Native women refuse carceral structures by harnessing Indigenous aesthetic practices such as dance, music, sound, crafting, letter-writing and everyday expressions of joy. Jessica draws especially on the fields of Black and Indigenous feminisms to not only document and map these moments of refusal through critical archival and ethnographic research but to imagine and cultivate alternative possibilities in her own writing and performances of spoken word poetry.