SDSU American Indian Studies

01/27/2026

We’ve been working on a brand new exhibit display in the CAL building! Come celebrate the exhibit dedication with us next week 🎉

12/01/2025

We still have open seats in our annual Kumeyaay language course! 🍁 This course counts as a foreign language GE for SDSU students, and is open to all community members!

If you have any questions or would like to enroll in the course, please reach out to the department!

01/28/2025

Sharing this again because we’re so excited for this talk!!

Please consider joining us on February 12th at 4pm at Scripps Cottage on campus. 👏🏽

Bayley J. Marquez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies, an affiliate faculty with the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race Gender and Ethnicity, and an Indigenous scholar from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. As an Indigenous scholar, she acknowledges that her work and scholarship takes place on Piscataway land, former plantation land, and within a land grant university funded by the seizure and sale of Indigenous lands. With a focus on space, land, material relations, and schooling, this acknowledgement is necessary to position her work within the structure of settler colonialism and her own lived experiences. Her book Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space (UC Press) examines education for Black and Indigenous students in the 19th and 20th centuries and how slavery and settlement were framed as educational processes by white reformers and educators. This form of teaching targeted Native and Black bodies as subjects to transform as well as the land as a target of teaching and transformation, fundamentally altering spaces and lives.

01/22/2025

Our department is hosting the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association Annual Conference this year! Please join us on February 13th and 14th for panels, discussions, and speakers from all over the state!

Attendance is free, please register using this link. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf1M-eeBH9vVRgnIyKnuEQ1-qIJiffHnDrA2kcQkn2V3-D7lw/viewform

Looking forward to seeing all of our relatives and community members there!!

12/09/2024

One of our wonderful lecturers and community members, Devon L. Lomayesva, was recently appointed to serve as a judge in the San Diego County Superior Court! She has a long history of serving California Indian tribal nations and is a citizen of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel.

State of California

12/02/2024

Dr. Margaret Field was quoted in: “Kumiai community in Baja California seeks to preserve its language / “Comunidad Kumiai en Baja California busca preservar su lengua.”

Miembros de la comunidad Kumiai de San José de la Zorra en Baja California, se encuentran en la búsqueda por preservar su lengua a través de las generaciones.

12/02/2024

A clip of Dr. Olivia Chilcote's recent interview with PBS Origins!

The 1830 Indian Removal Act led to the forced relocation of nearly 50,000 Indigenous people. What happened to the ones that stayed? Since then, some Native A...

10/30/2024

Spring enrollment is coming up soon! We’re so excited to offer our Kumeyaay Language (I’ipay/Ti’pay Aa) class, where you’ll have the opportunity to learn from fluent speakers, and help to preserve the language for future generations 🤎 Share this flyer widely, and spread the word!

10/30/2024

Congratulations to Olivia Chilcote on being selected as one of six 2024 Presidential Research Fellows. The award in the amount $25K will help further research on Olivia's second book manuscript.

Chilcote is an American Indian Studies scholar, who situates herself within an Indigenous social research paradigm that approaches community-based and historical research from specific cultural knowledges, ethics, and protocols. She works collaboratively with tribes to foreground Indigenous perspectives in specific histories and ongoing struggles to recover land, ancestors, and political rights.

“Receiving this honor is a recognition of the powerful ways in which American Indian Studies theories and methods can be transformative in academia, Chilcote said. “As a Luiseño/Payómkawichum scholar, it is an acknowledgment of my unwavering commitment to uplift Tribes and advance a research agenda through place-based Indigenous principles of sovereignty and relationality.”

She plans to use the fellowship award to conduct research for her second book manuscript which will focus on reorienting the historiography of California to one centered in Luiseño/Payómkawichum experience.

Read the full article, here: https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2024/10/2024-presidential-research-fellows-awarded-25k-each-to-further-their-projects?utm_source=salesforce&utm_medium=email

Photo: Olivia Chilcote accepts the award at the President's home during a reception on Oct. 29. L to R: Interim Provost Bill Tong, Olivia Chilcote, President Adela de la Torre, Dean Todd Butler, Vice President for Research and Innovation Hala Madanat.

10/30/2024

Our faculty member, Dr. Olivia Chilcote, has been selected as a 2025 Presidential Research Fellow!

Please extend your congratulations to her!

Tenured researchers recognized for their work on cancer, centering Indigenous history, and children’s mental health and math learning

10/30/2024

Fellow scholars and community members please consider joining us on Friday, November 8th to celebrate our faculty, most notably Dr. Olivia Chilcote! has been working incredibly hard, and has achieved not one, not two, but three major milestones in her career!!

As of this Fall semester, she is the first California Indian person to achieve tenure in the American Indian Studies department at SDSU. She is a member of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians.

Earlier this year, her first book was published with to much acclaim.

Dr. Chilcote has also been awarded the highest honor for faculty at SDSU. She is a 2025 Presidential Research Fellow, and has received $25,000 to conduct research for her second book manuscript.

Please help us congratulate and celebrate our most distinguished professor of this year! 🥳👏🏽📚🌠