Mishuana Goeman

PhD

Headshot of Dr. Mishuana Goeman.

Mishuana Goeman

PhD

Mishuana Goeman

PhD

Tonawanda Band of Seneca
Chair of Indigenous Studies
Professor of Indigenous Studies

Education

  • PhD, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, 2003
  • MA, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, 2000
  • BA, English and Native American Studies, Dartmouth College 1994
  • University College of London, Study Abroad, English Department, Fall and Winter, 1992-1993
  • T.R.I.B.E.S. Program, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, Summer 1990

Biographical Statement

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, daughter of enrolled Tonawanda Band of Seneca, Hawk Clan, is currently a Professor of Indigenous Studies at University of Buffalo (on leave from UCLA’s Gender Studies and American Indian Studies). Her monographs include Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Settler Aesthetics: The Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is also part of the feminist editorial collective for Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press 2021) which won the Choice award in 2021. Her community-engaged work is devoted to several digital humanities projects, including participation as Co-PI on community-based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities.  Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019) is a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She is the PI of the University of California President’s office multi-campus Research Grant for Centering Tribal Stories in Difficult Times. She also headed up the Mukurtu California Native Hub (2021) housed at UCLA through an NEH sub-grant, which supports local tribal organizations and nations to start their cultural heritage and language digitally sovereign sites through the Mukurtu platform. She is also a co-pi on the Haudenosaunee Archival Research and Knowledge (Hark, 2023), a Mellon funded project at University at Buffalo (Coming 2023). She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals and books, including guest-edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Her work from 2018-2022 included holding the Inaugural Special Advisor position at UCLA, where she worked across campus to better Indigenous relationships. From 2020-2021 she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University at Buffalo, located in her home territories. In 2023, she begins her role as the President-elect of the American Studies Association. 

Research Area

Mishuana Goeman's research and teaching reflect community-engaged scholarship and practice as well as a love for Indigenous creativity. Novels, poetry, filmmaking and art are all practices that enable us to see vibrant paths toward justice and think outside of the settler boxes created through colonial institutions and everyday practices. By examining theory and the material ground from which many Indigenous artist practice, I hope to further conversations that are nuanced and move us closer to the worlds we envision. In each place I have lived I have worked to build relationships with community members and to improve the work that the university should and could do better. It is an honor to be back in my traditional territories and surrounded by a legacy that honors just that. Digital projects and community-led grants have been part of my practice over the last years and I hope to continue this trajectory in Haudenosaunee territories.”

Scholarly Interests

Indigenous Feminisms, Indigenous Geographies and Literature, Contemporary Poetry, Visual Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Justice, Digital Humanities, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Recent Publications

Books

Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 

Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, Eds. Aizura, Bahng, Chavez, Goeman, Jackson, Musser, Thompkins, New York University Press, October 2021 &“Race” (Anthology Editor; Collective Author)

Digital Publications

Carrying Our Ancestors Home: Digital Education Project on NAGPRA and Repatriation, Co-PI, hosted in American Indian Studies Center, coah-repat.com, May 1, 2019.

California Native Hubs, Co-Director, hosted in American Indian Studies Center, coah-repat.com, 2021.

Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles, Co-PI, permanently hosted in social science UCLA, www.mila.ss.ucla.edu, October 12, 2015. 

Peer Reviewed Articles and Publications

“The Land Introduction: Beyond the Grammar of Settler Landscapes and Apologies,” Western Humanities Review, Fall 2020, 35-65.

“Combahee River Collective Statement: A 40th Anniversary Retrospective,” Invited Contributor, eds. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Kristen Koblenz, Frontiers, 38.1, Fall 2017. 

 “Indigenous Transnational Feminisms,” Co-authored with Hokulani Aikau, Maile Arvin, Mishuana Goeman, Scott Morgensen, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 36.3, Fall 2015, 84-126. 

 “Flirtations at the Intersections: Unsettling Liberal Multiculturalism in Helen Lee’s Prey,” Critical Ethnic Studies, 1.1, Spring 2015, 117-144. 

 “Tools of a Cartographic Poet: Joy Harjo’s Poetry and the (Re)mapping of Settler Colonial Geographies,”  Settler Colonial Studies, 2.2, Summer 2012, 69-88.

"Introduction to Indigenous Performance: Upsetting the Terrains of Settler Colonialism," Special Guest Editor for American Indian Cultures and Research Journal, 34.5, 2011, 3-18, 2009.

"Notes Towards a Native Feminism's Spatial Practice." Wicazo Sa 24.2, 2009, 169-187. 

(With Jennifer Denetdale), "Introduction: Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Indigenous Sovereignties," Wicazo Sa 24.2 (2009): 9-13.

"From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the discussion of Indigenous Nation-building." International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1.1, 2008, 23-34. 

"(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women’s Literature." American Quarterly 60.1 2008, 295-302.

Debenport, Goeman, Montenegro, Wynn. “How a dictionary Became an Archive: Community Language Reclamation Using Mukurtu Content Management System,” Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, Volume 44, Issue 2, 2023: 29-58.

Book Chapters

Electric Lights, Tourist Sights: Gendering Dispossession and Settler Colonial Infrastructure at the Niagara Falls,” Indian Cities: Histories of Urbanity, Eds. Blansett, Cahill, Needham, Oklahoma University Press, 2022, (Book Chapter).

“Flooding Settler Enclosures, Asserting Indigenous Presence,” Nature of Enclosure, ed. Jeffrey Nesbit, Actar Publishing, 2021. (Book Chapter)

“Community Resilience, “Contested” Spaces, and Indigenous Geographies,” Dean Olson, Allison Fischer Olson, Brenda Nichols, Wendy Teeter, Maylei Blackwell and Mishuana Goeman, Resilient Communities Across Geographies, (Esri Press2021), 129-154.

“Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-first Century American Poetry, eds. Timothy Yu, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2020.

“On-­going Storms and Struggles: Sexual Violence and Resource Exploitation in Solar Storms,” Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker, Duke University Press, 99-126, 2016.

“Native Foundations and Interventions in Feminist Theory and History,” Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, eds. Jeanie O’Brien and Chris Anderson, Routledge Press, 2016, 185-194. 

“Indigeneity, Gender, and Sexuality” Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives,and Methodologies,” eds. Nicole Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin, Macmillan Press, 2016, 151-165.

“Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment” Keywords in Native American Studies, eds. Lani Teves, Michelle Raheja, Andrea Smith, University of Arizona Press, 2015, 71-89. (Updated Reprint)

“Disrupting a Settler Grammar of Place in Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s 'Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant',” in Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, Duke University Press, Spring 2014.

Calhoun, Anne, Goeman, Mishuana, Tsethlikai, Monica. “Chapter 25: Achieving Gender Equity for Native Americans,” in Handbook for Achieving Gender Equity Through Education, eds. Sue S. Klein and Patricia Ortman, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, April 2007: 525-552.

“Beyond the Grammar of Settler Apology,” Indigenous Resurgence In an Age of Reconciliation, EDS Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik stark, Aimee Craft, Hokulani K. Aikau, University of Toronto Press, 2023: 23-42. (Book Chapter/Reprint)

“‘You Tell me your Stories, and I will tell you mine...’: Witnessing and Combatting Native Women's Extirpation in American Indian Literature,” Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Sovereignty – Life: Settler Colonialisms and Indigenous Presences, eds. Rene Dietrich and Kerstin Knopf, Duke University Press, 2023: 45-66. (Book Chapter) 

“Historic Interstices of Indigenous Visualities and the Uprooting of Settler Terrains,” Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, Amon Carter Museum, Texas: Radius Books, 2022: 197-208. (Book Chapter)

Editorships

Guest Editor, special issue on “Indigenous Performance:  Upsetting the Terrains of Settler Colonialism.”  American Indian Cultures and Research Journal, 34.5, Fall 2011.

Guest Co-Editor (with Jennifer Denetdale), special issue on “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Indigenous Sovereignties," Wicazo Sa 24.2, 2009.