Shannon Speed
Shannon Speed, Chickasaw, is director of the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA and an associate professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology. She writes regularly about indigenous issues throughout the Americas, including violence against indigenous women, indigenous migration, indigenous rights, tribal law, and teaching Native history in the U.S. school curriculum.
She has spent the past two decades working in Mexico. Her publications include “Rights in Rebellion: Human Rights and Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas,” “Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Moral Engagements, and Cultural Contentions,” and “Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas.” Her current research is focused on indigenous Latin American women migrants and gender violence. She has a book in progress titled, “States of Violence: Indigenous Women Migrants and Human Rights in the Era of Neoliberal Multicriminalism.”
“I try to teach about these things in a way that keeps people’s minds open and emphasize that it might be more important to think of all indigenous people as against a settler state rather than impose or embrace colonizer-imposed boundaries of identity.”
http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/shannon-speed-naisa