Project Team

Co-Directors

Darold Joseph, Assistant Professor of Special Education, Director of the Institute for Native Serving Educators, NAU 

Dr. Darold H. Joseph is from the Village of Moenkopi of the Hopi Tribe matrilineally representing the Paa’Iswunga (Water-Coyote Clan) and patrillineally, the Nuvawungwa (Snow Clan) from the Village of Shongopavi. Dr. Joseph was raised on Hopi, graduated from Tuba City High School, then went on to pursue and complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Northern Arizona University. In 2019 he achieved a PhD in Special Education at the University of Arizona and has worked for NAU since 2013. In addition to his role as the Director for the Institute for Native-serving Educators, he is an Assistant Professor of Special Education in the Educational Specialties Department at the College of Education. His research is focused on the intersection of disability with sociocultural differences that inform educational inequities for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth. His work aims to advance opportunities for Indigenous youth with and without disabilities to persist in education, health and wellness, and cultural well-being. With his wife, they share five children and two beautiful grandchildren and remain committed to serving and giving back to Indigenous communities.

Eric Meeks, Professor of History, NAU

Dr. Meeks is a historian whose teaching and research focus primarily on the history of the US-Mexico borderlands and race and ethnicity in North America. His award-winning book Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (2007, 2020) examines how racial classifications and identities of the diverse Indigenous, mestizo, and Euro-American residents of Arizona’s borderlands evolvedas the region was politically and economically incorporated into the United States. His research has focused especially on the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham nations, whose traditional homelands span the modern U.S.-Mexico border. Currently, Dr. Meeks is working on a book project that tells the history of the US-Mexico borderlands from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Marcus Macktima, Assistant Professor of History, NAU

Dr. Macktima is a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Eastern Arizona. His research consists of utilizing various historical, indigenous, and theoretical applications to uncover the history of Indigenous peoples within the Southwestern United States. Primarily, his work centers around bringing the history of the San Carlos Apachean peoples into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, beyond the “Apache Wars’” of the nineteenth century. Dr. Macktima completed his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 2022, finishing a dissertation entitled “Issues of Identity: The San Carlos Apachean Peoples.” This research explores the federal government’s manipulation and undermining of traditional Apachean identity from the nineteenth to the twenty first century to form the “San Carlos Apache” identity. He also received a Bachelor’s in History with a minor in Native American Studies, and a Master’s Degree in Native American Studies, at the University of Oklahoma.

Lauren Lefty, Assistant Professor and Director of Secondary History & Social Studies Education, NAU

Dr. Lefty’s research interests include the history of education in the U.S. and Latin America, teacher education, and public humanities. Her book project, Seize the Schools: Empire, Education, and Resistance in Postwar New York and Puerto Rico, examines the role of American empire and Puerto Rican migration in the development of postwar education politics. She is also the co-author of Teaching Teachers: Changing Paths and Enduring Debates and Teaching the World’s Teachers. Before completing her Ph.D. at NYU in 2020, she worked as a middle and high school teacher in Texas and Brooklyn, in education policy at the New York City Department of Education, as a Mellon Predoctoral Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, and as an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow with the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools program. 

Project Faculty

Maurice Crandall, Professor of History, Arizona State University

Dr.Crandall is a citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Arizona and Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University. He is a historian of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Crandall’s 2019 monograph, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912, won numerous awards, and his current book project examines the roles played in their communities by Dilzhe’e Apaches and Yavapais who served as Scouts in the U.S. Army. 

Vangee Nez, Assistant Professor of Educational Specialties, NAU

Dr. Nez is a member of the Navajo Nation (Dinetah) from Tocito, New Mexico. Her clans are, Táchiinii nishli, Ta’néészahnii baáshishchiin, Naakaii Dine’é ei dáshicheii dóó Bit’ahnii ei dáshinali. Her research explores the theoretical and philosophical foundations of Navajo Epistemology for research paradigms and using the Navajo Knowledge of SNBH (Framework) as an educational tool to reclaim cultural knowledge through storytelling and re-examining community-based education for Navajo youth, training Indigenous language and cultural teachers for language revitalization, and using storytelling for Indigenous research methodology. 

Alisse Ali-Joseph, Applied Indigenous Studies, NAU

Dr. Ali-Joseph, a member of the Choctaw nation, specializes in the importance of sports and physical activity as a vehicle for empowerment, cultural identity, health and educational attainment for American Indian people. She also focuses on American Indian health and wellness and American Indian education. She has worked closely with the INE’s teacher professional development, as well as NAU’s Indigenous People’s curriculum seminar.  

Anabel Galindo, Assistant Professor, Comparative Cultural Studies, NAU

Dr. Galindo earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Arizona and joined NAU’s Comparative Cultural Studies Department in 2023. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Mapping Yaqui Mobility, which centers on redefining mobility as a variegated tool that allowed Yaqui people to resist, adapt and negotiate their space and belonging across the Sonoran Desert in a broader temporal and spatial scope. Her work emphasizes the importance of moving away from misconstrued notions and rigid labels that have come to define Indigenous peoples and histories. 

Jeffrey Shepherd, Professor of History, University of Texas-El Paso

Dr. Shepherd joined the Department of History at UTEP in 2002 after receiving his Ph.D. from ASU.  His research interests include Indigenous peoples in North America, particularly the Apache/Nde’ and Native groups in the U.S. – Mexico borderlands; environmental history; biography; and art and culture as a form of resistance to militarizing the borderlands. He is the author of We Are an Indian Nation: A History of the Hualapai People and The Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands. 

James Mestaz, Assistant Professor of History, Sonoma State University

Dr. Mestaz is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at SSU. Broadly, his research interests include Latin American History, Environmental History, Ethnohistory, Borderlands, Latinx Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Indigenous Knowledge, Oral Histories, and Global Studies. Dr. Mestaz’s most recent book, Strength from the Waters: A History of Indigenous Mobilization in Northwest Mexico, is an environmental and social history that frames economic development, environmental concerns, and Indigenous mobilization within the context of a timeless issue: access to water. 

Project Administrators

Denyse Candace Herder, Community Program Coordinator, INE, NAU

 

Ms. Herder is of the Diné and Paiute tribes and serves as the Community Program Coordinator for the INE. She will help with institute logistics planning, including reserving space, ordering food, reserving transportation, and engaging in outreach to the INE’s networks of Indigenous-serving educators and community and tribal partners.

Leilah Danielson, Professor and Chair, Department of History, NAU

Dr. Danielson is a historian of modern U.S. politics, culture, social movements, and labor and chair of the NAU History Department. Her publications include a range of articles on the history of religion, race, and American social movements, as well as a book monograph, American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century and a co-edited anthology (with Doug Rossinow and Marian Mollin), The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith. She is currently working on several projects, including research on the workers’ education movement of the interwar years and the U.S.-Latin American solidarity movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

 

K-12 Education Specialist

Christi Carlson, Associate Teaching Professor, Secondary History & Social Studies Education, NAU

After graduating from NAU with a B.S.Ed. in History and Social Studies Education, Professor Carlson spent ten years teaching at the secondary level in public schools. Upon completion of an M.Ed. in Secondary Education, she returned to NAU, and now serves as an Associate Teaching Professor in History and Social Studies Education. She currently teaches HIS 206: Historical Inquiry and Teaching Seminar, HIS 407: Practicum in the Schools, and HIS 430: Methods for Teaching Government and Economics. She has the wonderful opportunity of working with practicing teachers to form positive teaching experiences for NAU’s teacher candidates, from entry in the program through the conclusion of the student teaching experience.