Dr. Wendy Giddens Teeter – Director
Dr. Wendy G. Teeter is the Curator of Archaeology for the Fowler Museum and the UCLA NAGPRA Coordinator. She teaches periodically in American Indian Studies at UCLA and the California State University, Northridge Anthropology Department. She collaborates nationally and internationally with Indigenous communities on issues of repatriation and cultural heritage protection. At UCLA she oversaw the work of 12 tribes and the UCLA administration to coordinate the return over 2,000 individuals back to rest. Since 2007, Teeter has been co-director of the Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project, which seeks to understand the Indigenous history of the island and Tongva homelands through multi-disciplinary and collaborative methodologies. The Project provides a field school that has educated over 150 students on the importance of community-based Indigenous archaeology. Her interests, lectures, and publications focus on the protection and knowledge of material and non-material culture, Indigenous archaeology, and the relationships between humans and the environment in North and Central America. She is also Co-PI for Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles, a community-based website devoted to storytelling through cultural geography and map making as well as providing educational resources and curriculum. Teeter helped to develop the Tribal Learning Community & Educational Exchange Program in the Native Nations Law & Policy Center, UCLA School of Law. In June 2011 she co-curated, “Launching A Dream: Reviving Tongva Maritime Traditions,” at the Fowler Museum at UCLA with Cindi Alvitre (Director, Ti’at Society). She serves on several boards and committees including as Chair of the Society for California Archaeology Curation Committee and Editorial Board Member, Heritage & Society Journal.
Dr. Mishuana Goeman – Director
Dr. Goeman received her PhD from Stanford University in Modern thought and Literature in 2013 and joined UCLA faculty in 2009. Since that time she has participated on the NAGPRA committee as well as several diversity and inclusion committees on campus. She is also a Co-PI on a community based digital humanities project, Mapping Indigenous L.A. (www.mila.ss.ucla.edu). Her monograph Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2013. She has published her research in several peer-reviewed journals and has book chapters in Theorizing Native Studies, Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, and in twoMacmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies (2016) and Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (2017). She also has a forthcoming monograph The Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrance Malick’s the New World as part of the Indigenous Film Studies Series.
Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky – Project Manager
Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is a Ph.D. student at UCLA in Environment and Sustainability. She is passionate about digital archiving for the continuance and strengthening of Indigenous Nations and Tribal sovereignty, especially as it concerns land protection and reclamation. She was formerly the Archaeology Collections Manager at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she worked on repatriation, curatorial, archival, and digital projects. Sedonna has a variety of experience working with Indigenous communities, through her work at non-profits, as a college intern, and her work in archaeology and museums. Her involvement in archaeology began when she attended a field school session through the Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project, and earned her B.A. from UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in Anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology. Sedonna is the project manager for COAH, where she conducts, films, and transcribes interviews, works with project staff to create content, and uploads digital content as part of her managerial role.
María Montenegro – Mukurtu Website Developer and Digital Archivist
María Montenegro is a doctoral candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of critical archival theory, Indigenous studies, and tribal law and policy, and is in conversation with anticolonial theory and the Indigenous data sovereignty movement. Her dissertation project explores the role that archives play structurally in the U.S. Federal Acknowledgement policy. She holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and a BA in Aesthetics from Universidad Catolica (Chile). María is a researcher for the Local Contexts project and used to work as the project coordinator of the Sustainable Heritage Network. For this project, María is in charge of developing and managing the COAH website powered by Mukurtu CMS.