cəlacačiʔ ʔi kʷi cəlac cəlacačiʔ ʔi kʷi cəlac cəlacačiʔ ʔi kʷi cəlac
UW's American Indian Studies department, one of the best in the nation, celebrates 55 years of relationships and learning.
By Caitlin Klask | June 2025 issue
Above: cəlacačiʔ ʔi kʷi cəlac, pronounced “suh-LAHTS ah-chee ee-kwee suh-LAHTS,” means 55 in Lushootseed, the ancestral language of the Puget Sound Salish peoples. The UW has offered Salish language classes since 1972.
In the spring of 1970, a group of Native American students brainstormed ways to prioritize Native studies at the UW. By that fall, the American Indian Studies Center was formed, with faculty from across campus teaching anthropology, art and history from a Native perspective.
In 1971, the UW American Indian Student Council (now First Nations @ UW) held its first spring powwow. In 1974, Marvin Oliver, ’73, taught the first American Indian Studies class, Art of the North American Indians. Vi Hilbert, an elder from the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe taught Lushootseed language. The Native Voices filmmaking program, which began in 1999, rose in popularity throughout the aughts. By 2002, students could major or minor in American Indian Studies, and in 2009, it became an academic department.
Today, the American Indian Studies department offers a major, a minor and a graduate certificate in American Indian Studies, a minor in Oceania and Pacific Islander Studies, and now a certificate in Tribal Gaming and Hospitality Management.
This year marks 55 years for one of the largest and most comprehensive American Indian Studies programs in the world. We spoke with five faculty from AIS, each of whom shares a passion for Native knowledge. Their answers have been edited for space.
Faculty spotlight
Jean Dennison (Osage Nation)
- Associate Professor, American Indian Studies and Anthropology
- Co-Director of the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies
- 10 years with the UW
Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth)
- Professor, American Indian Studies
- Chair of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Advisory Committee
- 24 years with the UW
Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan)
- Associate Professor, American Indian Studies
- Affiliated faculty, Canadian Studies, English and Comparative History of Ideas
- 23 years with the UW
Luana Ross (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes)
- Associate Professor Emerita, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
- Co-Director, Native Voices Film Program
- 26 years with the UW
Daniel Hart
- Professor Emeritus, American Indian Studies
- Co-Director, Native Voices Film Program
- 26 years with the UW
What brought you to the UW?
Jean Dennison: There are 29 federally recognized tribes in the state, and they’re active on environmental issues, educational issues, cultural practices. Our regent [Leonard Forsman, ’87] is the chairman of the Suquamish Tribe and is very active in the state. It’s exciting to build off that momentum and excitement and commitment. There are few other institutions in the continental U.S. that have such a concentration of Native faculty or anywhere near the kind of programming that we have.
Charlotte Coté: I never considered teaching as a career. [She originally studied political science and worked in broadcast television.] At UC Berkeley, I got the chance to teach as a graduate student instructor. That’s when it really started connecting for me. I met Sasha Harmon, a professor in American Indian Studies, who told me about an open position at the UW. I applied, and I got invited to give a job talk. And when I got there, there was a job talk flyer for Dian Million. Neither Dian nor I knew that we were both interviewing for the position. They ended up liking both of us and hired both of us.
Luana Ross: I came to the UW from the University of California because I am Bitterroot Salish and this geographic area was a good cultural fit. Equally important is that the UW was vitally interested in our documentary film program, Native Voices.
Dian Million: I had only applied to the UW. I had family in Alaska, and some family in Oregon. I think most Native people like to be closer to home.
A flyer for an October 1976 event at the Husky Union Building put on by Campus Radical Women and Freedom Socialist Party. Four Native women activists—Janet McCloud (Tulalip), Barbara Means (Oglala Lakota),Yvonne Swan (Colville) and Sally Fixico (Seminole)—spoke to a rapt crowd of 400, some of whom drove for hours to attend. Poster courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society.
How has American Indian Studies evolved?
Dian Million: We’ve ridden out the ups and downs that this campus has had: the wage freezes, the present-day cuts and threats of cuts. But one of our strong points is this department was [someone’s] dream, and we will always fight for it. These are legendary elders. We’re standing on the shoulders of an enormous amount of effort inside and outside the University.
Jean Dennison: Independence from other units is one of the most crucial things that happened. If you’re in your own department, you get to set tenure and promotion guidelines, decide what your hiring commitments are. There’s a level of stability that’s important, and recognition that this matters, that this is worth investment.
Charlotte Coté: Even with the challenges we’ve experienced, being a small department on campus, we’re a very powerful department in what we can offer—and that’s creating an important space on campus and making Indigenous intellectualism visual.
What is Native knowledge, and why is it important in higher ed?
Jean Dennison: Science, math, art, these things have long histories in Indigenous communities, but for a long time that knowledge has been dismissed or undermined. Most higher education institutions have been built in ways that don’t recognize those knowledges or celebrate them and often work to deny [them]. By Native knowledge, I’m talking about acknowledging that our communities have long histories of knowing advanced mathematics, environmental science, art forms like beading and carving—you can see math and sciences built into those practices from the beginning.
Charlotte Coté: When I was a student, I wasn’t aware that there was this Western paradigm that existed in academia. It wasn’t until I went to UC Berkeley and became part of a cohort for comparative ethnic studies that I even started having conversations with other students about this and saying, ‘Yeah, you’re right! These places are colonized.’ That’s what I try to tell my students: We’re indigenizing this space. We’re centering Indigenous knowledge.
Dian Million: What our knowledges represent is not just nature studies. It’s an ethos. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s a way of seeing the world. Those are things that I think we developed over many thousands of years that are still very active in almost every place I’ve ever been. I call that Indigenous ethos.
Luana Ross: As I taught classes in Native Studies over the decades, I developed a class on Native women which evolved into a class on Indigenous feminisms. At the core of my definition of feminism is nationhood and sovereignty. It was critical to look at the root causes and possible solutions to problems in our communities. Indigenous feminism, as I developed it, provided me and the students with a theoretical framework to analyze the social ills in our communities.
Roger Fernandes, an artist who lectures in American Indian Studies, shares traditional Native stories with students during the UW’s Welcome Week in 2019.
Daniel and Luana, how did you approach documentary filmmaking in the Native Voices program?
Luana Ross: We wanted to make sure that there were ethics regarding research, since prior to that time it seems like there were many people just going into Native communities and grabbing information, not even thinking about who really owned the information. Native communities have very strict rules around who owns songs, who owns stories.
Daniel Hart: One of the things we always stress is that our students’ work can contribute immediately to national and international discourse about Indigenous people and communities. Our students’ films are screened in thousands of libraries, educational institutions, tribal communities and places like the Smithsonian and Sundance, just to name a couple of examples. We’re proud and grateful to see that our graduates are continuing to contribute to national discourse both as media producers and as professors all over the world.
Daniel Hart (left) and Luana Ross (right) pose with the last two graduates of the Native Voices program, Christine Day (center, left) and Tara Fisher (center, right).
Why are non-Native students interested in Native studies?
Dian Million: People in the United States don’t have a working knowledge of who American Indians are, except as a demographic of some sort that are perhaps wounded, or a problem. We are fighting that constantly. I’m a social historian. I would say it outright, that there is a purposeful ignorance that this country holds for who we are.
Daniel Hart: One of the things non-native students find is they’re sitting on a lot of really uncomfortable unresolved feelings about their relationship with native communities, because we’re still in a colonial situation. Just in the immediate Salish Sea area, we have more than a dozen intact tribal nations who are working every day to strengthen themselves and protect their sovereignty. That’s a situation that non-native people, in their heart of hearts, want to get more comfortable with.
What makes American Indian Studies integral to the UW and the state of Washington?
Charlotte Coté: I want people to understand the importance of what we do, the research that we do, the work that we do in our classrooms, that it isn’t just for a select few—it resonates out into the larger world. We, as Indigenous peoples, being the first peoples of these lands, our histories weave into all the other histories. The way we connect to students in our classes, they feel empowered to tackle careers in public affairs, law, community work, tribal work, film, art, sciences. We provide such unique opportunities for our students in our classes, which have an amazing breadth of intellectual knowledge.
Dian Million: I don’t think there’s anything more interesting on earth than the complex relationship of Indigenous peoples and nations in our own homelands with this country, and how absolutely brilliant and innovative they have had to be to continue. I think people sense that excitement in our classes.
What makes the American Indian community at the UW special?
Charlotte Coté: People should know about the great work that we’re doing, not just within our department, but within the communities that we’re connected to, and the partnerships we’ve created over many years with the regional tribal communities to create this larger sense of community with people on campus and outside of campus.
Dian Million: We came together and cared for each other as a family, took care of issues as a family. Every time we hit big bumps, it ended in us regrouping and working out the problem together.
Jean Dennison: Compared to other research universities, there are very few that have robust programs [like the UW]. Most don’t have a major and minor, and when they do, they’re small. We not only have a strong department, but we have larger infrastructure supporting our work. The Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, for example, provides financial support for our research and funds additional Native knowledge experts to join our classes. It also builds a larger community for Native faculty, staff and students through its programming. The UW Canoe Family, for example, is a partnership between AIS and CAIIS, creating community around coastal canoe practices.
Daniel Hart: Folks here stress Indigenous approaches to research, education, relationships and especially the idea of reciprocity, that when you take something, you have to give it back.
What do you want to see in the next 55 years?
Jean Dennison: We desperately need space. We can’t even have a faculty meeting where we can all sit in the same space together, and we don’t have enough offices for new hires. It’s really an issue of Land Back [reclaiming control over ancestral lands]. The Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies does not have permanent space at all. There’s something disheartening to students and faculty that we don’t have space to do our work. Knowing this was all Native land, knowing Native folks have only been allowed to carve out tiny spaces or don’t have permanent space at all is really hard.
Dian Million: We’re working to build further but keep the excellence, tempered by the understanding that budget cuts have come down on us just like everybody else. We’ve fought for every bit of faculty we have right now.
Daniel Hart: We are now led by a group of people who want what they want, and they’re going to take what they can take. It’s always been the case that Indian communities suffer in real ways when the thinking gets like that. All the more reason for Native Studies. These are courses that build bridges.