AlterNative

Associate Professor Child teaches courses in American Indian Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. In 1998, she gained critical acclaim for her work Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900 -1940. The book examined hundreds of letters by students, parents and school officials to map American Indian experiences of boarding school in the first half of the 20th century and earned her the North American Indian Prose Award. Child is a Board Member of the Minnesota Historical Society, the Eiteljorg Museum, the Division of Indian Work and is an officer in the American Society for Ethnohistory and member of the Board of Editors of Ethnohistory. In 2003, she was awarded the Presidents Outstanding Community Service Award at the University of Minnesota. Brenda has also served on the Editorial Boards of the Indigenous Education series, the American Indian Lives series, Ethnohistory, and the Native American Studies series.

Barbara Israel is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. Dr. Israel has published widely in the areas of community-based participatory research, community empowerment, evaluation, stress and health, and social support and social networks. Her research interests include: the social and physical environmental determinants of health and health inequities; the relationship among stress, social support, control and physical and mental health; community empowerment and health; and community-based participatory research (CBPR) and policy change. Dr. Israel has extensive experience conducting community-based participatory research in collaboration with partners in diverse communities. With initial funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1995, she has worked together with community and academic partners to establish and maintain the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center. The Center involves multiple funded CBPR research and intervention projects aimed at increasing knowledge and addressing factors associated with health disparities of residents in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Israel is actively involved in several of these CBPR projects examining and addressing, for example, the social and physical environmental determinants of cardiovascular disease, the environmental triggers of childhood asthma, diabetes prevention, and capacity building for policy change.

Distinguished Professor Graham Smith is currently the CEO of Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi in Whakatane. Previously, he was in Canada as the Universitas 21 Distinguished Professor in Education and based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has also worked extensively with other Indigenous/ First Nation's peoples across the world, including Hawaii, Alaska, other parts of the US mainland, Taiwan, Chile, Australia and the Pacific nations.

Professor Smith is a prominent Maori educationalist who has been at the forefront of the alternative Maori initiatives in the education field and beyond. His recent academic work has centred on developing theoretically informed transformative strategies related to intervening in Maori cultural, political, social, educational and economic crises. He is involved in the development of Tribal Universities and is the Chairperson of Te Whare Wananga O Awanuiarangi in Whakatane. He is the former Pro Vice Chancellor (Maori) at the University of Auckland and under his leadership the Maori University structure (Te Wananga o Waipapa) was established within the University of Auckland.

Gaski is the author and editor of several books and articles on Sami literature and culture. Gaski has been visiting scholar at several universities in the U.S., Australia, and in Greenland, and is very much used as speaker internationally on Sami issues. He was until recently a member of the joint coordinating committee of a research program in Nicaragua conducted as a collaborative project between the University of Tromsø and URACCAN university in Nicaragua 2000-2007. For six years he was a board member in the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States 1999-2005. He is currently the chair of the Sami non-fiction writers association.

Ismael Abu-Saad is a member of the indigenous Negev Bedouin Arab community. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Educational Policy and Administration. He is currently a professor in the Department of Education, and is the founder of the Center for Bedouin Studies and Development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel.

Professor Linda Smith is the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Maori) at Waikato University. She is currently Deputy Chair of the Council of Te Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a member of the Advisory Committee for Official Statistics New Zealand, and a member of the Māori Reference Group for the Tertiary Education Commission. She also currently holds a Chair in Education at The University of Auckland.

In 1998, she was awarded Te Tohu Pae Tawhiti, the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE) Inaugural Award for Research Excellence in Māori Education. She also received the NZARE 1998 Jean Herbison Lecture Award and a Churchill Fellowship in 1991. Linda’s book, "Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples", received international attention and is now used as a text across a range of disciplines and institutions. It has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Italian and Bhasa Indonesian.

Dr. Muiris Ó Laoire is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Technology Tralee, He is co-editor of Teagasc na Gaeilge (Ireland) and The Celtic Journal of Language Learning (U.S.) and guest lecturer at Acadamh na hOllscolaíochta Gaeilge, National University of Ireland, Galway. He is author of textbooks, academic books and several articles on sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. He is a former president of IRAAL, the Irish Association of Applied Linguistics, the Irish affiliate of AILA. He was awarded IRCHSS Government of Ireland Research Fellow in 2003-2004 to undertake research on language planning and pedagogy. In 2007 he was awarded Williams Evans Visiting Fellowship at the University of Otago New Zealand an honorary fellowship at Te Mata o te Tau, Academy for Māori Research and Scholarship, Massey University New Zealand. He is currently conducting research on indigenous language revitalization and language policy with tribals in Orissa India.

Nerida Blair, daughter of Harold Blair, was born in Victoria. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Graduate Diploma in Education and a Master of Arts (Honours) in Education.

Blair has held a number of positions lecturing in Aboriginal Studies, and counselling and tutoring in various educational institutions. From 1984 to 1989 she was Head of the Aboriginal Education Support Unit at the Catholic Education Centre in Sydney. In 1989 she moved to Canberra to become a Policy Officer for the Department of Employment, Education and Training. She then joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra for one year, and was actively involved in indigenous people’s issues nationally and internationally.

1990 saw Blair move to Sydney to become a Policy Adviser with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In 1998, she was appointed Associate Professor to the Umulliko Indigenous Higher Education Research Centre at the University of Newcastle.

Sandy Grande is an Associate Professor in the Education Department at Connecticut College and also works as a research consultant for the Ford Foundation. She is currently working on developing a Indigenous Think Tank, with a home location in New York City. Her research and teaching are profoundly inter- and cross-disciplinary, and interfaces critical, feminist, Indigenous and Marxist theories of education with the concerns of Indigenous education. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) has been met with critical acclaim. She has also published several articles including "Critical Theory and American Indian Identity and Intellectualism," The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and "American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indigena and Mestizaje," Harvard Educational Review.

Professor Marcos is an accomplished author, teacher and researcher on gender issues in ancient and contemporary MesoAmerica. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Centro de Derechos Humanos Don Sergio, an organization promoting indigenous rights. She is also founding member of the International Connections Committee of the American Academy of Religion and the Secretary for the International Affairs of the Permanent Board of Directors for the Asociacion Latinoamericana para el Estudio de las Religiones. Sylvia is also a member of the editorial boards for Religion and Cuadernos Feministas, an editorial advisor for Concilium: International Review of Theology and an international editor for Gender and Society. Previously, she taught postgraduate courses at Harvard University.

Therese graduated with PhD in Child Development and Pedagogy from the University of Bristol in 1985. She has worked as a consultant for UNESCO, UNICEF, PLAN INTERNATIONAL, The World Bank, DED (German Development Corporation) and the African Development Bank. Therese's research interests include the psychology of development (from nursery to higher education), educational process, teacher education and training, as well as the assessment of pedagogical outcomes. Prior to her appointment at the University of Buea, Therese served as Head of Department of Sciences Education at ENS Yaonde. She has also held visiting lectureships at the University of Frankfurt and Osnabrueck University in Germany. The author of three books and numerous journal articles, therese also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Psychology in Africa.

Professor Skutnabb-Kangas is an accomplished sociolinguist with a strong interest in the survival of indigenous languages. She is a founding member of TerraLingua: Partnerships for Linguistic and Biological Diversity, a member of the Advisory Council on the EU Turkey Civic Commission, and is involved in projects to facilitate multilingual education of tribal children in India and in Nepal. Skutnabb-Kangas is working with the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Expert papers on violations on the right to education, and on linguistic genocide. She has served on nearly thirty Boards or Advisory Committees in the course of her career. In addition to her role as Series Editor for Linguistic Diversity and Human Language Rights, she is a member of six other journal Editorial Boards - Language Problems and Language Planning; Critical Enquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal; Language Policy; Journal of Language, Identity, and Education; The International Journal of Multilingualism; and Porta Linguarum.