Harvard University Native American Program

Research

Research Programs

Peabody Museum

The Peabody Museum, in conjunction with HUNAP, offers several joint research and course opportunities for faculty and students. In November 2007, Anthropology 1130: "The Archaeology of Harvard Yard," was lead by Peabody Museum Director and Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology William L. Fash, in conjunction with the Anthropology Department and (HUNAP) in a search for Harvard Indian College roots. A follow-up exhibit of the archaeology of Harvard Yard will open on November 10th, 2008 at the Peabody.

The Peabody Museum also offers summer internships that enable students to gain experience in museum activities such as curatorial research, collections management, conservation, archives, public programming, and/or publications, with a preference for North American projects. Interns will be matched with available projects based on their interests as expressed in the application. Interns work under the supervision of a mentor from the museum staff. The internships run for eight weeks (20 hours/week) beginning on June 9 (one full-time internship of 35 hours per week may be arranged). A stipend is provided. Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it the museum for an application.

Nation Building II

Nation Building II is a field research course through the Harvard Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Education. Nation Building II projects are designed and requested by a Native community or organization which then focuses on some of the major issues Native American tribes and nations face. These projects are based on the "sovereign" choice of a community to partner with a university to study native issues, including sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. The projects are completed by graduate and undergraduate students under the guidance of faculty members with relevant expertise.

Native Health Program

HUNAP’s Native Health Program, entitled "Saving Lives on the Frontline: Partnership with Native Communities, is run by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Dr. Dennis Norman, and Dr. James Zuckerman of Harvard Medical School. This program partners with Native communities to save lives through local capacity development. Focus areas in the program include training in emergency medical skills, suicide prevention, substance abuse intervention, and domestic violence mitigation. These partnerships are fostered through video technology, which facilitates collaboration between Harvard faculty in multiple locations with distant Native communities. Current partners include Hopi Health Center, the Indian Health Service, and the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Fort Peck.

Four Directions Summer Research Program

The Four Directions Summer Research Program (FDSRP) began as an idea among Native American students attending Harvard Medical School (HMS). With the help of a few devoted medical school faculty, the program was launched in 1994 with the successful enrollment of six students for the first summer. We are now in our 15th year and have brought nearly 150 students to HMS during this time. Students who complete this program gain new skills, experiences, and knowledge that can be used to help themselves, their communities, and future generations of Native peoples from all of the Four Directions.

The Harvard Indigenous Law Clinical Program

The Harvard Indigenous Law Clinical Program (HILC) is committed to advancing the rights of American Indian tribes, Indian people, and the needs of Indian Country at large. The program provides students the opportunity to become involved in the most pressing issues in tribal law and federal Indian law through both clinical placements and classroom studies. Harvard joins a growing list of law schools offering extensive academic and practice-based opportunities in the field of Indian law, which has increased in complexity and relevance as Indian nations have taken on a more public role—sometimes wielding significant political and financial influence. This is particularly true today on the East Coast, where tribes are making headlines in their efforts to reclaim traditional land within which they seek to exercise tribal governmental powers.

Faculty Research

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Environmental Biologist, Environmental Affairs Office, Harvard University
Collaboration between the Diné Environmental Institute of Diné College, Navajo Nation, HUNAP and the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

Navajo Ants Project. The goal of this project is to conduct the first comprehensive scientific field study of the distribution and abundance of ants on Navajo Nation land. The collaborators have combined expertise in teaching, ant identification, field work, insect photography and web design. They will assist Navajo students and staff to conduct and publish research on the biodiversity on their lands and in their efforts to protect and to cherish those resources for future generations.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Professor Fultineer has collaborated with the Oceti Sakowin Oyateto design a high school facility whose development and building methods are environmentally sensitive and sustainable while utilizing the lowest levels of technology as possible. The spatial designs also sought to align themselves with Oceti Sakowin traditions. Implicit in the design process is the relationship of the school to the natural conditions of the Black Hills. The site is being designed in a manner that would allow it to respond to the sacredness of the surrounding Black Hills and facilitate the expression of the spiritual relationship between the Oceti Sakowin and their revered homeland.

Visiting Scholar Program

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Oneida Visiting Professor of Law
After graduating from Yale Law School, Bethany Berger served as the director of the Native American youth law project of DNA-People's Legal Services on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. She conducted litigation challenging discrimination against Indian children, drafted and secured the passage of tribal laws affecting children, and helped to create a Navajo alternative to detention program. Berger is a judge with the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals and past chair of the Indian Nations and Indigenous People's Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She is an executive editor and coauthor of Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Visiting Lecturer on Women's Studies and Native American Religions
Nimachia Hernandez is an independent scholar and currently a research associate with Harvard Divinity School. Her research interests include Native American philosophy and religion, gender, cosmology, epistemologies, and research methods in Native American studies. She is a specialist in Native American cosmologies with a focus on the Blackfoot and the Blackfoot homeland that spans northwestern Montana and southern Alberta, Canada. She holds a doctorate in education in the fields of human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harvard Faculty

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Assistant Professor in History and Literature
Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) received her PhD from Cornell University in English literature, with a minor in American Indian Studies. Her research interests include early American Indian writing, contemporary American Indian literature, oral traditions, American Indian history, indigenous intellectual traditions, ecology/environmentalism and Native communities, Native northeastern culture and diplomacy, gender in American Indian studies, language and indigenous epistemology.

The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast [October, 2008] "The Common Pot," a metaphor that appears in Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embodies land, community, and the shared space of sustenance among relations. Far from being corrupted by forms of writing introduced by European colonizers, Brooks contends, Native people frequently rejected the roles intended for them by their missionary teachers and used the skills they acquired to compose petitions, political tracts, and speeches; to record community councils and histories; and most important, to imagine collectively the routes through which the Common Pot could survive.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Assistant Professor of History
Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) received her PhD in history from UNC-Chapel Hill. She has published articles about American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, and religious music. Lowery has produced three documentary films about Native American issues, including the award-winning In the Light of Reverence, which showed on PBS in 2001 to over three million people. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University and a master’s degree in documentary film production from Stanford.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, Bussey Professor of Law
Joseph William Singer received a BA from Williams College in 1976, an AM in political science from Harvard in 1978, and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1981. He has been teaching at Harvard since 1992. His research interests include property law, conflict of laws, and federal Indian law, and he has published more than 40 law review articles. He was one of the executive editors of the 2005 edition of Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law and a sponsor of the Harvard Indigenous Law Clinical Program.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it, MD, MS is the founding director for the Institute for International Emergency Medicine and Health (IEMH) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. In his capacity as Director, Dr. Davis focuses on international medical training, curriculum development, mass casualty preparations, research, and medical capacities improvement in diverse environments. Dr. Davis is also the PI on a new tele-education telemedicine initiative funded by the Department of Agriculture that promotes partnership between IEMH and Native Americans. Dr. Davis received his MD and MS from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990.