Kiara M. Vigil (Dakota/Apache heritage) is currently an associate professor of American Studies at Amherst College. She is currently faculty co-convener of the advisory circle for “Gathering at the Crossroads: Building Native American and Indigenous Studies at the Five College Consortium,” a 2.5 million dollar grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
She is also serving in her first year as an elected member of Council for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) for a three-year term. In 2020, Kiara was named the Jan Cohn Fellow and Lecturer in American Studies by Trinity College. Kiara’s PhD is in American Culture from the University of Michigan, and she holds master’s degrees from Columbia University’s Teachers’ College and Dartmouth College, as well as a B.A. in History from Tufts University. Her research and teaching interests are grounded in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She is the author of Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1890-1930, published by Cambridge University Press (2015). Her articles and essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and books, one of which, “Who was Henry Standing Bear? Remembering Lakota Activism from the Early Twentieth Century,” won the Frederick C. Luebke Award for Outstanding Regional Scholarship from the Great Plains Quarterly. Her new book, Natives in Transit: Indian Entertainment, Urban Life, and Activism is a cultural history of Native performance and activist networks from the mid-twentieth century. In addition to her book, Kiara is currently collaborating on a project about the new PBS show “Molly of Denali,” in a study about how Native Americans have been represented in children’s television programs. Most recently, Kiara received a Mellon Foundation “New Directions” Grant to support her foray into learning Dakota and working alongside Dakota language teachers to offer translations of rare Dakota-only texts from the 19th century from Amherst College’s Native American Literature (KWE) Collection, which will be made publicly accessible for scholars, language learners, and anyone interested in learning more about the history of Dakota language, people, and events.
