The American Indian Experience Advisory Board

Advisory Editor

Dr. Loriene Roy is Professor in the School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin. She is Anishinabe, enrolled on the White Earth Reservation, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She served as the 2007-2008 President of the American Library Association. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two University of Texas Excellence in Teaching and two Excellence in Advising awards, as well as the Equality Award from the American Library Association. She is a consultant and advisor with WGBH-Boston for We Shall Remain, an American Experience series on American Indian History that will air on PBS in April 2009. Her research and writing centers on indigenous library and cultural heritage development. She is the founder and director of “If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything,” a national reading club for Native children.

Advisory Board

Gladys Smiley Bell is the Peabody Librarian at Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia. The Peabody collection is a distinctive archive of African American resources and documents on American Indian education. She co-chaired the first ever Joint Conference of Librarians of Color and is a life member and past president of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Donald L. Fixico is Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and a native scholar (Shawnee, Sac & Fox, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole). He has worked on more than a dozen documentaries about American Indians and has published ten books, including American Indians in a Modern World (2008) and Treaties with American Indians: An Encyclopedia of Rights, Conflicts and Sovereignty (2007), a three-volume encyclopedia.

Irma Flores-Manges is a Managing Librarian at the Hampton Branch at Oak Hill for the Austin Public Library, where she also served as the Youth Services Manager. She received her MLS from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a member of Texas Library Association, American Library Association, REFORMA, AILA, and a Board Member of the Writer’s League of Texas. She is on the Regional Committee for the Tomas Rivera Award.

Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma, is an Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her scholarly activities focus on American Indian women’s issues and roles, historical and contemporary; American Indian education, with a special focus on higher education; and American Indian women and the justice system. She teaches courses on American Indian education, American Indian higher education, American Indian women, and Indian gaming.

Bruce E. Johansen is Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication and Native American Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has been teaching and writing in the School of Communication at UNO since 1982. He had authored thirty books as of 2008. These include Forgotten Founders (1982) and Exemplar of Liberty (with Donald A. Grinde, Jr.), published in 1991. He was lead editor of the Encyclopedia of American Indian History, a four-volume set (2007), as well as the two-volume Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America (2007).

Sarah R. Kostelecky is Director of Library Programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She previously worked in the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System, focusing on Youth Services. She received her master’s degree in Information Resources and Library Science from the University of Arizona. She is from Zuni Pueblo and her areas of interest include working with tribal libraries and museums.

Sandy Littletree, Navajo and Shoshone, is a Librarian at North Carolina State University. She holds an MA in Curriculum and Instruction from New Mexico State University and an MSIS from the University of Texas. She has helped develop advocacy resources for tribal libraries and oversaw the revision of the TRAILS Tribal Library Procedures Manual. Before becoming a librarian, she worked as an adult and high school educator in New Mexico.

Barbara Alice Mann, an Ohio Bear Clan Seneca and Northern Director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio, is also a Ph.D. scholar, known worldwide in Native American Studies and Women’s Studies, and nationally in James Fenimore Cooper Studies. As faculty at the University of Toledo, she has authored eight books and scores of articles. She honors the spirits of place and the ancestors by living in Ohio, homeland of her ancestors for the last 1,500 years, proud to be a thorn in the side of academic and social racism.

Wendy Weston was raised in the Four Corners area of the Navajo Nation. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and has devoted her career to advocating for Native artists and having the Native voice represented in public programs. Currently, she is the Director of American Indian Relations for the Heard Museum in Phoenix.