Restorying the Experiences of Indigenous College Students,  a talk by Shannon Gonzalez-Miller, is availabe on YouTube (captions available), AnchorFM, Origins, and SoundCloud.

Dr. Shannon Gonzales-Miller is a recent graduate and retiree of The Ohio State University.  You may know her from her professional affiliation with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion where she spent over 30 years working with students to support their academic goals and echo the brilliance and resilience she heard in the stories they shared.   

She earned all her degrees from Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Teaching and Learning.  Her research interest centers on distinguishing the experiences of Urban Indian/Native college-going students (the generations born in the city) from the enduring educational discourse that favors tribal-centric experiences of students.  Her research project sought to examine what can be learned about culturally centered pedagogies from Urban Indian, college-going students when their Indigenous identities are overlooked or contested in academic learning spaces.    

Shannon’s Native story is rooted in her experience as a direct descendant of a parent who lived in an off-reservation, state funded, orphanage for his K-12 years of schooling.  She considers her pursuit of a PhD a form of “historical trauma response” based on her understanding of the significance of remembering, reclaiming and re-storying her Indigenous ways of knowing, being and becoming.   

She is Southern Ute and holds dear the Native proverb: listen with 3 ears, 2 on the sides of my head and one in my heart to bring the heart and mind together.