Yá'át'ééh [Hello]

Teresa Montoya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Her manuscript project tentatively titled, Checkered Land, Yellow Water: Legacies of Extraction and Exposure across Navajo Lands, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, her research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of checkerboard land allotment, tribal jurisdiction, and environmental contamination among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico.

Her academic, political, and personal commitments are centered in Diné Bikéyah, the home that she carries with her and the home to which she always returns. She is Diné and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.

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