This semester, we invited some of our affiliated faculty who head other UCLA institutes to meet with law students for our new series, Affiliated Faculty Office Hours. Professor Shannon Speed was among the faculty who joined us. She is a leading scholar on Indigenous peoples, human rights, and migration, and we are excited to share her remarkable story and insights with you.

Professor Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of Indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, as well as published six books and edited volumes, including her most recent, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Settler Capitalist State. 

Among her various accomplishments, Dr. Speed is the Paula Gunn Allen Chair and Professor of American Indian Studies, Gender Studies and Anthropology and the Director of the American Indian Studies Center (AISC), whose core focus is on research about Indigenous peoples. AISC's work includes strengthening education, seeking funding to support research, and carrying out programs related to their mission. They maintain a reference library, organize symposia, support academic programs, and administer fellowships and research awards through the Institute of American Cultures. 

Recounting where she got her start, Prof. Speed shared that community college was where her education, horizons, and sense of possibility expanded for the first time. “The instructors in community college were teaching things they really cared about, and what a difference that made,” she chuckled.  

Prof. Shannon Speed

The curiosity sparked there eventually took her to San Francisco State University to pursue her BA degree, the University of Texas at Austin to pursue her Masters, and then to UC Davis and its activist-oriented Anthropology hemispheric Native Studies Programs for her PhD. Initial plans for her doctorate centered on her proposed study of mixed-blood identity in her tribe, the Chickasaw Nation. “I was interested in the way they were doing so much to be inclusive of tribal members who were not in the area, and their very non-exclusionary policy on enrollment.”  

She shared that at the time there was a tremendous political and cultural renaissance starting to take place with the tribe. “In my childhood, the Chickasaw were an impoverished tribe in rural Oklahoma existing on a very small budget from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Now remarkable things were starting to change; my tribe was turning a corner.”  

But then 1994 dawned and with it, the Zapatista uprising. Everything changed. Half the Zapatista army was women, as was a third of their leadership, and they had a strong platform for women’s rights. Their discourse was one of rights, which as Prof. Speed described it “was just a plainly different kind of conversation than a discourse about liberation.”  

“Even if you believe that rights are part of natural law and inherent to us all, it’s still the case that we are asking states to both give us rights and then protect us from abuses of those rights. This is a situation where you are inherently recognizing the authority of the state to say what can and cannot happen to you. And of course you remain dependent on the state to enforce those rights. In doing so, when you are an occupied or settler occupied people, you are reinforcing the power of the state that occupies you. That’s not liberation.”  

It was no coincidence that the Zapatistas took on a human rights discourse at that time, she stated. They were opposed to the neoliberal globalization taking place, which coincided with a rise of NGOs across the region and with them, increased discourse of human rights. Yet the Zapatistas’ human rights discourse held the potential to reify the very process they were opposing: promoting the need for state frameworks and enforcement of those rights. Fascinated with this, Prof. Speed set her Chickasaw project to one side and found herself working in Chiapas for what would be the next decade. “I was offered a job as the director of a global exchange office in San Cristobal, worked on my PhD from the field, got married, and had a baby.” She thought she would stay forever. 

One of the dangers of being in the field for so long though, she noted candidly, is that when situations are ongoing it’s very challenging to reach an end point because much of your work involves revising your dissertation in light of new developments — to say nothing of the competing, urgent needs that arise from being on the ground. In order to prioritize her dissertation, she and her young daughter decamped to San Diego. While there, she heard of the perfect opportunity. “It was as though they wrote the role with me actually in mind,” she shared, “I couldn’t believe it.” The role? An Assistant Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin.

“I was so pleased to find that Austin had changed a lot from my previous time there in the MA program. It certainly was a great place to be a Latin Americanist.” A few hours’ drive from her tribal headquarters, it also allowed her regular contact and more engagement with her tribe. She was the only Native American faculty member in the entire university at the time, but there were a number of people doing work with Indigenous peoples and she helped build a curriculum and Indigenous Studies initiative. Eventually, it became a full center at the school. She received tenure after six years on the faculty and remained at UT Austin for thirteen years.  

From there, she was recruited to become the Executive Director of UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center (AISC). The AISC was founded in 1969 by students advocating for ethnic studies programs that included Indigenous histories. “I sometimes teach Introduction to Native American Indian Studies and invariably the students are infuriated because, if this huge part of history was kept from them, they wonder what else they haven’t been told.”  

Not only was AISC among the first in the nation to emerge to counter these gaps in education, but they also have crafted lasting legacies on many fronts. The Center publishes the free, open-access American Indian Culture and Research Journal, one of the top journals in the field. The Center works closely with local tribal communities on initiatives such as the Sovereign Tribes Academy, endowed by the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, which will offer courses to tribal community members in areas such as tribal law and policy, economic development, and cultural resource management.   

On her role as Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs (alongside UCLA Law Professor Angela Riley), Prof. Speed commented how important it is that UCLA created the position and that the school recognizes the importance of engaging Native communities on- and off-campus.  

She shared “I recognize that we need to struggle for human rights in order to mitigate the damage being done by the way power is operating in the world, and at the same time I recognize that we shouldn’t allow liberal discourses like human rights to convince us that they are the vehicles to liberation. I do have a concern that rights struggles in general, akin to liberal discourses in general, can distract us from the actual goal by giving us small reformist tidbits which actually just reinforce the very power we want to oppose.”  

The Promise Institute for Human Rights (Los Angeles) acknowledges our presence on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples.