Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Research Expertise
Archival Research
Environmental Humanities
Environmental Justice
Feminist Epistemology
Feminist Science Studies
Indigenous Studies
Philosophy
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño & Cupeño) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher, methods scholar, and systems scientist whose work examines how knowledge is created, transmitted, classified, institutionalized, and cared for. Grounded in Indigenous feminist epistemology, her scholarship brings Indigenous studies and philosophy into conversation with feminist science and technology studies (STS), Black feminisms, queer and trans studies, disability studies, environmental studies, archival studies, and critical quantitative methods.
Meissner studies Indigenous and feminist research and evaluation methods, mortuary science and deathcare systems, cemeteries and burial landscapes, archives and cultural heritage infrastructures, environmental knowledge, language and cultural reclamation, and Indigenous data and knowledge sovereignty. Across these areas, she asks how institutions determine what counts as knowledge and evidence—and how Indigenous feminist methods can create different systems of classification, measurement, care, and accountability.
Death, dying, ancestor care, burial, grief, and ceremony are major areas of Meissner’s research. She approaches deathcare as both a material system and a knowledge system encompassing cemeteries, mortuary practices, medicine and anatomical institutions, archives, law and policy, environmental relations, and the infrastructures through which ancestors and information about the dead circulate. Her work addresses death injustice, unclaimed and unidentified decedents, cemetery and burial research, archival and forensic classification, and quantitative approaches to mortality and institutional inequality.
This work is equally concerned with reclaiming ancestral life-stage teachings and ceremonies, particularly those surrounding death, dying, burial, mourning, and ancestor relations. Meissner is interested in how communities recover interrupted practices while also co-creating new ceremonies responsive to contemporary Indigenous life. Ceremony, making, visiting, storytelling, food, humor, and collective remembrance become methods for transmitting knowledge and sustaining relationships among living communities, ancestors, lands, and future generations.
Her work on queer descendant communities and queer ancestor care asks how Indigenous and queer theories of kinship can expand dominant understandings of descent, inheritance, lineage, and responsibility to the dead. Descendant communities can be constituted through biological relations, but also through place, chosen kinship, collective memory, cultural and intellectual lineage, shared histories, and commitments of care. This raises practical questions for archives, cemeteries, museums, medical institutions, and other systems that must decide who has authority to speak for, care for, or make decisions concerning the dead.
Black feminist thought, disability studies, and environmental studies are important methodological and theoretical interlocutors throughout this work, particularly for thinking about care, embodiment, racial classification, dispossession, environmental injustice, dependency, kinship, and institutional power. Meissner also works with migrant, immigrant, refugee, and diasporic communities and engages global conceptions of Indigeneity, attending to how relationships among land, displacement, colonialism, peoplehood, and belonging differ across political and geographic contexts.
Methodologically, Meissner combines Indigenous epistemology with feminist qualitative, archival, evaluative, spatial, material, and quantitative methods. She is particularly interested in classification, missingness, uncertainty, relationality, and measurement: what becomes visible through data and institutional records, what disappears, and how methods themselves distribute authority. Alongside her academic work, she consults as a systems scientist, designing Indigenous and feminist evaluation systems and studying how complex institutions, programs, communities, and knowledge infrastructures produce change.
Meissner is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and is of Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kúupangaxwichem) descent. She is an Associate Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab.
Publications
Roots of Access: Un-Lock(e)ing Coalitions for Indigenous Futures and Disability Justice
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner publishes article co-written with Joel Michael Reynolds
Author/Lead: Shelbi Nahwil…Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Joel Michael Reynolds, Georgetown University
State violence against disabled people and Indigenous people as well as disabled Indigenous people has long been endemic in the US. Recent scholarship in philosophy of disability and disability studies rarely addresses the underlying issue that causes such state violence: settler-colonial conceptions of land. The aim of this article is to begin filling this gap in the literature. We detail settler colonial epistemologies and argue that the property relation underwrites operative concepts of accessibility dominant across disability theory. We show how such concepts of accessibility are Lockean and thereby defined terms of the project of settler colonialism. We instead offer an Indigenized account of access, which we term deep access, that does not rely on the notion of Lockean property and that provides a coalitional path for Indigenous futures and disability justice. On our account, decolonization is and must be a deep access measure.
Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse
Dr. Meissner publishes new article in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly
Author/Lead: Shelbi Nahwil…Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Andrew Frederick Smith, Drexel University
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.
This article was published in Vol. 10 No. 1/2 (2024): Revolutionizing Responsibility.
Indigenous Feminist Evaluation Methods: A Case Study in "My Two Aunties"
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner publishes new article in The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation
Author/Lead: Shelbi Nahwil…Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Jeremy Braithwaite, Karan Thorne, Art Martinez, Elizabeth Lycett
This paper offers some key characteristics of Indigenous feminist approaches to evaluation and spotlights a unique and promising example of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods in the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Though Indigenous feminist evaluation methods are diverse, complex, and community-specific, some general characteristics we point to in this analysis are commitments to anti-colonial conceptions of family, gender, and belonging, an assertion of the epistemic and evaluative importance of felt knowledge, the explicit confrontation of settler colonialism’s impact on Indigenous life, and the commitment to the transformative potential of community-led caretaking. We then turn to what we see as an exemplar of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods—the evaluation component of the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Our paper will provide theoretical scaffolding for Indigenous feminist evaluation and add to the growing body of Indigenous scholarship that challenges what “counts” as evidence in settler scholarship arenas.
Talk
Indigenous Insights: S03E04: Indigenous Feminist Evaluation: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner appears on podcast with Gladys Rowe
Author/Lead: Shelbi Nahwil…In this episode host Gladys Rowe engages in a powerful conversation with Indigenous feminist philosopher and educator Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner. Shelbi shares her journey into evaluation through her work on Indigenous language reclamation and her deep engagement within Indigenous research methods. She discusses the significance of relationship-building, the centrality of kinship and gender diversity, and the creation of the Indigenous Feminist Evaluation Framework. Shelbi also highlights her role as the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab and her inspiring work on community-driven projects. Together, Gladys and Shelbi reflect on how Indigenous knowledge systems, felt knowledge, and artistic practices like basket weaving can transform research and evaluation processes. This episode is a rich exploration of Indigenous feminist approaches to evaluation and the importance of centering community voices and diverse knowledges.
