Melissa Nelson

2019 Panta Rhea Refuge for Activists Fellow

Alum 2019 | Fellow 2019

Melissa Nelson (Anishinaabe [Turtle Mountain Chippewa]), Ph.D., is an Indigenous ecologist and award-winning scholar-activist and media-maker. She is a professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University, Professor Emerita of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, and chair of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), a Native-led indigenous rights organization she led as the founding executive director for twenty-eight years. She works in higher education, and the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors to elevate indigenous rights and Native ways of knowing, protect Indigenous food systems, restore land stewardship and biocultural diversity, and renew planetary health.

Melissa’s research examines the epistemological roots of the global polycrisis and Indigenous strategies for regeneration, including land rematriation and other forms of Indigenous-led conservation and resurgence. Her edited publications include Original Instructions – Indigenous Teachings for A Sustainable Future, Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability, and What Kind of Ancestor do you want to be? Melissa is a nonfiction essayist and photographer, and her writing and photographs have been published by Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, MIT, and Duke University presses as well as in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Ambio, Orion, Sierra Magazine, Cultural Survival Quarterly, and Earth Island Journal. Melissa is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and was born and raised in Northern California. You can learn more about Melissa here.