Heres che (that is ‘hello’ in Muscogee)!
I am a Native American philosopher and a President’s Indigenous Peoples Scholar at the University of Windsor. I received my PhD (2015) and MA (2009) from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Washington, and I earned my BA in Philosophy from Oklahoma State University.
My research focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly the social dimension of 
knowledge creation. In my dissertation, Analogical Reasoning and Scientific Practice: The Problem of Ingrained Analogy, I analyze a potential problem that arises when scientific communities indiscriminately rely on analogies that underwrite metaphor as part of their practice. To address this problem, I argue for strategies that exploit epistemic diversity as part of a constructive account of analogical reasoning.
A member of the wind clan of the Muskogee Nation of Oklahoma, I also research topics relevant to Indian Country and have presented papers on such subjects as identity, allyship, and mixed-race contributions to knowledge production.
Currently at UWindsor, I am teaching a variety of courses, such as Philosophy and Language and Indigenous Thought of the Americas. I have also received an internal grant to develop an Indigenous Philosophy workshop for high school students in the local district. I am very excited to be starting my second year, as you can see in this interview with Good Morning Windsor host, Tony Doucette. (link)
Previously, I was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD) Postdoctoral Fellow at DePauw University. While at DePauw, I had the opportunity to teach courses like Feminism and Science, Native American Philosophy, and Ethical Issues in Indian Country. During my CFD Fellowship, I was awarded a Diversity and Inclusion Grant from the American Philosophical Association to develop the Inclusive Summer High School Institute for Philosophy (ISHIP) at The Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. As part of ISHIP, eighteen high school students from across the United States spent a week on the DePauw campus with faculty mentors, learning about philosophy. I am honored and excited to have created a program that introduces the benefits of philosophy to high school juniors from social groups that are underrepresented in the discipline. As an added bonus–I was interviewed by a reporter for my tribal newspaper (link).
If you have any questions, you can contact me using the following form:
