Heather Howard
(PhD, U. of Toronto, 2005)
Assistant Professor, Affiliated Faculty American Indian Studies
howardh@msu.edu

DR. HOWARD’s research interests in health issues were initiated in relation to her broader long-term research since 1995 with Native people in Toronto, which examines “community production” and power relations within the mobilization and delineation of indigeneity, culture, tradition and identity, and in national organizing around urban Native issues. Her earlier work highlights feminist anthropological perspectives and Native women’s work in the organization of urban Native community.

Dr. Howard’s current research examines transformations in knowledge, practice, and power relations in community-based approaches to type 2 diabetes in the Toronto Native community where such initiatives have been in place for three decades. Community-based programs are situated in relation to the complex history of Toronto Native social service delivery, to shifting structures of culture and power, and to the interface with biomedical research and care delivery, including more recent collaborative models which promote the value of Indigenous knowledge frameworks to scholarship and research which is meaningful to the community. Dr. Howard has also conducted research on legal and policy issues, land and resource rights and use, and community history for tribal governments and Native peoples in urban settings in both Canada and the United States. She has collaborated on international interdisciplinary projects investigating Indigenous women’s health and inequality, as well as the legal and ethical implications of genetic markets, property rights, and Indigenous peoples.

Dr. Howard first joined the Department of Anthropology as a predoctoral Visiting Scholar in the fall of 2002, and since completion of her graduate study continued to serve as an adjunct faculty member while working full-time as a professional ethnohistorian for Native American tribes located in California, and in the Great Lakes area on projects involving resource rights, tribal jurisdiction, federal acknowledgment and land claims. In 2009 she joins the full-time faculty in a continuing appointment. Dr. Howard also holds a research faculty appointment with the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto and is an Exemplary Diversity Scholar with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Howard is currently preparing publications of research she conducted on the impact of Canadian Native boarding school experience and contemporary Native community chronic illness. Based on her consulting work, Dr. Howard is also completing a monograph which explores transformations in Native American labor history and use and occupancy of the San Joaquin Valley area of Central California, as well as a journal article which analyzes the impact of federal wardship policy on Native people’s health in early twentieth century central California, focusing on the political economic linkages between health status and Native sovereignty, federal recognition, and land rights.

Selected Publications:

• “California Indian Women’s Work in the Field and the Family, 1850-1950,” Indigenous Women and Work: Transnational Perspectives, Carol Williams and Joan Sangster, editors, University of Illinois Press (forthcoming, expected 2010)
• Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women’s Activism in Urban Areas, edited volume with Susan Applegate Krouse, University of Nebraska Press (2009, available October).
• “Women’s Class Strategies as Activism in Native Community Building in Toronto, 1950-1975,” American Indian Quarterly, (Vol. 27, No.3-4, 2003), pp. 566-582.
• Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights, edited volume with Rae Bridgman and Sally Cole (Broadview Press / UTP Higher Education Press, 1999).