Christina Gish Hill

Contact

Dept:	World Languages And Cultures
Email:	cghill@iastate.edu
Office:	2232 Pearson 505 Morrill Rd. Ames IA 50011-2103
Phone:	515-294-0101
Links:	Website Vita

Bio

Christina Gish Hill is an associate professor in the World Languages and Cultures department at Iowa State University. She focuses on American Indian/Native cultures of the Northern Plains, using the methodologies of ethnography and ethnohistory to research the employment of cultural and political expressions of social cohesion by Native communities, particularly in response to the pressures of Euro-American encroachment on Native landscapes and the resulting removals. While much research on Indigenous sovereignty and political autonomy has focused on political constructions, Gish Hill’s research focuses on the social relationships that undergird them. This emphasis allows her to explore the impact of kinship on exercising political autonomy, on asserting this autonomy in negotiations with the United States, on negotiating colonial impositions, on cultural expressions of identity, and on sustaining a relationship with the landscape. Christina Gish Hill’s 2017 book, entitled Webs of Kinship, addresses these issues by tracing Northern Cheyenne experiences of removal and massacre, to understand how this group continued to sustain a cultural political identity and a relationship with their traditional homeland. Her current research expands her exploration of how these social relations impact current cultural expressions of Native relationships with their landscapes and food ways in the face of colonial forces working to disrupt these relationships. She has recently published articles on Indigenous foodways, seed sovereignty, food sovereignty as a protected treaty rights. She is also currently conducting research on the relationship between Cheyenne and Arapaho people and the Black Hills.

Check out Dr. Hill's recent interview with the New Books Network here.