Shannon Speed

We are delighted to award the 2025 SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America to Professor Shannon Speed, Paula Gunn Allen Chair and Professor of American Indian Studies, Gender Studies, and Anthropology at UCLA, where she also serves as Director of the American Indian Studies Center and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. This award recognizes Professor Speed’s extraordinary scholarly and disciplinary contributions that have reshaped the critical study of Indigenous social movements, sovereignty, gender, violence, migration, and neoliberal capitalism within and beyond the field of anthropology.

For more than three decades, Dr. Speed has advanced engaged, decolonizing, and feminist anthropological scholarship. Speed’s early work as demonstrates innovative scholarship on the relationships between lived models of indigenous autonomy as expressed in territory, self-government, and justice systems and gender. Speed’s 2008 book, Rights in Rebellion, and subsequent articles and two co-edited books, are unique in illuminating the ways in which indigenous women in the Zapatista rebellion conceptualized gendered rights as part and parcel of indigenous rights.

Dr. Speed built on those early insights to advance synergies between scholars and practitioners working with American Indian communities and those working with Indigenous communities of Latin American origin. Professor Speed’s award-winning 2019 book, Incarcerated Stories, brings together the theoretical fields of gender violence, settler colonialism, and neoliberal economic regimes through a hemispheric lens that defies the separation of North and South America. She challenges the idea that settler colonialism is not applicable to Latin America and that colonialism in the continent is finished. Instead, she argues that ongoing processes of dispossession of indigenous labor, land, and resources indicate a state of ongoing occupation and elimination in Latin America as elsewhere in the hemisphere. In addition to her ground-breaking scholarship, which includes a current book project focused on a history of Chickasaw sovereignty, Dr. Speed is an important public scholar who has written for U.S. News and World Report, La Jornada, The Hill, In These Times, POLITICO Magazine, Al-Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.

Dr. Speed’s leadership has also shaped the institutional and intellectual landscape of our field: as founding architect of the University of Texas at Austin’s Native American and Indigenous Studies program, and as a driving force behind numerous community-engaged initiatives in Los Angeles and within the Chickasaw nation. From 2021 to 2024, she served on the AAA’s Task Force on Indigenous Peoples and its Committee on Human Rights. She has also been active in the leadership of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), for which she served as President from 2018 to 2021, and in the Latin American Studies Association, where she cofounded the Otros Saberes Section in 2015. Dr. Speed previously served as Chair of Chickasaw Citizen Connection, Los Angeles, and on the Strategic Planning Advisory Body for the Anti-Racism, Diversity, and Inclusion (ARDI) Initiative in the LA County Chief Executive Office, and she currently serves on the board of Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) and on the leadership circle of the Indigenous Education Now Coalition in Los Angeles.

Even as Dr. Speed works to advance these critical institutional and disciplinary initiatives, she models values of equity and justice through her commitment to community-well-being and mentorship and support of students and junior scholars. Lynn Stephen, a collaborator with Dr. Speed, writes that Speed, “remains deeply engaged with her own Chickasaw Nation and its language programs. Shannon spends an hour a day, sometimes more, as a teacher of Chickasaw. She is also deeply connected with diverse Indigenous communities in Los Angeles through advisory roles with multiple organizations. In all her work, she is dedicated to collaborative, intergenerational, intersectional scholarship rooted in social justice.”

Angela Stuesse and Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera, who coauthored Speed’s nomination letter, write that Speed “has mentored at least thirty women, Indigenous, and POC graduate students, including SANA members like us.” Committee member Ana Yesenia Ramirez concurred. “Speed’s work has deeply influenced my own,” she writes, “I recently submitted my dissertation, which was inspired in part by her scholarship. She continues to be a powerful role model, especially for Indigenous researchers and scholars. Her commitment to mentorship, advocacy, and rigorous scholarship makes her an exemplary candidate for this recognition.” We agree. Dr. Speed, through your writing, mentorship, and public engagement, you have modeled what a decolonial, feminist future for our discipline can look like. With deep appreciation for your leadership, scholarship, and commitment to anthropological praxis, we honor you as the 2025 recipient of the SANA Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America.

Warmest congratulations,

Ruth Gomberg
On behalf of the Society for the Anthropology of North America