Image courtesy of Stanford Law School
on April 29, 2021
Elizabeth Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower in the Tewa language), was born on the Nambé Pueblo reservation, one of the oldest continually inhabited Indigenous communities in the U.S. that sits just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico and where she is tribally enrolled. She grew up immersed in Nambé’s culture, participating in traditions that date back thousands of years to that exact location.
But when her parents decided to pursue Ph.D. degrees, her family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois — where they found themselves the only Native American family in a town where the mascot of the local university, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a racist caricature of a Native American person. Though Reese remained close to her community, spending summers and holidays at the Pueblo, she experienced racially-charged bullying in her new town. Always, she was the only Native person in her classes. She never had a Native teacher.