Dr. Andrew Jolivétte is Professor of Sociology and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is working with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Collective to develop the first Department of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is under review as an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of Black Studies, Chicana and Chicano Studies, Feminist Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies at UCSB. Dr. Jolivétte is former Professor and Department Chair of Ethnic Studies as well as the inaugural founding Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) at the University of California, San Diego where he worked from 2019-2024 with Affiliations in Black Diaspora and African American Studies, Critical Gender Studies, Global Health, and Latin American Studies. His acclaimed scholarship, writings, and presentations examine Native American, Indigenous, Creole, Black, Latinx, Queer, Mixed-Race, and Comparative Critical Ethnic Studies. Dr. Jolivétte is a former Professor and Department Chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University (2001-2019) and a Senior Ford Foundation Fellow. Throughout the course of his nearly 3 decades in education, he has served as Dean of Students and Multicultural Programs at Presidio Hill School, as Interim Principal of XCEL Cross Cultural Charter High School in San Francisco, CA, among many roles in K-12 and higher education. He currently serves as Partner Investigator with the Australian Research Council's Centre for Indigenous Futures at The University of Queensland, as Board President of the American Indian Cultural Center of San Francisco, as Board President of the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture (Speak Out), as a film consultant and producer on the documentary, Rise about Louisiana coastal erosion on the Isle de Jean Charles among BCC tribal members, as Co-Chair and Founder of the University of California's Ethnic Studies Leadership Council and as an Advisory Board Member of the American Indian and Indigenous Culture and Research Journal at UCLA. Dr. Jolivétte also serves on the editorial review boards for Contexts of the American Sociological Association and the Ethnic Studies Pedagogies Journal. He is the author or editor of nine books including the Lammy Award-nominated Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community; Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity; Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, Cultural Representation in Native America, American Indian and Indigenous Education: A Survey Text for the 21st Century, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community, Gumbo Circuitry: Poetic Routes, Gastronomic Legacies and the forthcoming book, Thrivance Circuitry: Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity and Kinship. An enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Louisiana, he is his tribe's former tribal historian and is born of the Hiyekiti Ishak [Sunrise People] of the Tsikip/Heron Clan. Dr. Jolivétte is a former Indigenous Peoples Representative to the United Nations as well as the former Board President of the GLBT Historical Society and Museum, iPride for Multiracial Families, and a Board Member for the African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco and the DataCenter in Oakland California among many others. He is a Louisiana Creole of Ishak, Opelousa, Kaskaskia (Illiniwek/Illinois Confederation of Tribes), Chitimacha, West African (Nigerian, Senegambian, Ghanaian, Cameroonian), French, Spanish, Italian, Cajun, Mexican, Canadian, Isleño, Portuguese, and Irish descent.