About Kelly

I am a scholar and weaver whose work bridges archival research, creative practice, and community memory. As a descendant of families connected to Saint Boniface Indian Industrial School, my work traces the intertwined histories of land, kinship, and survivance in Southern California. My research and creative practice move between story, land, and archive—a method I call archival basketry. Through this practice, I weave together oral histories, family photographs, church records, and material culture to illuminate how Native families endured, adapted, and loved through the colonial institutions that sought to divide them. At the heart of my work is the belief that love is a form of refusal—that remembering our families’ stories, in all their complexity, is itself a healing act.

Academic Roles

UCLA Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Education Studies
Assistant Professor (on leave), American Indian Studies Program, California State University, Long Beach

Current Projects

Publications:

I Love You More: Weaving Healing, Love, and the Refusal to Forget (forthcoming): is a story of love, healing, and refusal carried across generations of Saint Boniface survivors and descendants. Guided by archival basketry—a method of weaving oral history, family and church archives, and embodied knowledge—the book illuminates the enduring presence of Saint Boniface in Southern California Indian life and the power of love to have the last word—the last tag.

Collective Initiatives:

Remembering, Restorying, Reclaiming (3R): an intergenerational research and remembrance project.
Weaving Excellence through Ancestral Values and Education (WEAVE): a student-centered initiative supporting Indigenous mentorship and community partnerships.

Creative Practice:

Neyooxo Weavers: a family-based weaving circle dedicated to sustaining California basketry traditions as pedagogy, resurgence, and method.

Guiding Values

My work is guided by four interwoven principles:

Story. Land. Love. Refusal.

Together, they form the foundation of my scholarship and the rhythm of my life’s work—each one a strand in the basket of remembering, each carrying the promise of continuance.

#WovenWithLove is the movement that unites these strands. It expresses how I approach research, writing, teaching, and weaving—as acts of care and connection across generations. To be woven with love is to remember with intention, to honor stories as living knowledge, and to create in ways that sustain rather than extract. Across scholarship, art, and community practice, #WovenWithLove embodies the understanding that love itself is a method—one that binds refusal to healing, memory to land, and story to continuance.

About Kelly

Academic Roles

Current Projects

Guiding Values

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