Maia Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas
- Email:
- maiarodriguez@unm.edu
- Phone:
- 505 277-3917
- Office:
- Mesa Vista Hall Room 3092, Office Hours by Appointment
Profile:
Dr. Maia Rodriguez is an enrolled member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. Her research examines how aesthetic production (e.g., literature) and, more widely, Indigenous worldview (e.g., ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies) inform sovereignty and community- and nation- building.
Her current book project, Geronimo’s Ghosts: Specters of Sovereignty in the Post-Civil Rights Ethnic American Novel, considers Native/nonnative nonwhite (e.g., African American, Asian American, and Chicana/o) solidarities through the framework of Indigenous resistance, decolonization, and futurity, envisioning new grounds for political alignment beyond the tension between sovereignty/civil rights models.
Beyond literary analysis, she also engages in community-based research and scholarship. Her community-based research interests also concern what land reclamation and cultural resurgence means for formerly nonlandholding Indigenous communities, especially in Texas, the greater Southwest, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands, and how these unique cases nuance our understanding of such matters as the relationship between place, peoples, and sovereignty. In 2023-2024, she conducted research on the reclamation and restoration of Cementerio del Barrio de los Lipanes by her tribe. She has also started research for her second book project, In the Light and Shadow: (Re)building an Indigenous Nation, which will focus on Lipan Apache and other Indigenous communities’ land reclamation, cultural revitalization, and community- and nation- building.
