Rate My Professor Cynthia Benally

Benally earned a Doctor of Education. Her academic interests include critical Indigenous research methodologies, Indigenous epistemologies, and anti-colonial studies. She investigates how settler educational policies and curricula affect relationalities between settler society and Native peoples, communities, and Nations. Her work explores how Native communities use educational policies mandating Native curriculum and instruction to foster sovereignty, self-determination, and positive impacts for Native and non-Native students alike. As director of the Working with Native Communities certificate program and a faculty affiliate in the Environmental Humanities Program, she promotes relationality, reciprocity, respect, responsibility, relevance, and reflexivity in research and collaborations with Native Nations. Key publications include her co-edited volume Relational Scholarship with Indigenous Communities: Confronting Settler Colonial Social Studies (2024, with Christine Rogers Stanton and Brad Hall), guest editorship of the 2019 Journal of American Indian Education special issue "Indigenizing the Curriculum: Putting the “Native” into Native American Content Instruction Mandates," and the article “We All Live in One World”: Challenging Settler Mythologies With Sovereign Assertions” (2025, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, with Donna Deyhle and Beth King). She has received recognition including the Native Excellence in Education Award and departmental faculty awards.