Daniel Heath Justice

Daniel Heath Justice is an at-large, enrolled Cherokee Nation citizen born and raised in Colorado and now living in Canada in the coastal swiya (territory) of the shíshálh First Nation. Cherokee Nation/ ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ is a treatied, rights-bearing, and federally recognized sovereign Native Nation in the U.S. with a global citizenry of 468,000 and jurisdiction over a 7000-square mile reservation in northeast Oklahoma. Daniel received his B.A. from the University of Northern Colorado and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before joining the faculty at the University of British Columbia, he spent ten years as a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where he was also an affiliate of the Aboriginal Studies Program. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of the Arts and Humanities) in 2018 and was appointed an Officer in the Order of Canada in 2020.

Daniel is professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English at UBC. He is the author of *Why Indigenous Literatures Matter* (2018), the expanded and revised twentieth-anniversary edition of *Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition* (2026), and numerous essays in the field of Indigenous literary and cultural studies, as well as editor of a number of anthologies and journals, including *Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege* (co-edited with White Earth Ojibwe historian Jean M. O'Brien). He is also the author of *Raccoon* and *Badger* in the celebrated Animal series from Reaktion Books (UK).

Visit Daniel Justice’s website: www.danielheathjustice.com.

Photo by Jacquelyn Sparks (Cherokee Nation), 2025.