Míiyu Míiyu//Hello! My name is Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner. I am an Indigenous feminist philosopher, working and residing in the occupied ancestral territory of the Anacostan and Piscataway peoples. I am a first generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, and I am of both Luiseño and Cupeño descent. I am currently an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. I am also the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous research and evaluation.

In addition to and sometimes overlapping with my role as an Indigenous scholar-activist, I am also a consultant in American Indian/Indigenous research and evaluation methodologies, Indigenous curriculum design, and social-justice education. I received my PhD in philosophy with a graduate emphasis in American Indian and Indigenous Studies in 2019 from Michigan State University and my undergraduate degrees in philosophy, English, and linguistics from New Mexico State University in 2014.

At its broadest level, my scholarship emerges from the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous language systems, and the implications for these systems in resisting settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. I am interested in Indigenous language reclamation, in Indigenous research methodologies, and in Indigenous resistance movements, decolonization, and coalition-building. In addition to these foci, I also works on and have presented academic projects concerning Indigenous issues in health care policy, data sovereignty, Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous conceptions of kinship and identity, and Indigenous pedagogies.

As a consultant, I specialize in Indigenous feminist research and evaluation methods. I have participated in several projects working toward Indigenizing social work practices and Tribal Child Welfare programming. I also design curricula that center Indigenous epistemologies for social-justice oriented projects, classrooms, and advocacy spaces.