About Daniel
My Story So Far
“Writing in all its forms is a scary act; it makes us vulnerable and exposes our softest parts to a world not known for its gentleness. But there’s magnificent power in that vulnerability, and it’s deserving of acknowledgment.”
- Daniel Heath Justice
BIOGRAPHY
Personal and Academic Background
I’m a queer Cherokee Nation citizen raised outside of Cherokee community, the third generation of my mom’s family to grow up in and around the Rocky Mountain mining town of Victor, Colorado, on the southern slope of Evening Star Mountain in stolen Southern Ute territory.
We don’t know much about Mom's people other than that they were a working-class mix of English, Jewish, and western European white settlers whose lives were shaped by the economic precarity and social transience associated with the mining industry (mostly gold but also coal and uranium). My dad’s well-documented Cherokee Nation descent carries our family's persistent generational commitment to Cherokee sovereignty, citizenship, and kinship despite repeated cycles of dispossession and displacement. (See the Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation below for further details.) But both sides of my family have been shaped by the intergenerational impacts of story and silence alike, and my work explores those meaningful inheritances, their ruptures, and their repair.
My work in the academy prioritizes the dignity, access, and perspectives of Indigenous, working-class, first-generation, and queer learners. While some of my mom’s siblings went to college, Mom only finished high school and Dad’s schooling ended at 8th grade. Both firmly supported my dream of university education. I graduated from a high school class of 23 and went on to earn an English undergrad at the University of Northern Colorado, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in Native American literature at the University of Nebraska.
In 2002 I moved to Canada for my first academic job at the University of Toronto, and after a decade there joined the University of British Columbia, where I currently work as a professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of English Language and Literatures.
These layered context of Tribal affiliation and mixed heritage, working-class upbringing, and queerness ground who I am and what I do, as much in my broader life as in my work as a scholar and creative writer. My scholarship and my fiction firmly centre Indigenous nationhood and citizenship, Indigiqueer and otherwise imaginaries, and other-than-human kinship in history, literature, art, and politics.
I have abiding ties to the arid slopes of the eastern Colorado Rockies and the green hill country of the Cherokee Nation in northeast Oklahoma, but over the years I’ve also been fortunate to find belonging in other places, including Nebraska, Massachusetts, and Ontario. My husband and I now live in British Columbia in service to a frenzy of feral forest Frenchies in the unceded swiya of the shíshálh Nation on BC’s Sunshine Coast.
BIOGRAPHY
Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation
I’m an enrolled, at-large Cherokee Nation citizen born and raised in Colorado and now living on coastal shíshálh territory in Canada. Cherokee Nation-ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ is a federally recognized Indigenous Nation with a global population of 470,000 citizens and jurisdiction over a 7000 square mile reservation in northeast Oklahoma in the US. Through our 1999 Constitution (Article IV, Section 1), Cherokee Nation determines formal affiliation as citizenship through confirmed lineal descent from one or more original enrollees on our base 1907 Final Cherokee Dawes Roll. Cherokee Nation arguably has the best and most reliable genealogical archive of any Indigenous people in the world to substantiate persistent and ongoing relations and affiliation.
Like my dad, I was raised outside the geographic boundaries and cultural crucible of the Nation. Dad's maternal family moved from northeast Oklahoma to Colorado around 1920, a generation after the allotment process came to Indian Territory, where the U.S. government forcibly privatized collective Tribal lands and dissolved most Cherokee Nation institutions through the imposition of Oklahoma statehood. My mom, Deanna Kathline (Fay) Justice, was of a English, Jewish, and mixed European settler heritage that we still know little about, as it was far less well documented than my dad’s side.
Through my late citizen father, Jimmie J Justice, I’m a direct lineal descendant of Ross-aligned survivors of the Trail of Tears (Foreman and Spears families) as well as Chickamauga-descended Cherokee Old Settlers (Riley) who emigrated to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma and Arkansas) before Removal, with extended Traitor Party relations and intermarried white Shields, Crockett, and Bandy kin.
Before Removal and the Old Settler exodus, my Cherokee ancestors lived in the Amohee, Aquohee, Chickamauga, and Chatooga districts of the old Cherokee Nation homeland in today’s Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama; after forced relocation to Indian Territory, most Spears and Foreman kin rebuilt in Tahlequah and Cooweescoowee districts of the restored Nation, with the Old Settler Rileys first established in Skin Bayou district. My great-granddad Amos Spears, his mom, his siblings, and his oldest son had their allotments in Cooweescoowee district (today's CN districts 12 and 14 in Washington and Rogers counties in northeast Oklahoma).
Many of our ancestors and extended relatives were active in Cherokee politics, and that included service on the National Committee and National Council and participation in a diverse range of Cherokee Nation institutions over multiple generations. Amos was a Cherokee Nation citizen, an original Dawes allottee, and a Cherokee Male Seminary alumnus.
Like most Cherokee Nation citizens in Indian Territory at the time, Amos was forcibly enfranchised as a US citizen on 3 March 1901 through a unilateral Congressional amendment to section 6 of the General Allotment (Dawes) Act, even as our Nation was fighting to maintain its sovereignty and distinct political identity. His eldest daughter, my grandmother Pearl Clara Spears, was a by-birth dual citizen of Cherokee Nation and the US, born a “too-late” on the family homestead allotment outside the small town of Vera on the eve of Oklahoma statehood, where she was raised until the family moved to Colorado when she was a teenager.
My dad and I were not raised culturally Cherokee: Pearl’s 1945 death from tuberculosis ruptured Dad’s relationship with her family, although his sister Alverta remained close to our immediate Spears kin. Dad and Alverta were estranged when I was young but reconciled when I was a teenager, and the restoration of our family’s Cherokee citizenship, relations, and accountabilities has grounded my subsequent life’s work from abroad, on regular visits back to the Nation, and in active participation in Cherokee intellectual, social, and political life.
The US government unilaterally suspended the Nation’s electoral, citizenship, and enrollment processes with Oklahoma statehood in 1907, but these were rekindled with the 1970 Five Tribes Act (Public Law 91-495) and fully restored in the Cherokee Nation Constitution of 1975 (ratified 1976). Throughout our history and today, Cherokee Nation has consistently recognized our interrupted but unbroken line of citizenship and political belonging. My own citizenship status can be verified by contacting the Cherokee Nation Tribal Registration department directly by phone or email: 918-453-5058; registration@cherokee.org.
As a member of Digadatseli’i ᏗᎦᏓᏤᎵᎢ Cherokee Scholars (an association of citizen-scholars from the three federally recognized Cherokee Tribal Nations) and signatory to the 2020 Cherokee Scholars’ Statement on Sovereignty and Identity, I don’t consider this information confidential.
IMPORTANT NOTE: For the most accurate information about Cherokee culture, politics, and history, and for information relating to historical and contemporary Cherokee concerns as well as citizenship status, criteria, and kinship ties, go to the official tribal websites, or contact the tribes directly. It’s important to prioritize informed Cherokee voices on Cherokee matters.
Cherokee Nation
Eastern Band of Cherokees
United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees
AREA OF FOCUS
Critical Indigenous Studies
My interdisciplinary work sits at the intersection of Indigenous literary studies, cultural studies, and Cherokee intellectual history and creative practice. I’m especially interested in how Cherokee and other Indigenous writers articulate history, sovereignty, belonging, and political accountability through substantiated story and legitimate kinship. Alongside this core focus, I also explore race, gender, and sexuality in speculative fiction and what I call Indigenous “wonderworks,” drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines, including queer studies and animal studies. These commitments shape my teaching as well, where I focus on critical Indigenous studies and literatures, and the transformative possibilities of “imagining otherwise” through speculative fiction. Creatively, I’m drawn to Indigenous and queer fantasy, weird fiction and steampunk speculation, and forms of creative nonfiction that allow for experimentation, vulnerability, and wonder.
THE INTERVIEW SECTION
Queries & Quirks
1. Are you a dog person or a cat person?
Dog person, definitely. No shade on feline partisans--I just don't understand them.
2. What was your favorite toy line as a child?
Masters of the Universe, without a doubt. It was a weird and wonderful canvas for fantasy worldbuilding. I liked so many of the characters, but of all of them, the Sorceress, Moss Man, and Orko were top of my list. But nothing beat Castle Grayskull for sheer storytelling possibilities.
3. Your favorite book growing up?
There can be only one answer: The Hobbit. I loved it so much, in fact, that I stole the school library's copy. (I did later replace it anonymously to ease my guilty conscience!) The copy came with me to Aotearoa/New Zealand when I visited the Hobbiton film set in 2019.
4. You've been a Dungeons & Dragons player since you were twelve. Favorite ancestry, class, alignment, and setting?
Halfling, elf, or gnome; druid, ranger, or sorcerer; and neutral or chaotic good. For setting, it would be a toss-up between Dragonlance, Mystara, and Ravenloft.
5. Favorite recent TV show?
When living in Massachusetts for a year my husband and I were introduced to Heartstopper, and it's definitely up there. Alice Oseman has created such a lovely, healing series from her graphic novels, especially for those of us older queer folks who didn't have anything like this when we were coming out.
6. Recent good non-academic book recommendations?
Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw Nation) has an amazing new poetry collection out (Extant) that's gutting and restorative in equal measure, and So Mayer's Bad Language is a bracing, evocative analysis of the uses and abuses of language in a time of rising fascism.
7. What's one memorable experience you've had as a teacher?
We had an all-virtual First Nations and Indigenous Studies Research Practicum course during COVID, which was hard for everyone, but we got through it together and wrapped up quite successfully. At the end of the year the students surprised me with a thank-you Cameo message from an amazing Dolly Parton impersonator from the UK, Kelly O'Brien. It was an unexpected and incredibly thoughtful gift. (It also made clear to me that I apparently talked a LOT about Dolly in class!)
8. What's the music you listen to when you're nostalgic or homesick?
Old-school country (1950s-early '90s, or basically anything before Garth and Shania). That's what I grew up on, and it always makes me feel like I'm close to home.
ABOUT MY COAT OF ARMS
Heraldry and Personal Arms
My Coat of Arms grew out of a lifelong fascination with symbolism, iconography, and the ways carefully crafted images can express identity, values, and relationships. While researching visual materials for an early book project, I encountered Canadian heraldry, an inclusive tradition rooted in European forms but deeply attentive to the cultural and ecological realities of this land. Discovering that Indigenous citizens were actively reshaping heraldry on their own terms, I decided to apply for armorial bearings as a way of contributing Cherokee representation to this evolving visual tradition.
