Kristin Arola has been named Director of American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) at Michigan State University after serving as its Interim Director since Fall 2022. A first-generation descendant of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community of the Lake Superior Band of Chippewa Indians, Arola also is the inaugural Karen L. Gillmor Endowed Professor in Professional and Public Writing and a Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures.
“Together, I believe we can make MSU a premiere institution that supports American Indian and Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and Tribal Nations,” Arola said. “AIIS will continue to offer a high-quality minor and graduate certificate, to support faculty engaging in teaching and research in Indigenous studies, and to build toward greater collaborations and visibility across campus.”
Arola serves as co-principal investigator on the Anishinaabemowin portion of the Less Commonly Taught Languages grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is an active member of Educating Anishnaabe: Giving, Learning, and Empowering, which is an Indigenous faculty-staff association at MSU. She also served as a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant focused on partnering with rural and Indigenous communities to enable them to achieve energy sovereignty, or the right to make their own decisions about energy implementation in their communities.
She has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan and a master’s and doctorate in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University. Prior to her work at MSU, Arola worked at Washington State University, where she directed the Digital Technology and Culture undergraduate program and served as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English.
“Together, I believe we can make MSU a premiere institution that supports American Indian and Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and Tribal Nations.”
Dr. Kristin Arola
“I have had the pleasure of knowing and working closely with Dr. Arola on multiple programs and projects over the past seven years, and I look forward to our continued collaboration,” said Kevin Leonard, Director of the Native American Institute at MSU. “She is the perfect choice to lead the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program into the future. Beyond her impeccable academic record, she brings to this role an energy and willingness to look at things from a fresh perspective, drawing on traditional ways of knowing and understanding that I believe will help AIIS move from an undergraduate minor to a major at MSU.”
At the heart of Arola’s career as a tenure-track faculty member, first at Washington State University and then at Michigan State University starting in Fall 2017, she has remained committed to exploring how change is made within structures that are often resistant to it.
“Whether I am sharing best practices for multimodal writing pedagogies, exploring how marginalized users make meaning in digital spaces, researching tribal communities’ decision-making practices, or offering indigenous methodologies as a productive disruption to rhetorical theories, I continue to explore how world views shape the processes and products we individually and collectively value for making meaning and sharing research,” Arola said. “Because of my training as a rhetorician and writing studies specialist, I look to how alternative writing processes and products—be they multimodal, land-based, relational, and/or rooted in storytelling—can expand the processes and products that institutions value. Expanding the writing and research practices and products we value inherently expands the range of voices and bodies that are included and valued.”
Originally published by MSU Today
