This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative from an interview with Sierra Edd, a graduate student in the Department of Ethnic Studies whose research focuses on Native American studies and music, and sound in politics.
My current academic career started when I first listened to the Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape in 2014.
I was an undergraduate student at Brown University in Rhode Island. One of my professors at the time — Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) — introduced me to ideas around Native appropriations in art and Native representations in visual culture. I wrote a paper on the mixtape for her class, and it went on to inspire the research I’m doing now at UC Berkeley.
I am Diné, a citizen of the Navajo Nation. I grew up in a small border town in Durango, Colorado. As a young person, I always had in my mind that going to a big city away from the reservation was a way to be “successful.” So when I went to the East Coast, I thought that was going to be my experience of the other side of life.