Background
Dina Gilio-Whitaker is a Colville Confederated Tribes member who grew up in Southern California, moving to North Shore (Oahu), North Shore in the Hawaiian Islands in 1980. She returned to California, got married and moved to San Clemente, California, San Clemente. She is a surfer. As a mature student, Gilio-Whitaker studied at the University of New Mexico, initially intending to go into a legal career. Her master's thesis, ''Panhe at the Crossroads: Toward an Indigenized Environmental Justice Discourse'', was on the topic of indigenous American protests against a toll road being built on sacred land that was also a significant surfing location.Career
In 2016, Gilio-Whitaker co-authored ''"All the Real Indians Died Off" and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans'' with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In 2017, she wrote a chapter of ''The Critical Surfer Reader'' (2017) titled "Appropriating Surfing and the Politics of Indigenous Authenticity". Since 2017, Gilio-Whitaker has lectured in American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, commuting from San Clemente, California. She was offered the position a year earlier, but declined due to book tour responsibilities. She supports a scholarly framework known as "indigenized environmental justice", in which environmentalism would take into account "the history of colonization as a historical process of dispossession of native peoples and their lands in order to understand the way native people are still fighting these battles". In 2019, Gilio-Whitaker published ''As Long as Grass Grows''. The book outlines the effect of American settlers on indigenous Americans since 1492, the modern environmentalism movement and indigenous approaches to environmental stewardship. Gilio-Whitaker is also a senior research associate and policy director at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She runs the company DGW Consulting. She has also volunteered for the Institute for Women Surfers, Native Like Water and the San Onofre Parks Foundation. She maintains a blog, ''Ruminative''.Selected works
Books
* *Journal articles
* *News articles
* *References
Further reading
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gilio-Whitaker, Dina Native American academics Native American journalists Native American writers 21st-century American women writers Native American women academics American women academics Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American journalists American women journalists 21st-century Native American women 21st-century Native Americans Journalists from California Academics from California Native American people from California Environmental justice scholars 21st-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American academics American women non-fiction writers