Cecilia Marek

Cecilia Marek (she/her) is a Gender Studies PhD candidate at Arizona State University (ASU) and a Cotutelle PhD candidate in Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is Diné (Navajo), Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), and Hopi. She grew up on the Nez Perce reservation in northern Idaho and in Flagstaff, Arizona. She has an interdisciplinary background including Bachelor of Science degrees in Applied Indigenous Studies and Political Science, and a Graduate Certificate in Ethnic Studies from Northern Arizona University. Cecilia earned a Master of Science in American Indian Studies – Indigenous Rights and Social Justice and a Master of Art in Gender Studies from ASU. 

Her research interests include Indigenous feminisms, specifically Native feminisms situated in the United States, Indigenous women’s leadership in activism and resistance movements, and Indigenous resurgence and futurities. Her current research examines the entangled histories and ongoing impacts of Indigenous child removal policies in Arizona and New South Wales, Australia, with a focus on how Indigenous communities resist and reimagine child welfare through sovereignty, kinship, and advocacy. Her work is grounded in Indigenous feminist anti-colonial and decolonial methodologies and centers Indigenous voices, practices, and knowledges in both scholarly inquiry and critical policy engagement.

Cecilia also engages creative and community-based forms of knowledge production, including Indigenous zine-making as a decolonial practice through which artists circulate stories, critique, and political vision on their own terms. Across her work, she foregrounds the leadership of Indigenous women and other community members who sustain culturally grounded roles in governance and care, which remain vital to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and the regeneration of community-based systems of wellbeing despite ongoing disruptions under settler colonialism and patriarchy.