Taína Diaz-Reyes

Taína (she/they) is an Indigenous (Huichol/Maya/Taíno) Latina PhD student in Sustainability. Her identities are as important as her academic and professional backgrounds in geography, ecology, agriculture, and Indigenous sciences. These focus areas coupled with study in ecotheology and liberation theology inform her work in Sonoran Desert community ecologies, Indigenous food systems, resilience and climate change, and Indigenous sovereignties.

Within her first year as a doctoral student, she was named a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Global Futures Laboratory (GFL) at ASU for her work with Dr. Melissa Nelson developing the Lab’s Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area- coproducing knowledge with communities and dreaming of healthy, thriving Indigenous futures. This recognition came about due to her passion for ensuring Indigenous scientists have spaces where their Indigenous sciences are not only recognized as such, but can be a model for other marginalized peoples conducting scientific research oriented by their identities. Taína contributes perspectives on how ecology and geography are key to understanding ourselves and our research as place-based Indigenous peoples, since this place-based identity is present in our work regardless of our unique location in the landscape of STEM. As Indigenous science continues to inform Western science, and as Western science continues to appeal Indigenous science for solutions to complex problems, it must be understood that Indigenous science is inseparable from indigeneity.

Her career, education, and community engagement have led to her research interests in Indigenous farming methods and agriculture, global indigeneity, cosmogeneology, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), embodied knowledge, place and the sacred, Indigenous geographies, food and seed sovereignty, arid desert ecologies, borderlands and debordering, rematriation, ecological spirituality, ancestral trade networks, ecogastronomy, transterritoriality, bio/geocultural engagement, geographical-historical landscape analysis, culturally-collaborative environmental management practices, climate change, and Indigenous futurism.

Her doctoral research involves the future of Indigenous food sovereignties in the US-Mexico borderlands, specifically across the Sonoran Desert region of Arizona/Northwestern Mexico. Much of this work involves tracing the relationships between humans and other-than-human beings as they adapted in interdependence, resulting in tremendous biodiversity and intimacies between people and place. Desert communities thrived because of these relationships, and we can imagine thriving Indigenous futures as we reclaim our ancestral foodways and knowledges regarding the abundance of the landscape. This reclamation allows us to adapt to challenges facing the landscape, our foods, and our relatives.

Her positionality in research and writing are based in her experience as an Indigenous Latina existing in a borderland identity. She orients her work towards Latin American and American Indian liberation by centering community knowledge and connection to place.