Native American Heritage Month Keynote Speaker Deborah Miranda

ES Faculty Member Damien Montaño with Author, Poet Deborah Miranda

ES faculty member Damien Montaño with Native author, poet, and professor, Deborah Miranda, November 2023

November is Native American Heritage Month, a time that we collectively, as a nation, and as a campus, celebrate the myriad of histories, cultures, and contributions of Indigenous Peoples.

Deborah Miranda is the Native American Heritage Month Keynote Speaker who presented on November 7th in the Chumash Auditorium. 

Deborah Miranda is most known for the mixed-genre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Seen in her memoir, topics of her ancestry, gender, the natural world, and powering through trauma and violence are prominent features in her writing. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay area while holding Santa Ynez Chumash Ancestry. 

You can find out more about Deborah's work on her website, here.

At Cal Poly, we acknowledge that the land on which our university sits carries the heritage of the Indigenous People of San Luis Obispo County and Region, the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini, Northern Chumash Tribe.