Anthropologist at Dartmouth: Davina Two Bears

Davina Two Bears is a 2017-2018 Eastman Fellow from the Program in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. She is an Alumni of Dartmouth, where she majored in anthropology, and she also received a master’s degree in socio-cultural anthropology from Northern Arizona University.

Davina Two Bears is a Diné, Navajo, originally from Birdsprings, Arizona. Her maternal clan is Tódích’íi’nii, Bitter Water, born for Táchii’nii, Red Running into the Water Clan; and her maternal grandfather’s clan is Tábąąhí, Edge Water, and her paternal grandfather’s clan is also Tódích’íi’nii. She is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University under the Department of Anthropology’s Archaeology of the Social Context PhD Program with a PhD Minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her PhD dissertation topic derives from her grandparents’ oral history about the Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS) on the southwestern Navajo Reservation. Using non-destructive indigenous research methods, including interviews with Navajo elders and archival records and historic photographs, her decolonizing research investigates the early history of the Old Leupp Boarding School (1909-1942), which has never been thoroughly documented in the literature. Davina's focus on the educational experience of Navajo children at the OLBS, and how they resisted and survived early 20^th century federal Indian Boarding School assimilationist policies.

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