Who We Are

Maggie Blackhawk

Co-Director of the Sovereignty Project
Moses H. Grossman Professor of Law at NYU Law

Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is the Moses H. Grossman Professor of Law at NYU Law and an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of constitutional law, federal Indian law, and legislation. Blackhawk was awarded the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize and her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Supreme Court Review, and Cambridge University Press. Her recent projects examine the ways that American democracy can and should empower minorities, especially outside of traditional rights and courts-based frameworks. She also studies how the political agency of marginalized communities has shaped American democracy historically and how those communities have leveraged the law to redistribute power. She is particularly interested in how law can structure institutions in ways that empower minorities to govern and engage in lawmaking—petitioning, lobbying, federalism, etc.—and how empowering minorities could be harnessed to better mitigate constitutional failures, like colonialism and slavery.

Ned Blackhawk

Co-Director of the Sovereignty Project
Professor of History and American Studies at Yale

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is a professor of history and American Studies at Yale and was on the faculty from 1999 to 2009 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in history from UCLA and the University of Washington and is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West (Harvard, 2006), a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians.

In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Professor Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago, Yale College Class of 1910).

 

Avery Maples

Research Assistant and Project Coordinator

Avery Maples is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and grew up on the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, North Carolina. She is a recent graduate of Yale University and holds a BA in History with distinction, and her senior thesis "Sacrifice and Survival: Encountering Colonialism and the Bounds of Christian Humanitarianism in the Cherokee Nation from 1819-1833" was awarded the Walter McClintock Prize and the Diane Kaplan Memorial Prize.

While at Yale, Avery served as a Research Assistant to Professor Ned Blackhawk and the Museum of the Cherokee People during her junior and senior year. Avery is a textbook editor for the Remedial Herstory Project, and currently works for the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project and NYU's new Indian Law Lab taught by Professors Maggie Blackhawk and Sonora Taffa. She is also the newest recipient of the Chauncey Fellowship, aiding in her pursuit to unite Cherokee art, spirituality, and healing in a year-long community service project for the Center for Native Health.

 

Rebecca Nagle

Research Fellow

Rebecca Nagle is an award winning journalist and citizen of Cherokee Nation. She is the writer and host of the podcast This Land. Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today, and more. Rebecca Nagle is the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award, a Peabody Nominee, and numerous awards from the Native American Journalist Association. Nagle lives in Tahlequah, OK, where she also works on language revitalization. 

Indigenous communities deserve the same standard of journalism as the rest of the country, but rarely receive it from non-Native media outlets. Nagle‘s journalism seeks to correct this. From the census, to COVID, to the Supreme Court, Nagle focuses on deeply and timely reporting that sheds light on issues of national importance. Her first book is By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land (Harper Collins, 2025).