
DESI RODRIGUEZ-LONEBEAR
BOARD MEMBER
Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Northern Cheyenne Nation & Chicana) is committed to growing data warriors in Indigenous communities and has worked at the intersection of Indigenous nation rebuilding and data rebuilding for the last decade. She is the Co-Founder of the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN), an entity that helps ensure that data for and about Indigenous nations and peoples in the U.S. are utilized to advance Indigenous aspirations for collective and individual wellbeing. Desi is a dual PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Arizona and demography at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Her dissertation examines the confluence of racial classification, collective identity, and tribal citizenship through the lens of statistical statecraft and nation rebuilding. Desi has an international research portfolio spanning social demography, race and ethnicity, health equity, statecraft, and stratification. She has served as a tribal researcher and statistician in the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand. Since 2013, Desi has served on the U.S. Census Bureau's National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations. Her research has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Congress of American Indians, Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (New Zealand's Māori Centre of Research Excellence), and the Native Nations Institute. Desi and her family are nomadic Natives and can be found somewhere between their tribal homeland in Montana, the Arizona desert, and Aotearoa New Zealand (the land of the long white cloud).