A scholar of indigenous studies, Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is policy director and senior research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She teaches American Indian studies at California State University at San Marcos. For many years she has been doing the work of a public intellectual in her blog writing Ruminative. Dina’s interests focus on issues related to Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, and environmental justice, writing on the intersection of indigeneity and surfing. She is co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of the acclaimed book ‘All the Real Indians Died Off’ and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Beacon Press, 2016). As an award-winning freelance journalist, she was a frequent contributor and columnist at Indian Country Media Network, and has published in numerous other online publications.
An “urban Indian,” Dina grew up in Southern California, bodysurfing the waves at Santa Monica and other beaches. After moving to the North Shore of Oahu in 1980 she learned how to board surf which was central to her life. There she was one of the very few women who regularly surfed Pipeline. Eventually moving back to California, she migrated to Northern California far enough away from the ocean to have dropped out of surf culture. Twenty-five years would pass before she would pick up surfing again, and by then the world of surfing had changed in dramatic and almost unfathomable ways.
Dina’s reentry into surfing happened ironically when she was in graduate school at the University of New Mexico. Having reconnected with a lost love from her North Shore days, she returned to Southern California, got married and settled in San Clemente. She wrote her master’s thesis, Panhe at the Crossroads: Toward an Indigenized Environmental Justice Discourse, on the “Save Trestles” campaign and toll road controversy which examined the role of Native American efforts to protect a sacred site, ultimately a major contributing factor to the defeat of the road-building project and saving the famous surf spot from potential destruction. Many surfers are amazed to learn just how important the work of Native activists was to stopping the toll roll from carving up Trestles.
Dina is writing a lot these days on indigeneity in surf culture, focusing on the ways mainstream surf culture narratives have elided Native peoples in Hawaii and on the mainland and beyond. Building on the work of Isaiah Helekunihi Walker and others, she contributed to the volume Critical Surf Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2017). In 2015 she began a collaboration with Krista Comer on the Institute for Women Surfers project, presenting very consciousness-raising material to Institute participants, serving as a general advisor and respected teacher. Her recent intergenerational work with Native Like Water/Intertribal Youth dovetails with Institute principals of crossgeneration nurturing. The organization Native Like Water reconnects American Indian youth with the ocean through indigenous knowledge, culture, and surfing in a college prep format at the University of California, San Diego.
Dina continues to stand-up paddle surf regularly at San Onofre.