Benedict Colombi

Benedict J. Colombi, Ph.D. is Faculty Director of the UA's Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs (GIDPs) and is Professor and Past Head of the American Indian Studies Department in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He holds affiliated faculty appointments in the School of Anthropology, School of Geography, Development and Environment, and School of Natural Resources and Environment. He serves as the Past Program Chair of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Anthropology & Environment section, and was a  Faculty Fellow with The Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, and is a Fellow with The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). In 2014, he was awarded U.S. Fulbright Scholar Award, conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous communities along Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

His specialization lies at the interface of complex human-environmental problems (i.e. fisheries, climate, water, energy, and agriculture). Significant publications include the books (Colombi and Brooks 2012), Keystone Nations: Indigenous Peoples and Salmon across the North Pacific (Advanced Seminar Series, School for Advanced Research Press) and (Maldonado, Colombi, and Pandya 2014), Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences and Actions (Springer Verlag Press), and a number of articles and chapters, including long-term and engaged research with the Nez Perce Tribe (Nimiipuu) about large dams, salmon, and the regional economy in the Columbia River basin. He also pursues interests in expanding his research to include Southwestern Indigenous peoples and watersheds (Colombi 2010; Colombi 2014; Pasqualetti et al. 2016; Bair et al. 2019); complimented with field studies of local-Indigenous resources/management in the United States, Canada, Russia (Thom, Colombi, Degai 2016; Colombi, Thom, Degai 2018), Iceland, Norway (Ween and Colombi 2013), Japan, Brazil (Colombi 2014; Perry et al. 2018), and Mexico (Colombi 2010; Colombi 2014).