Dina Gilio-Whitaker
American journalist from California, U.S.
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Dina Gilio-Whitaker is a direct descendant of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation with Okanogan and Sinixt ancestry. Her mother was a Colville tribal citizen. Gilio-Whitaker was born and grew up in Southern California.
As a mature student, Gilio-Whitaker studied at the University of New Mexico, initially intending to go into a legal career. Her master's thesis, Panhe at the Crossroads: Toward an Indigenized Environmental Justice Discourse, was on the topic of Indigenous American protests against a toll road being built on sacred land that was also a significant surfing location.
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Career
In 2016, Gilio-Whitaker co-authored "All the Real Indians Died Off" and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. In 2017, she wrote a chapter of The Critical Surfer Reader (2017) titled "Appropriating Surfing and the Politics of Indigenous Authenticity".
Since 2017, Gilio-Whitaker has lectured in American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, commuting from San Clemente, California. She was offered the position a year earlier, but declined due to book tour responsibilities. She supports a scholarly framework known as "indigenized environmental justice", in which environmentalism would take into account "the history of colonization as a historical process of dispossession of native peoples and their lands in order to understand the way native people are still fighting these battles".
In 2019, Gilio-Whitaker published As Long as Grass Grows. The book outlines the effect of American settlers on indigenous Americans since 1492, the modern environmentalism movement and indigenous approaches to environmental stewardship.
Gilio-Whitaker is also a senior research associate and policy director at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She runs the company DGW Consulting. She has also volunteered for the Institute for Women Surfers, Native Like Water and the San Onofre Parks Foundation. She maintains a blog, Ruminative.
Personal
In 1980, Gilio-Whitaker moved to North Shore in the Hawaiian Islands. She returned to California, got married, and moved to San Clemente, California. She is a surfer.