She was born and raised in Seattle and earned her degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in 2001. Her areas of research include environmental anthropology, applied anthropology, ethnohistory, indigenous studies, rural studies, human relationships to place. Her work has been published in Ethnohistory and she (with Coll Thrush, UBC) has an edited volume, Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, due to be released by the University of Nebraska Press in June 2011.