Dr. Ashton Pemapanik Dunkley (Jamaican & Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape) is an Assistant Professor of Black and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Black Studies and the American Studies Program. As an Afro-Indigenous feminist historian, her research utilizes theories and methodologies of Black and Indigenous feminisms alongside historical methods to interrogate the popularization of Indigenous extinction narratives in the Mid-Atlantic. Specifically, she examines how settler colonialism, racialization, and anti-Blackness have shaped public memory and recognition of Nanticoke and Lenape tribal nations since the early nineteenth century. Born and raised in the southernmost tidewaters of Lenapehoking, which is presently known as Delaware and southern New Jersey, her work is grounded within the living Indigenous knowledge systems of her ancestral homelands. She is especially interested in the ways Nanticoke and Lenape spatialities, ecologies, oral histories, and kinship practices can help her to think beyond the silences of the colonial archive.
Dr. Dunkley’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and noted as an honorable mention in History by the Ford Foundation. She is passionate about community-engaged public scholarship pertaining to Black and Indigenous history, art, and environmental justice. This work has led to collaborations with institutions like the National Parks Service; The National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers; the Museum of the City of New York; the Stockton University Art Gallery; Emory University’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies; and the Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands. She also sits on the board of directors of Nanjemoy Forest Farm, an Indigenous-run non-profit organization that uplifts food sovereignty, traditional ecological knowledge, and land stewardship within Piscataway territory.
On ancestral homelands of the Dakota, she earned her Ph.D. and MA at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in American Studies with graduate minors in American Indian & Indigenous Studies and Africa & the African Diaspora. In Lenapehoking, she received her BA from Temple University in History, Anthropology, and Italian.