Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of profiles of notable spring 2025 graduates.
Joseph Gazing Wolf has lived many lives.
He has been an Amazigh shepherd in Upper Egypt, a range rider following buffalo across the American Great Plains, an ecology student in Southern California, an Indigenous rights activist across the world — and now, he graduates with a Doctor of Philosophy in environmental life sciences from Arizona State University.
“For me, the PhD is an important tool to acquire so that I can continue to serve the communities that I’ve worked with for most of my life,” said Gazing Wolf, who is graduating this May.
Gazing Wolf has worked with over 60 tribal nations within the U.S., and two dozen Indigenous communities across the world in total. His work spans many different subjects, from preventing violence against women to helping protect Indigenous land rights. For his PhD, Gazing Wolf focused on barriers that Indigenous people face in getting access to education and representation in the environmental sciences and STEM more broadly.
“There’s been an immense erasure of Indigenous presence, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous contributions to science — that’s all been erased from consciousness altogether. Not just in the context of history courses, but even the consciousness of Indians existing in the first place.”
Gazing Wolf initially planned to study rangeland ecology for a PhD. But after facing severe racism at his first academic institution of choice, he left that institution to come to ASU and work with Associate Professor Arianne Cease. Here, he pivoted to studying Indigenous experiences in academia, wondering how many people had gone through similar experiences.
“For my research, I brought together every American Indian scholar I could find within the environmental sciences to one place. I did that twice, in collaboration with the Ecological Society of America ... and we just talked about their experiences across the career span. Like what was it like to be an Indigenous woman scholar back in the '60s? And it was often horrifying.”
Gazing Wolf points out that, while more academics say they value Indigenous knowledge nowadays, the structure of academia, which values individualism and production, does not align with the values of many Indigenous people, such as reciprocity and community care. That makes it challenging — if not outright harmful — for many Indigenous people trying to make their way in academia.
Additionally, Gazing Wolf investigated the lack of representation of Indigenous voices in academic research.
“Anytime academics collect data and there are American Indians in the sample, it’s always a small sample of people, and so what they end up doing is just throwing us out of the analyses, throwing us out altogether. ... We’re never included in any of those studies, and therefore no policy, no benefits, nothing comes the way of American Indian communities,” he explains. “And so I investigated why that’s the case in my last chapter.”
Gazing Wolf hopes that his work can have some positive impact — whether it’s helping to change the culture of academia or even just increasing awareness that Indigenous people do still exist and aren’t going anywhere.
The title of a PhD means less to Gazing Wolf than how he can use it to benefit the communities he works with. Most recently, he’s been working with Waorani and Kichwa communities in Ecuador to resist oil companies’ attempts to exploit their lands in the Amazon. He plans to continue doing such work after his PhD, though he doesn’t know quite what that will look like or whether he will continue to be in academia.
“The institution is not what confirms me as a scholar. I was born a scholar.” Gazing Wolf insists. “The question is, do scholars even exist in academic spaces anymore? Can scholars exist within these settler-colonial institutions of education? I’m not sure.”
Wherever his work takes him, Gazing Wolf is sure to have many lifetimes left to live.
“I’m an 80-year-old man stuck in a young man’s body,” he laughs. “I’ve experienced way too much for my age.”
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