Rate My Professor Cynthia Benally

Cynthia Benally is an Assistant Professor of Native American Education in the Department of Education, Culture, and Society within the University of Utah's College of Education. A Diné woman of the Natoh Dine’é Tachiinii clan, she was born with her umbilical cord buried in Naadą́ą́’ Díílid, a valley outside Piñon, Arizona, establishing her deep connection to that land and community. Her first language was the Diné language, and she practiced Diné ways of knowing and being from birth through childhood. Due to settler colonial laws and policies, she did not grow up there but attended schools in majority white, middle-class areas. These experiences shape her research and teaching, which emphasize healing through education on Native topics and issues.

Benally earned a Doctor of Education. Her academic interests include critical Indigenous research methodologies, Indigenous epistemologies, and anti-colonial studies. She investigates how settler educational policies and curricula affect relationalities between settler society and Native peoples, communities, and Nations. Her work explores how Native communities use educational policies mandating Native curriculum and instruction to foster sovereignty, self-determination, and positive impacts for Native and non-Native students alike. As director of the Working with Native Communities certificate program and a faculty affiliate in the Environmental Humanities Program, she promotes relationality, reciprocity, respect, responsibility, relevance, and reflexivity in research and collaborations with Native Nations. Key publications include her co-edited volume Relational Scholarship with Indigenous Communities: Confronting Settler Colonial Social Studies (2024, with Christine Rogers Stanton and Brad Hall), guest editorship of the 2019 Journal of American Indian Education special issue "Indigenizing the Curriculum: Putting the “Native” into Native American Content Instruction Mandates," and the article “We All Live in One World”: Challenging Settler Mythologies With Sovereign Assertions” (2025, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, with Donna Deyhle and Beth King). She has received recognition including the Native Excellence in Education Award and departmental faculty awards.