Blythe K. George

Professor Blythe K. George is from McKinleyville, CA, and is a member of the Yurok Tribe. She previously served as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at UC Berkeley after completing her Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy from Harvard University. Her research focuses on processes of adversity and resilience in tribal communities, with an emphasis on qualitative methodologies and database creation and management. Prof. George is working on a book manuscript that focuses on the experiences of tribal fathers with criminal records, in particular their relationship to work, ceremony and family, thereby bringing “the reservation” into contemporary considerations of inequality, with an emphasis on the deep meaning and marginalization that have both clustered in such places now for generations.

Prof. George also serves as the research partner for the To'Kee Skuy'Soo Ney-Wo-Chek'—I Will See You Again in a Good Way project, in collaboration with the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute. This project generates a thorough understanding of the scope and severity of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit peoples in Northern California, with an emphasis on intervening in these cycles of violence by designing and implementing “best practices and protocols” for tribes in addressing MMIWG2.

Notably, Prof. George has been the recipient of multiple fellowships for her work on trauma and resilience on tribal reservations, including the National Science Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Indigenous Education, Inc., and the Gates Millennium Scholars Program. In 2021, she was awarded a Circle 3 Intergenerational Indigenous Women’s Fellowship from the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program. Through this opportunity, she is facilitating an intergenerational knowledge transfer project between herself and Judge Abby Abinanti, the Chief Justice of the Yurok Tribal Court and the first tribal woman to be a member of the California State Bar. Together, Prof. George and the Yurok Tribal Court have founded the Yurok Data Repository and Modeling Center. Under Prof. George’s leadership, this center centralizes the Court’s ongoing research efforts on criminal justice and policing reform and is the first tribally housed justice policy research center in the nation.