Damian Yazzie is an Urban Navajo Graduate Student within Chicana/o Studies. Being born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, his use of methodology and research remain grounded within the historical and cultural legacies of the Southwest. He is interested in recognizing transformative solidarities and schisms that exist within Southwest Indigenous-Latinx identities at particular junctions of cultural contact, that then confront us to rethink racial paradigms and crossings. He also researches coloniality and oppression while also being in conversation with praxis of decolonization and spaces of Indigenous liberation via Marxist materialism. He engages with critical analysis from multi-modal texts from the 17th to the 20th century, of questioning and complicating notions of Southwestern Indigeneity predicated within Manichean dualisms. As a response to the predominant assumptions to the questions of Indigeneity, his research has become more focused on the mechanisms of Indigenous temporality as an epistemological device to demonstrate a felt survivance and demonstration of cultural adaptability that weaves together a cohesion of the past, present, and future, which contends autonomy within the face of coloniality. In doing such a reading of Indigenous temporalities, there exists an acknowledgment of cultural individuation, sites of pan-Indigeneity, and reconfigurations of conceptual sovereignty within the imaginary of the Indian within the US. He is studying Indigenous and Latinx narratives that create a complex, weaved tapestry of initial cultural encounter that result into unlikely sites of defiance and resistance, that he plans to apply within ethnographic, historically based models of solidarity.