Titles

• Senior Global Futures Scholar, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
• Executive Director, American Indian Policy Institute, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Biography

Traci Morris, the executive director of the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. Under her leadership, the AIPI has grown and diversified its service to Indian Country providing policy analysis, tribally driven research, and economic development capacity building and working with such Indian Country partners as NAFOA, AISES, and the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative. In her work at both ASU and prior, Morris has worked with Native American nations; Tribal businesses; Native American non-profits; written a college-accredited curriculum; and has advocated for digital inclusion at the Federal Communications Commission and on Capitol Hill.

Morris’s research and publications on Native American media and the digital divide is focused on Internet use, digital inclusion, network neutrality, digital and new media curriculums, digital inclusion and development of broadband networks in Indian Country. Her book, Native American Voices: A Reader, continues to be a primary teaching tool in colleges throughout the country.

Morris is affiliated faculty at ASU's School for the Future of Innovation in Society, an affiliate of ASU's Center for Gender Equity in Science and Technology, a member of the Advisory Board for the Department of Labor's Native American Employment and Training Council, President of the Board of the Phoenix Indian Center, and on the Advisory Council of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums.  Formerly, Morris served a two-year appointment (2014-2016 and 2010-2012) to the Federal Communications Commission's Consumer Advisory Committee.

As an entrepreneur prior to her ASU appointment, Morris founded Homahota Consulting LLC, a national Native American woman-owned professional services firm working in policy analysis, telecommunications, education, and research assisting tribes in their nation-building efforts and working with Native Nations, tribal businesses and those businesses working with tribes. 

Morris has an MA and PhD from the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies, in addition to a BA in Liberal Arts from Colorado State University.

Education

• PhD, American Indian Studies & Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies, University of Arizona, 2005
• MA, American Indian Studies, University of Arizona, 1997
• BA, Liberal Arts, Colorado State University, 1995

Expertise

• leadership
• Tribal broadband
• Tribal economic development
• Tribal entrepreneurship