Andrew Jolivette (Opelousa/Atakapa-Ishak) Ph.D., is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and social/cultural critic. His work spans many different social and political arenas - from education reform and cultural representation in Native America to community of color
identity issues, critical mixed-race movement building, LGBT/Queer community of color identity issues and gay marriage, and AIDS disparities within Indigenous and people of
color communities.
Jolivette is an associate professor in American Indian Studies, Educational Leadership, and Critical Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University. He recently completed a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship through the National Academy of Sciences.
He is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, the Urban Indian Experience, People of Color and Popular Culture, Critical Mixed Race Studies and Social Justice, Creole studies, Black-Indians, and mixed-race health disparities. He has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Researcher with the University of California, San Francisco on issues of racial violence among African American and Latino/a youth in the Bay Area.
Jolivette is the author of two books, Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press), which is a part of the Contemporary Native American Communities Series and Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, January 2007).
He is currently working on two new books, Mixed Race Gay Men and HIV: A Community History where he will explore how race and sexuality intersect to create social and sexual risk. His forthcoming book, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, seeks to understand the impact of President Obama's biracial identity on the election campaign of 2008, on Obama's first 100 days in office, and what his historic election might mean for the current battle for a new American majority.
Professor Jolivette recently edited a special volume of the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal (UCLA) entitled "Indigenous Landscapes Post-Katrina: Beyond Invisibility and Disaster" which examines the state of Native American tribes and communities three years after Hurricane Katrina (August 2008) and A Report on the Health and Wellness of Multiracial Youth in the Bay Area (May 2008). His work has also appeared in the Ethnic Studies Review Journal, Crash Course: Reflections on the Film Crash for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege (2007), Hurricane Katrina: Response and Responsibilities (2005) edited by John Brown Childs, and in the forthcoming anthology, Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective (Summer, 2009).
In the fall of 2005, he gave a keynote address for World AIDS Day where he disclosed his HIV/AIDS positive status. According to Jolivette:
“I wasn't sure if I should disclose my status in this way here today. I spoke with a colleague about it and he said, How will disclosing impact you? Will it benefit you? Are you giving anything up? I thought to myself, as a gay man of color, I have a responsibility to disclose. This is a very personal decision, but in communities of color we lack faces to make this pandemic real. If you've never known someone living with AIDS, now you do. You know my story and in sharing it I hope that others will know that they can live with this. They can have a career, a family, they too can find love again. Over the last three years I have learned AIDS is not me. I am me. AIDS is only one other part of my life.”
Jolivette is a Creole of Opelousa, Choctaw, Atakapa, Cherokee, French, African, and Spanish descent. As a descendant of the Creoles of Louisiana, Dr. Jolivette is personally and professionally aware of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on issues of race and ethnicity in the United States. Professor Jolivette currently serves as the tribal historian for the Atakapa-Ishak Nation located between southwest Louisiana and southeast Texas.
He has done work with the Agape Foundation, which works for peace in both national and international contexts and is working with the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center on a Creole Ethnicity and Heritage Bill for the 2010 census. Jolivette recently served on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's Special Task Force on the Status of Native Americans. As a former Middle School Dean, Jolivette is familiar with the current movement for small school reform in public education. He is the board president of Speak Out - the Institute for Democratic Education and Culture, a current board member of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and the former board president of iPride, an organization for mixed heritage and transracially adopted youth and their families.
