Julia Coates

A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Julia Coates was born in Pryor, Oklahoma, within the Nation's boundaries, but was raised in northern California’s Redwood Country. She lived in San Francisco for fifteen years, where she completed undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico while she completed her PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. While there, she also worked as the Program Director for the Native Lands Institute and was active in working with tribal and community coalitions around the issues of Native religious rights. During much of that time, she commuted weekly between Albuquerque and Window Rock, AZ, on the Navajo reservation, where her husband lived and worked.

Julia served as a delegate to the 1999 Cherokee Nation Constitutional Convention, where she was instrumental in organizing a coalition of twenty delegates who led the successful movement to establish representation on the Tribal Council for Cherokees who resided outside the tribe's jurisdictional boundaries. She later was elected to two terms as a Tribal Councilor (2007-2015). Julia was recruited in 2000 to work for the Cherokee Nation, initially to teach the Cherokee Nation History Course and later to develop an organizing model for additional At Large community groups. She was concurrently an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, and in 2010-2012, was a Visiting Professor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. She has also worked on Research and Special Projects with the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA, and presently is a trainer for the Falmouth Institute, assisting employees and elected officials from tribes across the country in fostering good tribal administration and governance.

Julia is a member of Echota ceremonial grounds at Park Hill, OK, and although she maintains a home in Tahlequah, she currently resides with her two dogs, Celia and Maudie, in Los Angeles, California, where she enjoys the energy and vitality of an urban environment, and the strong and well-organized southern California Indian community.