Molly Bigknife Antonio, PhD

Molly Bigknife Antonio, PhD, is of Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee, Irish, and English heritage. She is executive director of the nonprofit Pollen Circles, located in Window Rock, Arizona, and she serves as a Doctoral Program First Year Faculty Mentor at Southwestern College, as well as an associate faculty at Prescott College. She teaches and advises online students in the areas of environmental studies, adventure education, and Indigenous studies. Molly enjoys weaving together experiences for youth and adults that incorporate the senses, the arts, and the outdoors, with threads of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom.

Dr. Bigknife Antonio’s doctoral research, entitled “‘Sitting to My Loom’: Weaving Sustainability Through Navajo Kincentric Wisdom,” utilized Indigenous methodologies with narrative methods to encourage storytelling, with Navajo wool rug weavers as co-researchers. The collective words of knowing and being expressed through the traditional Navajo weavers’ worldviews forms a beautiful tapestry emphasizing human being’s responsibility to creatively weave a more balanced and thriving world for all of life, with conscious awareness and co-creative, physical-spiritual kinship guiding actions and relationships with the shared human-nature ecological community.