Cynthia Wilson is a tribal member of the Navajo Nation, born and raised in Monument Valley, UT. She is of the Folded Arms People clan and born for the Towering House clan. Wilson holds a MS in Nutrition from the University of Utah. She serves as the Traditional Foods Program Director for Utah Diné Bikéyah, a native-led nonprofit organization with a mission to preserve and protect the cultural and natural resources of ancestral lands. She is also a founding member of the Women of Bears Ears initiative that seeks to restore indigenous women’s matrilineal roles and to rematriate the Earth. Her work encompasses traditional knowledge that addresses the environmental, cultural, nutritional and spiritual health of the land and the people. Wilson hopes to strengthen healthy food practices and ties to reclaim local traditional food ways among indigenous communities.

On becoming an RPL fellow, Wilson explains, “As an indigenous women, I come from a silenced and marginalized society where religion was once an act of violence, cultural genocide and displacement among our Native families, cultural identity, language and ancestral homelands. I chose to become a RPL Fellow as an opportunity to share my lived experiences, preserve my culture and language; and to bring forth awareness, education and civic understanding from oppressive and forced assimilation on indigenous ways of knowing.”

Wilson hopes to give the students she mentors a greater knowledge of and open-mindedness to the history and impacts of colonization among Native and indigenous rights. She also hopes to instill in them a deeper understanding of and receptivity to finding peace and healing embedded in the “spirituality rooted in our coexistence with both the natural world and non-human relatives in beauty, harmony and balance as the Earth surface peoples.”