Kelly Leah Stewart

Kelly Leah Stewart is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education and the American Indian Studies Center. Her research examines the legacies of Indian boarding schools, land tenure, and public education in California through the frameworks of settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and neyooxo pedagogy.

Her first book, I Love You More: Faith and Resistance from the St. Boniface Indian Industrial School (in progress), builds from her family’s connection to St. Boniface Indian Industrial School (formerly located in Banning, California) while centering the broader experiences of survivors and descendants who navigated and resisted the Catholic-run mission boarding school system. She also serves as co-principal investigator of Remembering, Restorying, Reclaiming: A Community-Based Examination of Land Tenure and Public Education Across California (3R), a multi-year initiative grounded in archival research, community partnerships, and Indigenous student mentorship. Stewart’s scholarship is guided by neyooxo pedagogy, a framework rooted in relational accountability, weaving practices, and refusal. She is co-author of From Tovaangar to the University of California, Los Angeles (2023) and co-author of Neyooxo Pedagogy (2025), and is a member of UC San Diego’s Indigenous Futures Institute’s Council of Futurists.

She earned her Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership from the University of California, San Diego and California State University, San Marcos; a Master of Arts in American Indian Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Through her maternal lineage, she is a Tongva (Gabrieliño) and Payómkawish (Luiseño) descendant from the villages of Wa’aachnga, Jaibepet, and Toibingna.