Beth Rose Middleton Manning is professor of Native American studies and the Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair in California Indian Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is also associate director of environmental and climate justice for the Institute of the Environment at UC Davis.
Middleton Manning’s research and teaching center Native American environmental policy and cultural site protection, rural environmental justice and environmental health, African and Indigenous intersections in the Americas, and Indigenous approaches to climate change. She has written two books: Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (University of Arizona Press, 2011), on Native applications of conservation easements, and Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River (University of Arizona Press, 2018), on the history of Indian allotment lands at the headwaters of the California State Water Project. Her articles have been published in Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Human Geography, Natural Resources Journal, and other journals. Middleton Manning is committed to collaborative research that contributes to decolonizing relationships to land and water. Her current research is funded by the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, the Open Rivers Fund of the Resources Legacy Fund, and the UC Davis Environmental Health Sciences Center.
Her project, “Healing Rivers, Communities, and Homelands: Indigenous Leadership in 21st-Century Dam Removal and River Restoration in North America,” recognizes Indigenous leadership in dam removals as central to both truth and reconciliation and climate adaptation. The study looks across multiple dam removal projects to understand the sociopolitical and institutional mechanisms supporting successful Indigenous-led efforts to remove dams and restore impacted rivers.
