Rose shows how she performs justice, speaks truth to power, plays the gender card anytime she can, and writes it just like she sees it. Rose can make you think poetry is scholarship, fiction is history, and a photograph is an imaginary picture of truth. But then, Rose just likes to mess with you, tricking all the boys and girls into her dreams that live across the border, right at the genre-crossing. Get marginal while riding the fences with the Leader of the Pack. Give it up for critical inquiry, girls, with Dr. Rose, Coyote Emerita. Show her how you can howl.
Rayna Green has been a Curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution since 1986, becoming Curator Emerita in 2014. With a doctorate in folklore and American studies from Indiana University, she has served on university faculties and in public service institutions.
Green has a special expertise and interest in American Indian representations and American identity, the history of American Indian women, American/Indian material culture, American/Indian agriculture, and American foodways. Four books (The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America; Women in American Indian Society; (ed.) That’s What She Said: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry By Native American Women; and (ed. and comp.) Native American Women: A Contextual Bibliography) and many essays (“The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture”; “The Tribe Called Wannabee”; “Magnolias Grow in Dirt”;”Southern Women’s Bawdy Humor;” and “Mother Corn Meets the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South”) are well-known in native, feminist studies and food studies curricula.
She has been a curator of exhibitions (“Bon Appétit: Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian”; “Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000;” and “American Encounters”), made documentary short films (We Are Here: 500 Years of Pueblo Resistance; Corn Is Who We Are: The Story of Pueblo Indian Food; and From Ritual to Retail: Pueblos, Tourism, and the Fred Harvey Company), and made pioneering audio recordings of Native women’s music (“Heartbeat: The Voices of First Nations Women, I and II”).