Nancy Bonvillain is a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Bard College at Simon's Rock. She is author of over twenty books on language, culture, and gender, including a series on Native American peoples. In her field work she studied the Mohawk and Navajo, and she has published a grammar and dictionary of the Akwesasne dialect of Mohawk. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1972 and has taught at Columbia University, The New School, SUNY Purchase, Stony Brook University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She now teaches at Bard College at Simon's Rock.