Kim TallBear (born 1968) is a Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate professor at the University of Alberta, specializing in racial politics in science. Holding the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment, TallBear has published on DNA testing, race science and Indigenous identities, as well as on polyamory as a decolonization practice. Early life TallBear was born in 1968 at a public hospital in Pipestone, Minnesota. She grew up moving back and forth between the Sisseton and Flandreau reservations in South Dakota. During this time, she was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, until the age of fourteen when she went to live full time with her mother in St. Paul, Minnesota. TallBear is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, as well as a descendant from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. Her Indigenous descent comes from her mother’s side. Her father, who was only present in her life up to age three, is white. TallBear has two sisters and one brother, whose father is Floyd Westerman, a Dakota Sioux musician, actor and political activist. TallBear’s household growing up was a politically active environment and TallBear says her mother in particular helped to shape her understanding of research and academic thought as being a part of a colonial project. Nevertheless her mother also emphasized thinking practically about education, viewing it as the only way out of poverty. Education and career TallBear pursued post-secondary education at the University of Massachusetts in Boston obtaining an undergraduate degree in community planning. She then completed her master’s degree in environmental planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduating, TallBear worked for 10 years as an environmental planner for United States federal agencies, tribal governments, and national tribal organizations. She later worked for a non-governmental, Indigenous environmental research organization in Denver. This organization started holding workshops that researched the implications of mapping of the human genome and the genetic research on Indigenous peoples. It was through this workshop that TallBear found a desire to continue her education, and subsequently completed her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness in 2005. In 2010, TallBear was elected to be a member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and served in the position until 2013. In late 2016, she became the first ever Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples,