Research Collaborator
Ana Oihan Ametsa is a third-gendered cultural mediator, artist, and storyteller whose work bridges Indigenous and Western knowledge systems through a praxis of embodied scholarship and land-based memory. Born to settler families of Northern
Basque, French, and Western European descent, Ana has spent over two decades in deep relational work with Indigenous nations across Turtle Island (North America), including the Independent Lakota Nation, where she is a Hunkapi (customary kinship) citizen and adopted member of the Strong Heart Warrior Society. In this capacity, she has supported treaty rights, decolonization, and human rights advocacy with the United Nations.
Initially trained in ecological assessment and conservation science, Ana spent two decades working within state agencies and environmental NGOs before turning toward epistemological inquiry and ceremonial practice as methods for cultural and ecological understanding. For the past 25 years, she has focused on the revitalization of earth-based knowledge traditions, particularly those from Old Europe disrupted by forced erasure and cultural loss.
Ana’s experiences have allowed her to collaborate with Indigenous communities to remember, map, and protect cultural and ceremonial landscapes, advocate for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and support community-led research. She is the founding storyteller of AwakeningTheHorsePeople.org, co-founder of the Weaving Oceans Collective, and a key contributor to the Public History Project, an interdisciplinary research consortium in the New York–New Jersey bioregion.
As an artist, she works in natural materials and graphic media, co-produced the Lakota documentary Red Cry, and is a contributor to the Varied Spirits Anthology.
Based in Bilbao, Euskadi, Ana invites cross-disciplinary collaboration that centers ancestral knowledge systems, cultural resilience, and ecological justice in this time of global transformation.