Dr. Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Smiles’ work centers around conversations of the political role of the Indigenous deceased in relationships and contestations between Indigenous communities and the state; Smiles also has broader interests in critical Indigenous geographies, political ecology, science and technology studies, and tribal cultural resource preservation. Smiles earned his PhD in Geography from The Ohio State University, where he also spent a year as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the History department.