Listen to UCLA associate professor and triple Bruin Theresa Ambo reflect on her path from academic dismissal to faculty life while discussing indigenous studies, land acknowledgments and how universities can move toward meaningful institutional change.

Nicole Hatton: Welcome back to the Bruin to Bruin series. My name is Nicole Hatton, and today I’m excited to be talking with Dr. Theresa Ambo. Not only is she an associate professor in the Department of Education and American Indian Studies, but she is what we call a triple Bruin, having earned her B.A., M.Ed. and Ph.D. right here at UCLA. Her areas of expertise in advertising interests include community engagement, higher education and organizational change. Her research focuses on the historical relationships and contemporary partnerships between Native nations and public universities, and she challenges us to move beyond simple land acknowledgments and toward real institutional change. So, Dr. Ambo, could you please tell us more about your background and career journey or just anything else that I missed in this introduction?

Theresa Ambo: Yeah, thank you for having me on the podcast, Nicole, and sharing my experience here at UCLA as an alumni and now as a faculty. As you shared, my name’s Theresa Jean Ambo, and I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Well, I grew up in a small city called La Puente, which is in the east part of Los Angeles County. My parents still live in my childhood home, and it’s really great to be, to have gone to UCLA and to be back as a faculty now. I came to UCLA in 2002, before most of you all were born, and I came as an undergraduate. I was undeclared at the time. I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my education, but I knew that I wanted to go to college. It’s very rare that students come to UCLA now undeclared, I would say. I took a few classes in American Indian studies and really found a lot of deep connections between my cultural background or my ethnic background, if you will, and what I was learning in the classroom. And so something that I often share with people is, I’m mixed heritage. And so on my mom’s side, I am Native American, and my tribes specifically are Gabrielino-Tongva and Luiseño, and that’s two communities that are indigenous to the Los Angeles area and northern San Diego area. I’m also Chicana on my mom’s side, and on my dad’s side, on my paternal side, I’m European American, if you will. Being in the classroom and learning about Native communities from an academic perspective really connected to my family background, and it ignited a lot of interest and passion for me as an undergraduate student. While I was at UCLA, I had a few challenges, academically speaking, I wasn’t the best student. I was really involved in the American Indian Student Association. Classes, I struggled a lot, and I’m not really afraid to say that or to share that with students or anybody, really. I was on academic probation. I was subject to dismissal, and even at one point in my fourth year as a student here, undergraduate, I was academically dismissed, and I carried a lot of shame about being academically dismissed when it happened, and even as I went on to work in student affairs and to get my master’s and my Ph.D., it was something I didn’t talk openly about because I was afraid. I was ashamed at what it meant, that I had this moment, this experience, but it actually became a galvanizing moment for me, and it shaped my entire career, which has been in higher education, because it called on me to ask questions around what are universities doing to support Native students and specifically, what are they doing to support Native people whose land they’re on. That experience really shaped my career, why I worked in student affairs here, why I went and got a master’s degree and ultimately a Ph.D. and what I study now, in terms of historical relationships and contemporary partnerships.

NH: Thank you so much for sharing and just being so honest. I really appreciate your honesty with classes. Yeah, classes can be pretty hard at UCLA, or just balancing being a full-time student and college in general, but I’m really glad that you’re able to find something that and study things that are really resonated with you and your identity, so that’s really amazing to hear. My next question is, I guess you kind of touched on this a little bit, but why did you want to study American Indian studies, student affairs and education? And is there anything in particular that drew you to these? So you could touch on I guess like some of the other topics too.

TA: As I was saying, my major as an undergraduate was American Indian studies, and that’s the department I’m currently a faculty in, or one of the departments anyhow. And I think it was really being in a field of study that centered indigenous perspectives and the interests of Indigenous people is what really made me passionate about getting that degree and being in that field. You know, most often in our society, in our education system, Native American people are at the margins or were never mentioned, and we’re often forgotten. Or we’re an afterthought, is what I also tell people when we’re talking about diversity, equity and inclusion – these words that have become surveilled, if you will, in the current political climate. But when we’re talking about those words and we’re creating programs that ensure that we’re addressing the needs of historically marginalized communities, Native people might not even come into consciousness. And it’s only after the fact that maybe the program’s done and somebody might think, well, “We forgot this group of people.” And so I think elevating the stories and the experience and the interests of Native people is what really drew me to American Indian studies or what they call other places, indigenous studies. And then, as I mentioned, you know, my experience as a student, not being the best student, not having the best reading comprehension, not having the best writing skills, having to work because I was from a low-income background, having to work, you know, full time or, you know, 20 hours a week and balance that with my student leadership and my coursework, that is what really drew me into student affairs and education. I saw how critical my mentors were in my experience in supporting me, and so I wanted to do the same. I wanted to be that person within the university that helped Native students, but all students. I’ve worked with students from all different backgrounds, all different identity groups, and so I think that was the pull into student affairs, was to have that hands-on work with students and supporting them on their journey so that they had a less difficult or challenging time than I did. But when I started doing my master’s in education, I became very passionate about research and education as an applied field, and so we can conduct research and implement that research, what we learn, that knowledge, right into the classroom, right into student affairs, right on our campuses. And so it was that applied nature that I really loved about educational research. It wasn’t research that was done in a vacuum that didn’t impact anybody’s lives, but it was research that you can learn from and use to transform universities or the university we were in. That love for research is what really put me on this pathway of becoming a research faculty.

NH: Thank you so much for sharing that. My next question is, can you please tell us more about the Remembering, Restoring and Reclaiming project and your role in it?

TA: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about the project. Remembering, Restoring and Reclaiming is a statewide project that looks at the land tenure of California and the role of public education in the land tenure. It’s a community-based project, so it engages local Native nations on rewriting and restoring, or retelling the history of California’s lands in relationship to education. I have the opportunity to organize the team, but I work with some really fantastic Native women. Kelly Stewart, who is a faculty at Cal State Long Beach, and she’s also a current UCLA chancellor’s postdoc here. Heather Ponchetti Daly, who’s Kumeyaay, and she is at the University of California, San Diego, as well as Patricia Quijada, who is a faculty in education at UC Davis, and she is Cupeño. Kelly Stewart is Gabrielino-Tongva and Luiseño as well. Together, what we’re doing essentially at our respective institutions is we’re working with members of Native nations to ask them, “What is the history of the land that this university occupies? And what has that history looked like across time?” You know, these institutions didn’t pop up out of nowhere. There’s a long legacy of colonial interactions and colonial inheritance on how the university acquired its land. What we’re really interested in is not necessarily rewriting the university’s history and centering the university constantly, right? These big universities have wonderful reputations, but what we want to do is we want to have the communities tell the story from their vantage point, which is often a story that’s not told by the university, and it’s often excluded by the university. Oftentimes, when you go to any college or any university across the country, they very rarely outside of a land acknowledgment talk about Native people as a part of their history. Most often, the history goes, UCLA was established in 1919 and was originally housed at the Los Angeles Normal School. There’s a lot more history before that, though. That’s really what the project aims to do. We’re in our first year, and so we’re still actively doing the research and working with community partners on unpacking these layers of history together.

NH: Thank you so much for sharing. And yeah, I think that I tend to also sometimes forget when I hear UCLA was established, like whenever, and then yeah, I feel like a lot of us tend to forget that. So it’s really interesting and really cool that you’re able to work on this project. My next question is, we hear land acknowledgments at almost every campus event now. So based on your research, where do these statements usually fail, and what would a successful acknowledgment actually look like in terms of policy?

TA: Well, land acknowledgments have become an area of my research over the last five years, I would say, and I’ve published two articles: one titled, “Beyond Land acknowledgment and Settler Universities” and another one called, “Performance or Progress,” and I’ve done this with two really wonderful colleagues, Kay Wayne Yang at UC San Diego and Theresa Rocha Beardall at the University of Washington in Seattle. And in those articles, we, and in the research that we do together, we talk about, well, where did land acknowledgments come from, and why did universities start to adopt them? And what we’ve really found is that it was around 2016 to 2017 that Native people in universities started to do what a mentor of mine calls a land introduction. And as a form of refusal and resistance and education, many of Native faculty would put in their signature line a land acknowledgment, you know, as you see today, and that land acknowledgment was more of a Native person acknowledging that they potentially were a visitor or they were on their own ancestral lands. And so it was really a deeply relational practice of saying, “I’m a visitor, I’m a guest or I’m indigenous to these lands” and acknowledging Native lands. Over time, this started to be adopted by allies and other people who are equity-minded within the university, and it’s become what we see today, for better or for worse. Land acknowledgments can be very performative if they’re delivered without the proper intention, without any sort of material resources or institutional change tied to them. It’s just a statement that’s read, and then oftentimes what we see is the statement is read, and then we move on in the event and go on to the business of the program, and we never come back to Native people. And because there’s nothing tangible tied to these statements that are read, they become these empty gestures of the university. But there are good land acknowledgments, and there are not good land acknowledgments, is what we found. You know, many land acknowledgments that are highly problematic, they never mentioned the tribal community who is being mentioned. They kind of use these generalized terms, like “Did we recognize Indigenous people?” Other problematic ways land acknowledgments are represented or presented is, they write or they speak about Native people as people of the past, that their land was willingly given, and it kind of infers that Native people are no longer with us, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I think a meaningful land acknowledgment, and we see really great examples of this, and I think that while UCLA’s land acknowledgment can always be improved by tying material actions, or material resources and actions to it, I do think that UCLA’s land acknowledgment is a good example of a thoughtful and meaningful land acknowledgment because it was written with the community. And that is something that makes the land acknowledgment unique, is that the land acknowledgment in its present form communicates what the community wished at the time that it was written. They asked for our Tongva language to be included in the statement, and they composed those lines. And so I think that the best land acknowledgment is a land acknowledgment that includes the community in the process of composing it. And an even better land acknowledgment is a land acknowledgment that makes a commitment to Native people and that moves beyond just a moment or a statement, but it actually says, “This is our land acknowledgment. We’re acknowledging our colonial inheritance, our history. We’re acknowledging that we’re on this community’s land, and to reckon with that history, this is what we’re going to do.” So that would be a just land acknowledgment statement, in my opinion.

NH: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. I actually didn’t know that much about how UCLA’s land acknowledgment was written, but I just know that I tend to hear people before different events making that land acknowledgment, and I feel like I hear it so often, but I also didn’t really know that much that went on behind it. But yeah, thank you so much for sharing that insight. My next question is, if you were not a professor, is there anything else that you think you could see yourself doing for your career? Or if not, then I guess what made you want to become a professor?

TA: That’s a great question. Before I started my master’s and my Ph.D., I worked in student affairs, and I love to work with college students. I think that UCLA students, college students, you are brilliant, very talented, creative, innovative, and so it just kind of gives me, brings so much fulfillment and meaning to my life to be able to support people at a stage in their life where they’re like, “The possibilities are endless,” and with the right support, you can just launch onto this beautiful path of your life. And so if I wasn’t a professor, I would still work in student affairs. And I’d still work with college students or youth that are transitioning from high school to college because I love that part of a person’s life, where you just kind of watch them and support them in charting their next path. I never planned to be a professor. A lot of young people or people who are entering graduate school, they might have in mind, “I want to be a research faculty. I want to be a professor. I want to work at an R1.” When I went to do the master’s, and then eventually the Ph.D., I thought, “This is going to help me be a stronger student affairs professional,” or “This is going to support me when I work for a tribe in Southern California in education.” And so it wasn’t really ever the plan. And as I kept going, and I fell more and more in love with research and cultivating and uplifting Native perspectives that are often marginalized in educational research, I started down this path of being a professor and being in the classroom is the way that I get to have that student affairs interaction that I used to have. I get to interact very closely with students on my research projects. I have graduate students and undergraduate students who work on the projects. And so that’s also a way that I still get to have that student interaction, and I get to do the research, which is what I really am passionate about. So the faculty life, though I never planned it, kind of brought together this beautiful world that I, for me, of like two loves, my love for working with students and my love for working in the area of research. And if I didn’t do anything related to education at all, maybe I’d be an artist. I like to do different artistic practice and different crafts. I’ve done all of that since I was very young, and so right now, something I’m very passionate about is weaving. I weave traditional baskets. And so maybe if I wasn’t a professor and I didn’t work in student affairs, I might pursue some pathway of being an artist of some sort.

NH: Thank you so much for sharing, and I actually relate because I also really like art as well, and I feel like in some of my other, I guess like campus leadership or job experiences, I’ve also been able to work with other students and see how they can grow. My next question is, how’s your experience been as a faculty in residence, and how has this experience been different from just being a regular professor?

TA: I think that’s a great question. and one reason being that not a lot of students who are here know that there are faculty in residence. And so there’s about 20 faculty that live on the Hill or in residential life with students, and we live in between the cracks and the crevices and small apartments. We live with our families. Some faculty have children, some have spouses and we’re all assigned to a building. And so I’m very fortunate that my building is Dykstra Hall, which is a large traditional hall, right, that has like the shared rooms and the common bathroom set up with many floors. I think there’s nine floors if I’m remembering correctly. And in Dykstra Hall is the American Indian and Pacific Islander Living Learning Community. And so, again, right, this is like a blending of multiple worlds for me where I get to be a professor, now I get a little bit of taste of student affairs life and I get to work with Native students, but I work with students and residents, resident assistants, RAs. I work with them from the whole building, not just one floor. And what we do is we offer multiple programs throughout the quarter. And so two weeks ago as an example, I did a journaling program with some of the RAs in Dykstra, and it was a buildingwide program. It was on a Wednesday or Thursday night. We brought out all these journaling supplies. I love to journal. It’s like, I’ve been journaling since I was really young. And we offer different types of journaling opportunities. We gave supplies for people if they wanted to do junk journals or maybe a traditional journal or a bullet journal. We provided washi tape and stickers and glue, and people came and they journaled for two hours, and then they took their supplies home. A few weekends ago, I hosted a Sunday brunch where on the first floor lounge of Dykstra Hall brought breakfast items, and we sat, and we just had brunch, and we talked about students’ questions about working with faculty or how do you find a job. The real goal of a faculty in residence, or an FIR, is really to have that close interaction with students because often when you all are in your classrooms, your classes can be 100, 200, sometimes 300 people, and you might never ever talk to your professor. And so, when you’re in those classes, it can become very intimidating. You can have the impression that your faculty doesn’t have time or they don’t want to talk to you. It can be intimidating because you might see other students talking to your professor, and you don’t know the right questions to ask. And so, as a faculty in residence, our real goal is for you all to know faculty are people too, and we’re approachable, and we have interests and hobbies, and we have families. And so that’s a little bit about the faculty in residence role. I really enjoy the role because I get to work with students, and I get to see them in a more I guess intimate setting because this is where we all live. Sometimes I’ll walk in the hallway, and I’ll see a student stressed out ‘cause they have a midterm coming, and I’ll just stop to ask, you know, “Are you OK? Do you need anything?” And they’ll maybe share with me like, “I have a midterm. I’m really stressed out.” Or I might have a student who’s come to multiple programs, taken a class with me and you know, I might see them walking on campus, and you know, just say, “Give me a hug. How are you?” and check in and just see how they’re doing. I think that’s something that’s really beautiful. The relationship transpires not just on the Hill, but it comes also onto campus. And we get to build really wonderful relationships with students and support them on their journey but kind of know more about them or know more about each other on a human level, right, beyond the classroom. Our hope is really that students understand that we are approachable. We are just people. We have lives and hobbies and interests. And hopefully they can see that, and it helps them transform their relationships with the faculty they have outside of the Hill that they have for their classrooms.

NH: Yeah. Thank you so much for answering, and I actually am an RA myself right now. So I’ve also been able to host a couple events, with the faculty and residents, and I think it’s super cool, and you bring up a really good point about just being able to connect deeper with students because I’ve also had the experience of being in a really large lecture hall with hundreds of other students and then never be able to talk to the professor, unless you go to office hours and stuff. My next question is, you earned your undergrad, grad and did your Ph.D. all at UCLA, making you a triple Bruin. So, how was your experience different each time you came back to UCLA, and did you gain any new perspectives or just learn anything interesting from these different experiences?

TA: Yeah, I think that’s a really great question. When I was an undergraduate student, I was just figuring it out. And I think that’s OK. That’s what undergrad is for. You have your general education, and then you have your major, and, you know, sometimes things are just rhythmic and you get a pacing, and there’s no problem. And sometimes you might stumble or take a misstep, but that’s what doing your undergraduate, graduate degree is about. It is learning, right? And becoming that young adult that you will be when you graduate and get as you’re getting ready to go into the professional world. And so I made a lot of mistakes as an undergraduate, and a lot of all those lessons I took into my master’s degree. And so after being away for five years and working, I was ready to do the master’s degree and because of my experience as an undergraduate, I was all in on the master’s. I read everything. I went to office hours. I asked my professors for extra reading. If I felt like we weren’t reading about Native people, I asked them for additional recommendations so that I can have a more fuller understanding of Native experience in education. And so my master’s degree was just an all-in experience. And I learned how to be a better, like intentional reader or an active reader. I learned how to ask for mentorship and ask for support. These are things that I wasn’t really doing when I was an undergraduate student. I came into the master’s with work experience, and I was older, so I was a bit more mature. The Ph.D. program, I would say similar to the master’s program, that experience was a lot of fun for me. I worked with a mentor here who’s still here. Her name is Sylvia Hurtado, and I got a lot of research opportunities almost immediately. That first quarter of my Ph.D. program, I was able to go to Cornell University and study campus climate and lead focus groups with student groups. And so I feel like the Ph.D. was different in the sense where I, you know, if I had to step back a little bit and say my bachelor’s was kind of just like figuring it out, right, and trying to get into a rhythm, but I stumbled a lot. And then the master’s degree, I was laser-focused on doing well and getting A’s. And my head was down, and I was so focused on this, completing this degree that I’d never really looked up and looked to the horizon, right? I never like really paused and like, you know, took all that time in, and I feel like the Ph.D., I’ve got a world of experiences and what it really called on me to do was to lift my head up and look at my surroundings and look around me. And so in my prior degrees, I was really focused on Native students, and that’s always been at the heart and in Native communities. It’s always been at the heart of the work that I have done and will continue to do. But by lifting my head up, I was able to see the whole university, and I was able to see how it was organized, who were all the players in it, and in being able to lift my head up and learn more about higher education and organizational change, it helped me to see, “Well, this is how we change institutions to be more beneficial, more supportive of Native people.” I would say maybe that is the difference in getting that particular degree. I also relished in being a UCLA student. Now, as a faculty, I go to all the basketball games. This was something that I really relished in when I was a Ph.D. student. And so I would say for those students who are listening, while you’re on your journey and there’s moments of stress and you may be working a significant amount, you might have your classes, you might have your student organizations – don’t forget to pause and to take in the fact that you are at a top university in the country, in the world, and make sure to make the most of your experience, you know, do go to Westwood and do the Westwood things, go to sporting events, go to different community functions, really take it all in, and I feel like that was something that was different in the Ph.D. was getting all this training, learning and knowledge, and I was also really enjoying being a UCLA student.

NH: Thank you so much for sharing. Sometimes we don’t have the chance to really like look up, as you said, and just think about and appreciate all the different things that UCLA has to offer. So with that being said, my last question is, knowing everything that you do now, is there any last pieces of advice that you would give an incoming or a newer UCLA student?

TA: I mean, as you can tell, I’m pretty opinionated and have a lot to say, but I’ll keep it brief to say, be kind to yourself on this journey that you’re on. I think something that we said a lot in the pandemic was to give yourself grace. And I think for students who are here, who are starting or on their academic journey at an institution that’s very competitive, it can be overwhelming and hard to not be hard on yourself to be. It can be hard to not be critical of yourself when you make a mistake. But I would say, enjoy the journey, and don’t be so focused on the destination, right? Make sure you look up, and while you’re on this path and getting your undergraduate degree or even your graduate degree, you know, be kind to yourself. It’s OK to make mistakes. Those are opportunities to learn and to grow and to stretch. At the end of those experiences, you’ll be all the stronger and more knowledgeable because of them.

NH: Thank you so much for that amazing piece of advice. That was it for our Bruin to Bruin series. We hope to see you on the next episode, and thank you so much for tuning in.