Yvette Running Horse Collin

Yvette Running Horse Collin is a Marie Skłodowska Curie IEF post-doctoral researcher in the AGES group. Her project is titled: MethylRIDE: Charting DNA Methylation Reprogramming of Ice Age Horses in the Face of Global Climate Change and Extinction. She is interested in the fields of equine genomics, archelogy, paleontology, metagenomics, indigenous studies, sustainability and climate change.

Yvette is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation (Oglala Sioux Tribe). For more than a decade, she has received specialized training from a number of Lakota traditional knowledge bearers in advanced indigenous sciences, environmental practices, and medicines. Within her culture, these categories of traditional indigenous knowledge are selectively passed to candidates who are viewed as capable of learning, practicing and holding such knowledge in a manner that is preserved accurately for the benefit of the People of her Nation, and as appropriate, for the world.

Yvette received her B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Joint M.A. from New York University. She completed her PhD work at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Phi Kappa Phi International Honors Society, Golden Key International Honors Society.) Her doctoral research, which was sponsored by multiple UAF Indigenous Studies Fellowship awards and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, focused on the history of the horse in the Americas and its relationship with First Nation Peoples.

Upon completion of her doctorate in 2017, Yvette served her Nation as an appointed Presidential Ambassador, and continued her work as an Administrator for the Black Hills Sioux Nation Council. As is aligned with her cultural protocols, Yvette spent the past three years returning her research back to the communities who participated in her doctoral study. In many cases, this took the form of physically returning representative herds of the descendants of the original horses of such Peoples to their communities and actively participating with elders in teaching and sharing the traditions and science surrounding them.