Andrew Jolivette

He became the founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Program at the University of California, San Diego, in 2020. The NAIS Program includes a minor and a graduate certificate and an elder/culture bearer-in-residence program. He served as a historian of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, an unrecognized tribe, from 2005 to 2010. He co-founded and is co-chair of the University of California Ethnic Studies Council which works to advance and support ethnic studies curriculum and programs across the state of California and the United States.

Jolivétte was a professor and chair of the American Indian studies department at San Francisco State University from 2010 to 2016.

Jolivette earned his bachelor's degree in sociology with a minor in English literature and a certificate in ethnic studies from the University of San Francisco. He earned his master's degree in sociology from San Francisco State University in 1999. His thesis was titled, "Native America: White Indians, Black Indians and the Contemporary Privilege of Color." He earned his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003, with a dissertation titled "Creole Diaspora: (Re)articulating the Social, Legal, Economic, and Regional Construction of American Indian Identity."

Andrew James Jolivette was born in San Francisco in 1975 to Annetta Donna Foster Jolivette and Kenneth Louis Jolivette. He grew up in San Francisco. He identifies as being of Louisiana Creole descent.