Davina Ruth Two Bears is Diné (Navajo) originally from Birdsprings, Arizona.
Two Bears is currently a visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Postdoctoral Fellow at Swarthmore College. Before deciding to go back to school to obtain a PhD, Davina worked for fourteen years for the Navajo Nation Archaeology Department as a Program Manager and a tribal archaeologist conducting cultural resources inventories on the western half of the Navajo reservation. In 2019, Davina graduated with her PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University with an emphasis in Archaeology and a PhD Minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her dissertation topic derives from her grandparents’ oral history about the Old Leupp Boarding School (OLBS), an early twentieth century federal Indian Boarding School located on the southwestern Navajo Reservation. Davina recently published parts of her dissertation research in KIVA Journal (Vol. 87 2021) and in a Special Issue of the Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (Vol. 33, Issue 1, 2022). She is currently working on a new project with archaeology colleagues about the Old Leupp Boarding School’s reuse as a Japanese Isolation Center in 1943 during World War II.