Taína (Taíno/Huichol/Maya) (she/they) is an Indigenous Latina living in a borderlands identity, working towards community liberation, Indigenous food sovereignty, debordering, and climate justice. She is in the PhD program in Sustainability at Arizona State University and a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL)- a position she was awarded as a first year PhD student thanks to their work with Dr. Melissa Nelson in developing GFL's Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area.A “Sonoran Desert evangelist,” she encourages others to see deserts for what they are: devastatingly beautiful and bioculturally diverse landscapes. Her current research interests lie in Indigenous knowledge systems, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), desert ecology and climate change, cosmology/cosmogeneology, food system sustainability and sovereignty, seed/land rematriation, Indigenous histories of trade and migration, the US-Mexico borderlands, and indigeneity. Additionally, she is interested in bringing the frameworks of ecotheology and liberation theology into the discipline and practice of sustainability. Outside of the academy, she has been an active leader and voice for radical hope in the climate and social justice advocacy work of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). One of her roles was serving as the 2020-2021 ELCA World Hunger Advocacy Fellow and as a young adult Indigenous voice in the Truth & Healing movement, which included contributions to the task force advising the Presiding Bishop on how to move forward with the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery. She hopes to include community advocacy and engagement work in her scholarship to pursue a more sustainable connection to the Earth and each other through any and all art forms. An amateur filmmaker, vocalist, and stand-up poet, she is also in the early stages of developing her podcast, “Latindigenous” – a forum for discussing Latin American Indigenous identities and the challenges in defining and claiming indigeneity. Passionate about connecting communities through research and writing on food, equity, climate, and spirituality, she has the long-term goal of working with global desert communities to learn how ancestral food traditions, relationships to land, and TEK can help communities living in desert ecologies build and maintain food sovereignty in the places most vulnerable to climate change.