Laurie Arnold is an enrolled citizen of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She is Associate Professor of History, Director of Native American Studies, and the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Chair of the Humanities at Gonzaga University.  

In 2019-20 she held the Frederick W. Beinecke Senior Research Fellowship at Yale University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. Her first book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press. Her scholarship includes Colville author Mourning Dove, the Indigenous Columbia Plateau, Indian gaming, and her current research considers how contemporary Native American playwrights are using theatre to tell Native narratives of the past and present. 

Her publications have appeared in Time Magazine and in scholarly journals including Montana: The Magazine of Western History, the Western Historical Quarterly, and The Public Historian. She is a publicly engaged scholar and has collaborated on projects with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, the High Desert Museum, the History Colorado Center, and the National Council on Public History.  

She holds a PhD in History from Arizona State University and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Oregon State University.