Barbara Alice Mann
Barbara Alice Mann (1947) – Ph. D. author, historian, oral traditionalist, and elder. Professor (now Emerita) of Honors Humanities at the University of Toledo, 1982‒2022, has published twenty books, including works on matriarchal cultures, as her second book, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas, 2000; in 2006, Daughters of Mother Earth: The Wisdom of Native American Women; and in 2025, her most recent Indigenous Struggles in the US. She has also published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Her popular Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America (2016) was translated by Valeria Trisoglio and published in 2023 by Venexia – Le Civette Saggi : Spiriti del Sangue. Spiriti del respiro. Il Cosmo Gemellare degli Indiani d’America. A Bear Clan, Ohio Seneca, Mann lives in her Ohio homeland. Politically, she defines herself as “decidedly post-colonial in outlook”. When she first entered the University of Toledo as a scholar (1982), her Indigenous elders gave her the “job of ‘setting the record straight.’” Thus, in publishing her work, she says, “I was really working for the Indigenous people of Ohio.”
