My name is Diana Onco-Ingyadet.

I am of the Reed People clan.

My father is Comanche (Yamparika band).

My maternal grandfather is Red Running into the Water clan.

My paternal grandfather is Kiowa.

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I was born and raised in Norman, OK. I am the youngest of four girls. My mother is Diné (Navajo) and the majority of our family lives in Monument Valley, UT. My father is Caigu (Kiowa) and Numunu (Comanche) and grew up in Hobart, OK. 

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I attended Norman Public Schools from grades K - 8. At the encouragement of my brother, I enrolled in Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah, OK, a tribally run boarding school in northeastern Oklahoma. 

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In 2007, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Gates Millennium Scholarship, and used it for my bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. 

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The majority of my undergraduate career was spent in Flagstaff, AZ at Northern Arizona University, where I majored in Applied Indigenous Studies with a personal focus on Indigenous Education. After graduation in 2012, I joined Teach For America because of their Native Alliance Initiative to serve Indigenous students in the classroom. For two years, I taught 2nd grade on the Navajo Nation in a small town called Navajo, NM. 

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I had always planned on returning to classroom teaching, but came across a panel at Arizona State University where a graduate student spoke about the Higher and Postsecondary Education Master's at ASU. I had no idea that Higher Ed was even an area you could specialize in, but it intrigued me so much I immediately applied for the program in the spring of 2014. 

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By the fall 2014, I had moved and settled in Tempe, AZ ready to begin my master's program. While in the program, I worked as a Tribal Relations Coordinator, a substitute teacher, and a graduate intern with the American Indian Student Support Services office at ASU. After the completion of the degree, my plan was to find a doctoral program that would allow me to continue to work in higher education and also support my area of interest: Indigenous Higher Education.

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Luckily, I found the Organizational Change & Leadership program at the University of Southern California. This is a distant-based program that gathers a cohort of doctoral students together from all around the world and from various careers. The hardest part about being in this program was the full-time, consecutive enrollment that was required. I was a full-time doctoral student every semester (spring/summer/fall) for 3.5 years and working a full-time job at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. I was also co-parenting with my son who was 3 years old at the start of my program. Life was not easy, but luckily I was able to successfully defend my dissertation in December 2019. 

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In the summer of 2019, I accepted the position as Assistant Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University. I love my job and my students! I have not yet decided how much I want to share about certain aspects of my life, but will most likely do so within my blog. So please stay tuned if you would like to learn more about my story and thank you for those who made it to the end. You are appreciated.