Jana Fortier

Jana Fortier is a Himalayan specialist who teaches courses on sustainability issues and heritage preservation. Her expertise centers around the resilience of communities facing threats to their language and culture. She has spent several years of research in Nepal and India resulting in numerous articles and two books. The book 'Kings of the Forest: The cultural resilience of Himalayan hunter-gatherers’ (U. of Hawai’i Press) portrays the life of highly endangered hunter-gatherers, and ‘A Comparative Dictionary of Raute and Rawat’ (Harvard Univ. Press) documents their Sino-Tibetan languages. She received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Anthropology with a concentration in South Asian Studies and her research has been funded by numerous agencies including the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation. Dr. Fortier serves as a consultant to government agencies such as the City of San Diego, the Department of the Navy, and the California Dept. of Transportation concerning local cultural issues such as public folk arts, sustainable development, and preserving Native American heritage. Her latest article on hunter-gatherer relations with other living beings is in 'The Routledge International Handbook of Himalayan Environments, Development, and Wellbeing'.