Gabrielle Tayac
Gabrielle Tayac is a historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She is a member of the Piscataway Indian Nation in Maryland and works on Indigenous land and water rights and treaty issues with the U.S. government.
She was born in Greenwich Village, New York City. She earned a BS in social work and American Indian studies from Cornell University in 1989 and a PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 1999. She is the niece of Piscataway Chief Billy Redwing Tayac.
Tayac began at the National Museum of the American Indian as a research consultant in 1999, helped develop the museum’s education work, and became a curator after the museum opened in 2004. She co-curated the inaugural permanent exhibit “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identity” and was the lead curator for “Return to a Native Place: Native Peoples of the Chesapeake Region” (2007). She also helped curate the traveling exhibit “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.” Her exhibit “Native New York: Where Nations Rise” was planned to open in 2019.
She helped found the League of Indigenous Sovereign Nations and serves as communications director for the Spirit Aligned Leadership Program. Tayac has taken part in activism, including marching against the Keystone XL pipeline in 2014, supporting Leonard Peltier’s release in 2016, and speaking at the People’s Climate March in 2017 on President Trump’s 100th day.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 01:08 (CET).