Yo’oko M. H. Salazar (Yoeme) is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University, where they work with the Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) certificate program. Grounded in research as a process of reclamation, revitalization, and regeneration, her work approaches Indigenous science as living knowledge systems rooted in relationship with land, the senses, the elements, and culture. Guided by Indigenous methods, methodologies, and philosophies, Yo'oko works in an interdisciplinary fashion across botany, environmental science, ethnomusicology and acoustic ecology, Indigenous food systems, archives, liberative praxis, and data sovereignty.
Yo’oko is completing their PhD in Earth, Environment and Society at PSU. Her dissertation examines territory, knowledge, and power in colonial New Spain, tracing how colonial institutions recorded, criminalized, and archived Indigenous knowledges and land relations, and how those patterns carry into present-day bioprospecting, biopiracy, and digital archiving. Her broader research supports community-led plant and seed knowledge protection, ecological restoration, environmental conservation, and Indigenous data governance across the Americas.
Yo'oko's earlier work appears under the name Hailey Maria Salazar.