Stacy Lynn Leeds

To hear Stacy Leeds tell it, ending up at the top-ranked Washington University when she was 18 years old was a total fluke.

"I wish I had a grand story that was a little bit more thoughtful in career planning, but it is what it is," the dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law says, laughing. "I gave very little forethought as to where I would go to undergrad. I played basketball and tennis, and that was kind of my identity at the time. So I ended up at Washington University in St. Louis completely because their basketball coach was recruiting me."

Before the end of the first semester, though, she discovered the significance of her environment.

"Once I got there and realized that I had stumbled onto a top 20 university, and what an amazing academic powerhouse of a school I was at ... there was just this entire world that opened up. [I was] meeting people freshman year who were already talking about graduate school and medical school and law school and things that I had never thought about.

"It was a complete and total accident. I had never heard of the place, and yet here I was."

Leeds flourished in her environment, playing basketball and tennis while majoring in history. Things were moving along at an expected pace, and she had a pretty good idea of what she would do after graduation: teach and, hopefully, coach basketball. But fate took the reins one more time.

"I really got the law bug [in] junior year," Leeds remembers. "I took a class in the School of Social Work as opposed to my degree in liberal arts. It was a class that was teaching advocacy skills around Indian child welfare." As a member of the Cherokee Nation, she felt a personal pull toward the subject matter. "Given my background, and that I came from Oklahoma, I already had an interest in what could be better in tribal communities."

The initial reasons she took the class, however, were that it was available and it was full of master's students, who were more likely to have washing machines they might let her use. She was unprepared for the effect the subject would have on her.

"It was the first time that, in a classroom, I had the, "Wow, I could really do this this; this is exciting for me,' type of thing. That was the single class in undergrad that sent me into the 'Now I'm going to do this! What does this take?', and I started thinking of the application process for law school.

"Again, it's this sequence of events that lead you to a place, but no single one is that deliberate ... it's a culmination."

Mapping her journey

This was the last time Leeds would let chance determine her direction. When looking at her academic and career trajectory from that moment forward, it is clear that her success has been due to her methodical planning, dogged determination and commitment to honoring her heritage.

After she earned her undergraduate degree in St. Louis, a homesick Leeds returned to Oklahoma to study law at the University of Tulsa. Her teaching assistant position and research experience during her last year of law school convinced her that she wanted a career in the classroom. "Again, it's kind of that coaching analogy ... it gave me a lot of energy, but I also felt like I was helping to shape someone's life, and that was important."

Two years after graduating from law school, Leeds found herself working toward her Master of Laws degree at the University of Wisconsin. The teaching and research she did while she was there cemented her desire to pursue a faculty position, which is how she ended up at the University of North Dakota. From North Dakota, she went to the University of Kansas, where she taught, served as the interim associate dean for academic affairs and as the director of the Tribal Law and Government Center.

And then, she moved on to the position of dean of the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, where she has served since 2011. Leeds has just been reappointed to her second term, extending to 2021.

In her first term as dean, Leeds supported a number of initiatives that have served to increase accessibility to and diversity in education. Under her leadership, the School of Law launched the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative, an ambitious program directed by Janie Simms Hipps with multi-pronged goals that include increasing "student enrollment in the land grant universities in food and agricultural related disciplines by supporting existing students and creating early pipeline programs for youth." Part of that program is the Native Youth in Food and Agriculture Summer Leadership Summit, open to tribal youth and tribal descendants between the ages of 15 and 18 and designed to educate high school students in food and agriculture careers. And the Summer Pre-Law Program (SPPARK) seeks to include students from higher education institutions with significant populations of African American, Asian American, Latino and American Indian students.

Law student and SPPARK program participant Deborah Moore says, "The great thing about about being a teaching assistant this year was that I could observe how the demographics have changed ... Each year the [diversity] grows. And it's not happening magically. It's because Dean Leeds wants to see all types of diversity."

Todd G. Shields, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the UA, has seen all of this work up close.

"Most people take a little bit of time to learn the job, and then in their middle to second term they're making accomplishments," he says. "But [Leeds] accomplished [these initiatives] in her first four years, and they're all doing fantastic."

It's no coincidence that several of these initiatives align with her advocacy and leadership on behalf of American Indian causes. Leeds says she remembers being aware of tribal issues at a very young age.

"Because of how difficult it was to maintain a continued [Cherokee Tribal] government identity during the beginning of Oklahoma statehood, it really wasn't until the '70s and early '80s that the tribes that we know as tribal governments today started getting their strength back and reorganizing," she says. "That was going on at the same time I was in elementary school."

Leeds had an early role model for her brand of decisive leadership. "I grew up watching our first couple of modern day leaders come into their own, and so somebody, of course, for me and all of the other little girls and boys [to look up to] at the time was an iconic Cherokee female chief by the name of Wilma Mankiller. When she came to power, I was an elementary school student ... Having her in that role absolutely normalized female leadership for me and all of the kids around me."

Leeds' contributions to the American Indian legal community are significant. She has been a judge for several tribal courts, was the director of several American Indian Law Centers, was the first woman to sit on the Cherokee Supreme Court, served on the National Commission on Indian Trust Administration and Reform and served as chairwoman for the Cherokee Nation Gaming Commission. Leeds has published more than 20 articles on, she says, "predominantly Native American issues dealing either with tribal courts and government on one side or property issues that relate to tribes on the other."

"When you look at the word 'commitment' and look at Stacy Leeds and the work she's done at the University of Arkansas -- her commitment to Cherokee life and the importance of that past heritage -- that in many ways is the word that I would say helps define Stacy," says Daniel Ferritor, chancellor of the University of Arkansas from 1986-1997 and interim chancellor in 2015.

Taking to the road

All of the multi-layered facets of her personality and professional life came together this past June in a most spectacular way. Leeds participated in the 2016 Remember the Removal Bike Ride, a 30-year-old event that commemorates the forced relocation of American Indians from the southeastern United States as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The grueling, nearly 1,000-mile route winds from Georgia to Oklahoma, tracing the same path Leeds' Cherokee ancestors took on the Trail of Tears. "My family was in the first detachment on the northern removal route, about 18 months before the history books mark the formal beginning of the Trail of Tears," she says.

Leeds says she is at her best when she is "training up for something." She has run several marathons, but the physical requirement of a 1,000-mile bike ride is unlike any of the previous challenges she has ever taken on.

"But once you are on the hook for doing it and everyone knows that you're there, you're going to finish it, right?" she asks, laughing. It seems to have never occurred to her that quitting in the middle was even a possibility. In fact, Ferritor had a conversation about it with one of Leeds' fellow riders when the group traveled through Fayetteville on the last leg of their journey to Oklahoma.

"I talked to him, and I said, 'Tell me, how is Stacy on this ride?', and he said, 'She was the bomb.' Well, I'm old enough that I had to make sure I knew what 'bomb' meant, and I said, "What do you mean?' He said, 'She's just the nicest person in the world. You know, she never took a SAG.' SAG stands for 'support and gear', and when you take a SAG, it means you just can't go any further. A car picks you up and puts your bike on the back. And so she rode the entire way without a SAG. She rode every single mile of that. That's just amazing. It is amazing."

So how to train for such a demanding mission?

"In all candor, I was not trained as well as I would have liked to be prior to the start of the trip," Leeds admits. "Whether it was the demands of my work, or parenting, or any host of excuses that I made for missed workouts, I was not fully where I wanted to be at the start. Two weeks prior to the trip, [I was] behind in training and needed a test day."

That test day turned out to be a 100-mile, one-day bike ride to Alma, up, and down, and up and down again through the Boston Mountains. The fact that she successfully completed that task somewhat reassured her.

"Once that full day was behind me, I knew I would be able to handle any individual day [on the trip]," she says. "The hard part after that was simply the cumulative effect, riding day after day."

The route included biking over the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, but Leeds says her most difficult day was near the end.

"In Missouri, with the combination of heat and road conditions, I experienced my toughest day. At one point, a 15-year-old Cherokee from Muldrow, Okla., [by the name of] Blayne Workman was beside me. He encouraged me along. I told him to tell me bedtime stories, sing to me off of his iTunes library ... He talked me to the top of the mountain.

"The powerful energy we obtain from others is one of the remarkable gifts of life, and it happens in so many contexts."

Leeds says that a bond among the riders formed early and was sustained throughout the length of the ride. They made the promise that "no rider would be left behind" and despite the wide variety of skill levels and ages -- the oldest rider was a 70-year-old Vietnam War veteran from Hawaii -- they kept that promise.

"That meant looking out for each other and helping each other along, but it also meant being honest, individually, if we were struggling," she remembers.

That kind of interdependence took an enormous amount of trust among the riders.

"We each had a safe place to be vulnerable inside the team, and most of us had a day or two, without rhyme or reason or way to predict, that we struggled. On those days, the group adjusted speeds, took more breaks, and encouraged each other along.

"We were one."

Arriving successfully

The cohesion they felt among themselves was in large part due to the somber route they were taking and the personal link the riders had to the historic event.

"Part of the ride for each rider involved a deliberative process of connection, both to people and to places," Leeds observes. "Each of the riders [was] aware of [his or her] family history and connection. All along the way, we stopped at relevant historical and cultural sites, some formally marked and other places unmarked but known to the tribes ... There were certainly times where we felt anger and disappointment for the collective loss of lives, of resources, and lifeways of our ancestors, but we also felt a profound spirit of resilience, a spirit of survival and above all, the strength, goodness and humor in ourselves as a group."

Shields thinks the same resilience and strength of will that allowed Leeds to emerge from such a demanding, emotionally draining event optimistic and renewed makes her a remarkable administrator and leader.

"She has a really unique ability -- she combines really tough, high expectations along with understanding, encouraging and nurturing. Usually people fall one way or another, but she does both of these really well.

"If any of the deans face a difficult decision, we're all calling, saying, 'Stacy, what do you think?' I'm always impressed that even [with] really complicated issues, she's able to disentangle them really fast and find the heart of the issue and then get really practical about the next steps."

"She cares. She's committed. That's what makes Stacy tick," says Ferritor. "She wakes up and she still cares, and she gets up and she's still committed.

"I just don't know how you beat that."

NAN Profiles on 08/21/2016