Dr. Mary Poole is a historian of U.S. and African history, with an emphasis on histories of social movements, racial capitalism, colonialism, feminist and other critical social theory, and Indigenous decolonizing research methods. She has served on the faculty of Prescott College in Arizona since 2003. In the 1980s, she served as a fiscal analyst for the Washington State Senate Ways & Means Committee overseeing welfare policy during a period of federal dismantling of the U.S welfare state and rapid prison expansion and the corresponding increase in racially discriminatory drug laws. She later served as Executive Director for Early Options for Unintended Pregnancy, a non-governmental organization established to teach family practice doctors techniques of early abortion.

She earned her PhD at Rutgers, which led to her first book, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (UNC: 2006) which demonstrates how the U.S. welfare state operates as a mechanism of racial capitalism, producing economic security as a property of whiteness. She has worked closely for over two decades with Meitamei Olol Dapash on land rights, environmental justice and decolonizing research, and has co-directed through that time the Institute for Maasai Education, Research & Conservation (MERC) and the Dopoi Center. In today’s conversation, we discuss  Decolonizing Maasai History: A Path to Indigenous African Futures, (Zed Books/Bloomsbury, 2025), co-authored with Meitamei Olol Dapash, where they offer a new version of Maasai history based on Maasai memory and concerns. 

Meitamei Olol-Dapash is the founder and Executive Director of the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC) a registered community-based organization in Kenya. MERC is a network of grassroots organizations and activists promoting the rights of the Maasai community and the environment.