Mills, Antonia

Antonia Mills was born in 1942, in Iowa City, Iowa. She received her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe/Harvard in 1964 and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard in 1982. She is currently Professor Emeritus of First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) whose research interests include First Nations land claims, religion and law, and reincarnation beliefs.

Mills wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on The Beaver Indian Prophet Dance and Related Movements among North American Indians. She had been working with the Beaver (Dunne-zaa) Nation in their Peace River BC territory since finishing college in 1964. It was from the Beaver that she first learned about aboriginal reincarnation beliefs and cases, but she took little interest in them until 1984, when she met Ian Stevenson. Stevenson had been researching reincarnation cases in Alaska and was looking for someone to carry on his work in British Columbia. That summer Mills began an intensive study of beliefs and cases among the Beaver and the Gitksan and in 1985 received a two-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue her work among the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en nations. Between September, 1987, and January, 1989, she made three trips to India to investigate cases there as part of an effort to “replicate” Stevenson’s findings through the study of cases similar to those he had reported.

In 1988 Mills relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she held a dual appointment as Research Assistant Professor in Stevenson’s Division of Personality Studies (now Division of Perceptual Studies, DOPS) of the University of Virginia Medical Center and as Lecturer in the UVA Department of Anthropology. She remained with Stevenson until accepting the post at UNBC in 1994. During this period she returned to India to study cases of Hindu children who recalled lives as Moslems and Moslem children who recalled lives as Hindus. She did a comparative study of American children with imaginary playmates and Indian children who remembered previous lives and began a longitudinal study of persons with past-life memories. She also studied American and Canadian children with nightmares apparently related to things that had happened in previous lives Mills co-edited (with anthropologist Richard Slobodin) the book Amerindian Rebirth: Reincarnation Belief Among North American Indians and Inuit in 1994.

In 1985 Mills was asked by the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en to support them as an expert witness in their land claims suit against the Canadian government. The report she submitted to the court was published as Eagle Down Is Our Law: Wet’suwet’en Law, Feasts, and Land Claims . A third book, Hang on to These Words: Johnny David's Delgamuukw Testimony , also sprang from that trial and a series of papers detailing Gitksan, Wet’suwet’en and Beaver nation reincarnation beliefs and cases followed.

Mills collaborated with James Matlock on a trait index to North American Indian and Inuit reincarnation beliefs and with Indian philosopher Kuldip Dhiman on a follow-up investigation of an unusual reincarnation case originally reported by Stevenson. She co-authored with psychologist Stephen J. Lynn a review of the past-life memory phenomenon for the book Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence , published by the American Psychological Association in 2000, and with psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker, M.D. a similar chapter for a second edition under the title of Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (Dissociation, Trauma, Memory, and Hypnosis) in 2013. She also contributed a Foreword and an article to Warren Jefferson's 2008 Reincarnation Beliefs of North American Indians: Soul Journeys, Metamorphoses, and Near-Death Experiences .