Dallas Pettigrew

The Director of the Center for Tribal Social Work at OU-Tulsa is Dallas W. Pettigrew. Dallas is a member of the Cherokee Nation and grew up in Stilwell, OK. Dallas earned his Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice-Law Enforcement in December 2002 from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. He was fortunate to be hired at Cherokee Nation as a Child Welfare Specialist in January 2003. For the next several years he worked in Indian Child Welfare, in three different programs, Out-of-District- where his caseload of around 100 was made up of families from outside the Cherokee Nation. Next, he worked in State Court Advocacy and Permanency Service (CAPS). Both experiences helped prepare him for his next role, working in the Tribal CAPS unit. In Tribal CAPS, the children are in the custody of the Cherokee Nation and there is no state involvement at all.  

 Dallas earned a Bachelor of Social Work from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 2011, then started an 11-month march to his MSW at OU-Tulsa, in the Advanced Standing program. After graduation, Dallas joined Cherokee Nation’s Behavioral Health Division as the Manager of Administrative Operations where he was responsible for the day-to-day operation of the entire Behavioral Health program, including ensuring compliance with grant requirements, developing and monitoring policies and procedures to improve program efficiency and effectiveness, hiring new employees, and making sure all the bills were paid. During that time, he and MSW classmate and former child welfare colleague, Juli Skinner (Ponca Tribe) began working earnestly to grow a new children’s behavioral health program.  Ultimately, they built the program, called The HERO Project, using grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and other funds. Today, the HERO Project has expanded beyond Tahlequah, where it started, reaching nearly all parts of the Cherokee Nation’s 14-county reservation. 

After leaving Cherokee Nation in 2015, Dallas spent nearly a year with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina, serving as the first Program Manager of the Family Safety Program. Dallas was homesick for Oklahoma, though and moved to Tulsa 2016. In the fall he served as an adjunct professor at OU. In January 2017, he was hired as a Clinical Assistant Professor, joining Dr. Lisa Byers (Cherokee Nation) as the only Native American faculty members in the School of Social Work at that time. Dallas taught mostly macro-level courses at OU-with topic like Human Diversity, Social Welfare Policy Practice and Advocacy, Community Organizing, and Human Service Administration. Soon, he joined forces with other Native current and former child welfare professionals to begin developing training for employees of Oklahoma Tribes’ child welfare programs. The idea was to combine the wisdom, experience, and talents of the tribes with the resources of the University to build child welfare training “for tribes, by tribes.” A pilot training program, funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, successfully trained dozens of tribal child welfare professionals in OU-Tulsa’s Simulation Center and became the launchpad for the Center for Tribal Social Work. 

While Dallas’s work keeps him busy, he has a full life outside work, too. His son Cordell, 25, lives in Tahlequah. His sister, her fiancé and their three daughters also live in Tahlequah, as does his matriarch aunt, Naomi. Dallas’s parents and other relatives live in Stilwell. His mentor, the person who sent him to graduate school and encouraged him every step of the way, Norma Merriman (OU MSW, Class of 1974), lives in Raleigh, NC, where Dallas enjoys vacationing, along with his classmate and friend, Juli Skinner. He also enjoys kayaking, road-tripping, and watching Hamilton over and over and over. In 2019, the graduates of the MSW program named Dallas as the Faculty of the Year, one of the highest honors he has ever received.