In 2008 she was awarded the Clifford D. Clark fellowship to attend graduate studies and earned her PhD in 2015 from Binghamton. Steeves dissertation "Decolonising Indigenous Histories: Pleistocene Archeology Sites of the Western hemisphere" was the first thesis using Indigenous method and theory in Anthropology within the United States. Throughout her graduate studies Steeves taught at Fort Peck Community College and Selkirk College.
