Her father nicknamed her “Sharkey.” The family lived in Savannah until 1962 when they moved to the Atlanta area.

At NKU Neely served as both Anthropology Coordinator and Native American Studies Director.

[6] Neely's topics of study include ethnicity, indigenousness, gender roles, social organization, the origins of human behavior and institutions, and ethnohistory.

[9] Her most recent is the book, Native Nations: The Survival of Indigenous Peoples, co-edited with Douglas W. Hume.

The book is an ethnographic study of Snowbird, North Carolina, a remote mountain community of Cherokees who are regarded as simultaneously the most traditional and the most adaptive members of the entire tribe.