Rita G. Napier was born on July 27, 1940 in Sedalia, Missouri, the daughter of Delmar and Freta Napier. She earned her B.A. Degree in American History from American University in 1962, followed by her M.A. in 1965 and Ph.D. in 1976.

From 1962-1966, Napier worked as a teacher at the Hoonah Indian Village High School in Hoonah, Alaska, a Tlingit village, where she received an Outstanding Teaching Award. In 1967 she was a Smithsonian Institution Research Fellow. In 1968, Napier was an assistant archivist for the National Archives and later went on a National Geographic Society research and photography expedition to Alaska. From 1969 to 1971 she taught at Longview Community College in Lee's Summit, MO.

Napier moved to Lawrence in 1973 to teach at the University of Kansas full time, after a stint during the 1960s as a teaching assistant. She remained at KU for the rest of her career, retiring in 2012 as professor emerita.

During her time as a history professor, Napier received numerous awards from the University of Kansas, including Outstanding Woman Teacher (1979), Hall of Fame Inductee (1982), H. Bernerd Fink Award for Outstanding Classroom Teaching (1983), Wally and Marrie Steeple’s Faculty Award (1998), and the Kemper Teaching Award (2004). Napier also served on many boards and received further awards throughout her career, including serving on the 1989 Governor’s Task Force (which created a new statewide curriculum for Kansas history), on the Governor’s Board on the Preservation of Unmarked Burial Sites from 1991-1995, and on the Kansas Humanities Council from 1991-1997 (for which she received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Humanities). In 2003 she received the American Association of State and Local History's National Award of Merit.

Napier established the first program of Native American history courses at KU (now the Indigenous Studies Program), in which she created the courses Environmental Studies, American Indian History, Plains Indians, the Indian in the 20th Century, and Kansas Ethnic and Racial Groups. Napier spoke at numerous conferences, presented at humanities lectures, acted as historian-in-residence in a Kansas community, wrote a series of radio programs and newspaper articles on the history of Kansas trails, helped write grant proposals, completed research for film series, and worked on museum exhibitions. In 2003 she consulted on the script and provided on-camera commentary for a PBS documentary called Who Owns the Past, regarding Native Americans' struggle to control ancestral remains.

Rita Napier passed away on November 7, 2016.