Scholarship
Indian Territory's Legacy:
Indigenous-Settler Partnerships and Persistence in Oklahoma, 1875-2020
My first book – Indian Territory’s Legacy: Indigenous-Settler Partnerships and Persistence in Oklahoma, 1875-2020 – explores a strategy that Indigenous people in Oklahoma used to navigate enormous challenges over a long period of time. For most of the nineteenth century, the United States promised that Native communities who relocated to Indian Territory – a massive reserve in the heart of North America – would be left alone. In 1889, the United States broke that promise by opening a portion of Indian Territory to White American settlers. Over the next twenty years, US officials suppressed tribal governments while settlers successfully replaced Indian Territory with the state of Oklahoma. These changes left Indigenous peoples in the region with few collective means to protect themselves or their resources. White settlers and federal officials alike predicted that Native peoples would soon cease to exist.
Yet Native peoples endured. Although Indian Territory could no longer be found on a map after 1907, the people who made that space Indigenous did not simply fade out of existence with Oklahoma statehood. Instead, many evaded erasure by cleverly building and then leveraging partnerships with their new neighbors, White settlers. These stories connect Oklahoma – home of the largest Indigenous population north of Mexico yet paradoxically almost ignored in US historiography – to broader national and international conversations about race, class, settler colonialism, and the persistence of Native peoples in the North American West.
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Indian Territory's Legacy is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press, a leading academic press in Native American History.
Reform, Revolution, Backlash:
Native America in the 1970s
Reform, Revolution, Backlash: Native America in the 1970s is a sort of sequel to my first book. As Native peoples in the United States rebuilt their governments and began exercising long dormant sovereign powers, they faced enormous complications. This project will explore how political dissonance amongst Indigenous communities during the early 1970s reshaped Native America and its collective relationship with the American public over the next ten years. A national survey of Native America during a decade of extraordinary change, this text will continue broadening the growing historiography of the Red Power Era while also incorporating carceral studies, memory studies, and the rise of political conservatism into that conversation.
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Left: One of the book's case studies explores Indigenous responses to the American Revolution Bicentennial, a nationwide commemoration of the United States' 200th birthday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was deeply (and erroneously) concerned that the American Indian Movement would disrupt the celebration. Courtesy, FBI Library.
In Development:
Bill Janklow and Tribal Sovereignty
Exploring Native America in the 1970s led me to a controversial figure: William “Wild Bill” Janklow. One of the most successful figures in South Dakota politics ever, Janklow embodied a growing intersection in the late twentieth century between resistance to tribal sovereignty and the rise of American political conservatism. He is largely remembered today for running over a pedestrian while serving his first term in the US House of Representatives, but the four-term governor first made a name for himself as an opponent of tribal sovereignty.
As state attorney general, his intervention in Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978) directly influenced the US Supreme Court’s decision to strip tribal governments of their ability to prosecute non-Native offenders. Oliphant triggered an epidemic of sexual violence across Native America and indirectly shielded Janklow from a 1974 tribal court warrant for rape. As governor, he adapted Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen stereotype to South Dakota by criminalizing federally distributed agricultural goods or commodities in Lakota and Dakota communities. In 1981, Janklow ordered state police to raid and empty the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s commodity warehouse on the Yankton reservation, a blatantly illegal move that was never prosecuted. Profoundly disrupted by the raid, the Yankton Sioux tribal government experienced an extended internal political crisis before suffering total collapse in 1984.
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In Development:
The Politics of Indigenous Land Rights in the United States and Australia,
1960s-1980s
While teaching at Dickinson College, I developed a course comparing Indigenous-settler relations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In preparing for that course, I was struck by similarities between the US and Australia in how Indigenous peoples and their non-Indigenous counterparts debated Native land claims. This was especially true of the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. When I eventually finish my other three books, I would like to take a look at these similarities in more depth.
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