My research focuses on American Indian history since 1887, political activism, ethnohistorical methods, biography, memory, and global Indigenous rights. I utilize a multidisciplinary approach that integrates historical methods, ethnography, and social scientific theory. The central objective of my work has been to demonstrate that our understanding of “United States” and “Indigenous” history is incomplete if we fail to acknowledge the experiences of Native peoples—and that situating Indians at the center rather than the margins of these stories forces a fundamental reevaluation of them.
Beyond Red Power (2007)
Native Activism in Cold War America (2008)
My first book, Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty (2008), won the inaugural Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award in 2009. I am the co-editor, with anthropologist Loretta Fowler, of Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900 (2007) and, with Helen Sheumaker, Memory Matters (2011).
American Indians (2013)
Say We Are Nations (2015)
In 2013, the University of Chicago Press published my revised and expanded fourth edition of William T. Hagan’s classic work American Indians and in November of 2015, the University of North Carolina Press released Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887. My essays have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Western Historical Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Ethnohistory, and Comparative American Studies.