My current research and writing projects continue to explore American Indian political activism broadly conceived and have moved into the realm of biography.
Oklahoma State University Lecture Poster (2013)
My next monograph, Let’s Raise Some Hell: Clyde Warrior, An Intellectual Ethnobiography, focuses on the life of Ponca activist Clyde Warrior, a central figure in the American Indian youth movement of the 1960s. It places Warrior at the heart of a global anticolonial intellectual moment and, in so doing, argues that an understanding of the evolution of American Indian anticolonial thinking challenges the chronological, spatial, and experiential boundaries established for this area of critical inquiry.
As with my previous works, Let’s Raise Some Hell will fundamentally challenge a story we thought we knew about decolonization and anticolonialism. This work is also the product of engaged scholarship, having grown out of an exhibit about the life and legacy of Clyde Warrior that I created for the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma’s Clyde Warrior Memorial Building in 2007. I did this work at the invitation of Della Warrior, Clyde Warrior’s wife, who has entrusted me with his personal papers.
UNC Lecture Poster (2014)
I have also, for several years now, been working toward a biography of D’Arcy McNickle (1904-1977), a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation who placed an indelible mark on Native politics during the mid-twentieth century.
In Buss and Genetin-Pilawa, eds., Beyond Two Worlds (2014)
Based largely upon his un-transcribed journal which extends from the 1930s to the early 1970s, it conceives of McNickle as a cosmopolitan writer, intellectual, and activist whose sojourns from Montana to London and from Paris to New York City, along with his passion for literary modernism, social science, and political internationalism, allowed him to view Native America through a complex lens that we have yet to understand or appreciate.
I have in mind several innovative forms with regard to the major publications that will grow out of the McNickle project. The first publication from this work can be found in “‘born in the opposition'”: D’Arcy McNickle, Ethnobiographically, in James Buss and Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, eds., Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014): 253-267. Public-facing Digital Humanities projects can be found by visiting The Experiential World of D’Arcy McNickle page on this website.