Current Projects
BOOK PROJECT: Native Reconstruction: Indian Territory and the Making of Modern American Power, 1861 - 1907 (manuscript in progress)
As Americans set out to politically unite the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War, the continued existence of domestic semi-sovereign nations seemed an anomaly that demanded intervention. Forged by the exigencies of war, the U.S. government’s expanded power and prerogative after 1865 transformed federal Indian policy into an active arena in which the social and political revolutions of Reconstruction took place. My book project is a history of Indian Territory as a critical site and historical laboratory for the federal reforms of Reconstruction. Based on U.S. and Native government sources, this project explains how Reconstruction politics and priorities--free labor, private property ownership, a homogenous citizenry--transformed Indian Territory as part of the post-war growth of federal supremacy throughout the continental United States.
As my work reveals, federal policymakers sought to reconstruct the Five Tribes of Indian Territory through a variety of military, legislative, and legal reforms, including the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866, the expansion of federal jurisdiction in Indian Territory, the allotment of tribal land, and the dissolution of Native governments in favor of single statehood. Yet the process of Reconstruction was messy, inconsistent, and incomplete. Resisting these reforms as persistently as did the Southern states, the Five Tribes strategically sought to preserve their own sovereignty, delaying territorialization for decades through their political advocacy in Washington and by proposing the first Native state at the turn of the century. While sharing the same origins and impetus as the Reconstruction policies enacted in the former Confederate South, Reconstruction in Indian Territory was ultimately a far more aggressive and long-term project. It continued, this project argues, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907. While piecemeal and often disjointed, this darker side of Reconstruction achieved many more of its aims than its southern sister project. This western Reconstruction secured the plenary power of the U.S. Congress over Indian affairs while Indian Territory experienced the kind of transformation that Republicans had hoped to achieve in the South.
Reconstruction has long been a southern narrative, but as this project demonstrates, we cannot fully account for the successes and failures of the multiregional and multinational project of Reconstruction without Indian Territory and consideration of the wider American West.
As my work reveals, federal policymakers sought to reconstruct the Five Tribes of Indian Territory through a variety of military, legislative, and legal reforms, including the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866, the expansion of federal jurisdiction in Indian Territory, the allotment of tribal land, and the dissolution of Native governments in favor of single statehood. Yet the process of Reconstruction was messy, inconsistent, and incomplete. Resisting these reforms as persistently as did the Southern states, the Five Tribes strategically sought to preserve their own sovereignty, delaying territorialization for decades through their political advocacy in Washington and by proposing the first Native state at the turn of the century. While sharing the same origins and impetus as the Reconstruction policies enacted in the former Confederate South, Reconstruction in Indian Territory was ultimately a far more aggressive and long-term project. It continued, this project argues, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907. While piecemeal and often disjointed, this darker side of Reconstruction achieved many more of its aims than its southern sister project. This western Reconstruction secured the plenary power of the U.S. Congress over Indian affairs while Indian Territory experienced the kind of transformation that Republicans had hoped to achieve in the South.
Reconstruction has long been a southern narrative, but as this project demonstrates, we cannot fully account for the successes and failures of the multiregional and multinational project of Reconstruction without Indian Territory and consideration of the wider American West.
DIGITAL & PUBLIC HISTORY PROJECT: NativeReconstruction.com
This site is dedicated to sharing the latest scholarship analyzing the Civil War & Reconstruction eras (1861-1907) in Indian country. It also serves as a hub through which multi-generational historical thinkers researching and producing work on Reconstruction in Indian country can network and collaborate
Past Projects
UNDERGRADUATE HONORS THESIS:
“State of Rebellion: The Dakota Uprising in the Civil War Period” is an original research thesis written for honors in the history major at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. My thesis examines the Sioux Uprising or Dakota War of 1862, a six-week armed conflict between Dakota tribesmen and Minnesotan settlers which required the involvement of local militia and federal troops and resulted in legally questionable military trials of the defeated Dakota. The thesis frames the Dakota rebellion as a western conflict inextricably tied to the American Civil War occurring farther east and south. Just like the Confederate nation project, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, from its causes to its consequences, questioned the appropriate limits of federal authority and state-sponsored violence in an era of expansive federal intervention. The thesis explores the distinctive challenges the Sioux Uprising of 1862 posed to the new and expanded role of America’s federal government in the Civil War era and the ways in which the Uprising questions the traditional view (as described in Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution) that expanded federal authority was a positive result of the Civil War. Throughout this project I argue that the Civil War was explosive because it challenged the authority and power of the United States’ federal government in both the South and the West; it is the history of not only the Confederates who took that challenge to the battlefield, but the Sioux of Minnesota who did so as well.
The thesis also challenges to the the ways in which the Sioux Uprising or Dakota War is usually told. The traditional history of the 1862 Sioux Uprising reflects a regionalized understanding of the Civil War in which western or Native American histories are separated from the classic North versus South Civil War narrative. My goal with this thesis, however, was to argue that the 1862 Uprising was integrally connected to the Civil War by showing that the modes of federal force used to crush the self-declared sovereignty of the Confederate states in the South were also used to destroy the sovereign Native American nations of the West. This thesis articulates the national implications of expanded federal power in the Civil War and promotes a tri-regional understanding of the Civil War that reemphasizes the importance of the West in 1860s America.
The thesis project was advised by Professors Stephanie McCurry and Daniel Richter and was filed with the University of Pennsylvania's History Department in the spring of 2013.
“State of Rebellion: The Dakota Uprising in the Civil War Period” is an original research thesis written for honors in the history major at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. My thesis examines the Sioux Uprising or Dakota War of 1862, a six-week armed conflict between Dakota tribesmen and Minnesotan settlers which required the involvement of local militia and federal troops and resulted in legally questionable military trials of the defeated Dakota. The thesis frames the Dakota rebellion as a western conflict inextricably tied to the American Civil War occurring farther east and south. Just like the Confederate nation project, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, from its causes to its consequences, questioned the appropriate limits of federal authority and state-sponsored violence in an era of expansive federal intervention. The thesis explores the distinctive challenges the Sioux Uprising of 1862 posed to the new and expanded role of America’s federal government in the Civil War era and the ways in which the Uprising questions the traditional view (as described in Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution) that expanded federal authority was a positive result of the Civil War. Throughout this project I argue that the Civil War was explosive because it challenged the authority and power of the United States’ federal government in both the South and the West; it is the history of not only the Confederates who took that challenge to the battlefield, but the Sioux of Minnesota who did so as well.
The thesis also challenges to the the ways in which the Sioux Uprising or Dakota War is usually told. The traditional history of the 1862 Sioux Uprising reflects a regionalized understanding of the Civil War in which western or Native American histories are separated from the classic North versus South Civil War narrative. My goal with this thesis, however, was to argue that the 1862 Uprising was integrally connected to the Civil War by showing that the modes of federal force used to crush the self-declared sovereignty of the Confederate states in the South were also used to destroy the sovereign Native American nations of the West. This thesis articulates the national implications of expanded federal power in the Civil War and promotes a tri-regional understanding of the Civil War that reemphasizes the importance of the West in 1860s America.
The thesis project was advised by Professors Stephanie McCurry and Daniel Richter and was filed with the University of Pennsylvania's History Department in the spring of 2013.
