Published and Working Projects
Books
“The Amazing Iroquois” and the Invention of the Empire State, Oxford University Press, 2023
“The Amazing Iroquois” follows the lives of an extended Seneca family from the American Revolution to the Cold War. It explores how Red Jacket, Ely S. Parker, Harriet Maxwell Converse (adopted), and Arthur C. Parker, became agents in the invention of the historical, political, and cultural conceptions of the Empire State.
Each was one of the most popular indigenous celebrities of their respective age, so they were in a unique position to shape white New Yorker’s conception of self by rewriting and representing their peoples’ history on their own terms. From indigenous imperial politics to pioneering museum exhibitions, each was able to package and deliver Iroquois stories to the public in defiance of the contemporary racial stereotypes and settler colonial politics that threatened to bury them. Because of their skill, the advantages of celebrity, and with the timely intervention of Iroquois leadership, these competing forces entangled together to create a popular and long-lasting historical memory where the Iroquois became an obvious and foundational part of New York’s own exceptional state history and self-identification.
This is a story of how four members of an extended Seneca family worked within and used the tools of a colonial culture to shape aspects of contemporary New York culture in their own peoples’ image. The result was the creation of “The Amazing Iroquois,” an historical memory shaped by a combination of indigenous self-definition, colonial expectations about racial stereotypes and Native American politics, and the personalities of the people who did so much to shape it.
Articles
“‘The Great White Mother’: Harriet Maxwell Converse, the Indian Colony of New York City, and the Media, 1885-1903,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol 21 Ed 4 (October 2022): 279-300. Open Access.
This article reveals the history of the unstudied “Indian Colony” of Gilded Age New York City through the life of its founder and governor, Harriet Maxwell Converse. Converse was a white woman adopted by the Senecas and a salvage ethnographer, a potent combination of indigenous “authenticity” and scholarly authority that made her an object of fascination to white New Yorkers who read about her in extensive newspaper coverage. The Colony itself was composed of boarding houses, Converse’s own townhouse-turned-museum, and was connected to the New York Police Department. It provided housing and support to resident and visiting Native Americans who found work in the city’s “Indian trade” and booming entertainment industry.
By highlighting the extensive newspaper coverage of Converse and her Colony, this article reveals a hidden history of the Indigenous people who lived and worked in the city. It also pushes the periodization of the earliest urban Indian communities backward in time by more than a decade and shows how the media fused the daily life of Converse and the Colonists with popular stereotypes of “savage” and “vanished” Indians, immigrant stereotypes, assimilation, gendered expectations, and the predatory academic desires of museums and salvage ethnographers.
Media
Indigenous Public History Podcast
In Season 2 of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies Podcast “Public History in a Virtual Age,” I look closely at a subject in the public humanities that is not often discussed: Indigenous Public History.
Once a month, I interview a variety of guests who are public history practitioners, academics, and cultural leaders, as well as non-Indigenous public history practitioners. They talk about their experience in Indigenous Public History, their successes and challenges in the field, and more broadly about the responsibilities and ethics of doing "activist" and decolonized public history.
Working Projects
Author, “Zombies in the Museum,” accepted for publication, New York Archives, April 2024
Essay on the long history of the Iroquois Life Group dioramas in the New York State Museum in the twentieth century. Forerunner to a book project on the history of racial and historical dioramas in American museums.
Editor and Chapter Author, “Red Jacket and the Creation of Indigenous Identity” in the volume Antebellum Afterlives of George Washington, in progress
Under consideration with a university press, this multidisciplinary edited volume explores the many ways that George Washington’s life, legacy, and memory manifested amongst diverse groups during the Revolutionary War through the antebellum era.