I am drawn to topics that explore the complicated intersections of culture, technology, and the environment in North America.

My current book project is a study of Indigenous responses to railroad expansion in the North American West. The Iron Horse in Indian Country showcases how Indigenous peoples across the trans-Mississippi West adapted to the “railroad revolution” of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Historians have long pondered the railroad’s profound and far-reaching role in transforming the United States’ economic, political, social, and physical landscapes. The Iron Horse in Indian Country de-centers and reframes this work by spotlighting how Indigenous peoples incorporated railroads into their own socio-economic, political, and cultural networks. This Indigenous process of incorporation challenges deep-seated stereotypes of Indians as either violently resisting the juggernaut of the Iron Horse, or simply vanishing at the first blast of a locomotive’s whistle.

This project begins with a study of Indigenous contributions to the Pacific Railway Surveys of the 1850s, and extends through to the rise of automobile travel and the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in the 1920s. It demonstrates that even as railroad-driven colonialism brought disease, economic displacement, and dispossession to Indigenous communities, Native peoples turned trains into a literal and figurative vehicle of survival, repurposing this novel technology to establish themselves as decisive actors in a modern world.

I am also committed to writing in outlets that reach broad audiences. In 2014, I co-founded Erstwhile, a blog aimed at promoting thoughtful conversation about the past, the present, and the historical profession. Erstwhile has been featured in the Canadian online news magazine Rabble; on the Harvard University Press website; and by leading scholarly blogs, including the Center for Culture, History, and Environment’s Edge Effects and Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

A selection of my public writing includes:

• “150 years after transcontinental construction, Indigenous Americans continue to battle corporate overreach,” Washington Post, May 2019

• “Yes the culture has changed, but so have our weapons” [title change by editorial staff], Lexington-Herald Leader, March 2018

• “Trump budget a moral failure for Kentucky culture” [title change by editorial staff], The Courier-Journal, June 2017

• “What’s in a Name? Louisville’s City Parks as Sites of Learning,” Erstwhile Blog, December 2017

• “Crude Entanglements: The Dakota Access Pipeline Controversy and the Troubling History of Corporations in Indian Country,” Erstwhile Blog, September 2016

Image: Medicine Crow’s (Crow) documentation of three trains he encountered after a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1880. At Montana State University Special Collections, online here.

Recent/forthcoming academic publications:

• Review, David Walker, Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, spring 2021 issue

• Review, David Bernstein, How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West, Environmental History 24:3 (July 2019)

• “Editing for Expansion: Railroad Photography and Native Americans in the U.S. West, 1860-1880,” Western Historical Quarterly (Fall 2019)