From the hall outside my office, I can look down on the roof of the dormitory where I lived as a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, where I received all of my college education at the University of Oklahoma, where I am currently Director of the Native American Studies program and Professor of History. I received a B.A. in Letters (1962) and a M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Science (1970). Before joining the faculty here in 1995 I served for two years as Assistant Director of Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, where I oversaw the care and maintenance of the Museum's collection of approximately one million objects and participated in the development and opening of the Museum's exhibition facility in New York City in 1994.
My first full-time teaching experience was as Instructor of Western Civilization and History of Science at the Kansas City Art Institute (1968-69). In 1970 I became Instructor of Social Sciences at Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence, Kansas (1970-72), where my parents had been students in the late 1930's when it was a vocational school for Indians. In 1972 I became Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and began to explore the history and culture of the Minnesota Chippewa tribes and reservations (My mother and I and my siblings are enrolled on the White Earth Reservation.) In 1974 I took a position as Associate Professor in the Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1980 I was Visiting Assistant Professor in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.
I maintain an interest in the comparisons between Indian attitudes toward and uses of the natural environment, and western scientific traditions, and I have published "Native Knowledge in the Americas," Osiris, 2nd series, I (1985), 209 228, and "Systems of Knowledge," in America in 1492, edited by Alvin Josephy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). My current research interest is in the history of Choctaw Indians, and in 1995 my book Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818-1918 was published by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). While I spend a good deal of time developing the undergraduate bachelor's degree program in Native American Studies for the University, I hope to continue my work on Choctaw land claims in Mississippi in the period after the removal in 1831-32. (To see my curriculum vita, click here).My tribal affiliations are Choctaw and Chippewa.
Teaching
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My philosophy of teaching is to show students that answers to difficult questions are not a matter of black and white. In any debate, if you are going to defend your own position you need to know where your opponent is coming from. Historical questions have to be viewed in this light.
