After Lewis & Clark: American Indians in U.S. History

Keynote Speaker - Professor Elliott West

"The Great Plains: America's Meeting Ground"    

(1 hr: 02 min: 14 sec)           

Elliott West,  Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, is a specialist in the social and environmental history of the American West.  His many articles, book chapters, and review essays have profoundly shaped our understanding of the American experience, and he is author of five books, including Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (1989), and The Way to the West: Essays on the Great Plains (1995).  In 1998 he published The Contested Plains: Indians, Gold Seekers, and the Rush to Colorado, a main selection of the History Book Club and winner of the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize and the OAH Ray Allen Billington Prize, among others.  In addition to a prolific scholarly career, he has twice been honored as his university's teacher of the year, and in 1995 was named Arkansas Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Lecturer - Professor Theda Perdue

"Sacajawea's Sisters:

Writing the History of American Indian Women"

(49 min: 53 sec)          

Theda Perdue is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the Native peoples of the southeastern United States and on gender in native societies. Her book Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835, (1998) won the Southern Association of Women's Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Award and the Southern Anthropological Society's James Mooney Prize. She is past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, editor of the anthology Sifters: The Lives of Native American Women (2001), and co-author, with Michael D. Green, of the Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001). Most recently, her lectures at Mercer University were published as "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South.

Lecturer - Professor Daniel R. Wildcat

"Lewis and Clark: A Native American Perspective"

(46 min: 37 sec)            

Daniel R. Wildcat is a professor of sociology and American Indian Studies, and Director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. He has published his research in a variety of academic journals and anthologies, and co-authored with Vine DeLoria Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001). He has been an invited speaker at universities and colleges in the United States and internationally and has directed grants from the Agency for International Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey. A Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, he is also active in community and public affairs, and in 1992 was honored with the Heart Peace Award by the Kansas City organization The Future Is Now for his efforts to promote world peace and cultural diversity.