Resisting the Lonely Historian

I long imagined writing as a lonely endeavor. My vision was of an individual bent over a notebook, solitary in some winged armchair, in a room quiet save for the gasps of a dying fire. As an undergraduate, I found friends who shared my habits of pouring over fantasy novels and writing poems on classroom chalkboards in empty buildings. I suppose it was human of me not to realize that my formative experiences as a writer came from being surrounded by others.

My vision of the historian mirrored my picture of the writer, although I substituted the fireplace for a backdrop of old maps and oddities encased in glass. A mentor took the time to disabuse me of my desires for objective historical truth. But I held onto the idea that history was, at heart, a lonely profession. History was something at once cold and intimate, created in the space between the historian and the sources. The process of researching and writing my JAH article, “Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building,” challenged these assumptions at their core.

I joined the graduate program at University of Minnesota Twin Cities intending to study Indigenous histories of the Midwest. My interest was personal; as a Midwestern settler, born in Illinois, I had become increasingly curious about the place I was raised. I was also interested in how we talked about the past, locally and nationally—and this led me to investigate the historiography of a man named George Rogers Clark, a militia leader who is often cited as the Midwestern contribution to the American Revolution. Although the majority of Clark’s campaigns in the “Illinois Country” took place against Indigenous peoples such as the Myaamia (Miami) nation, and all took place on Indigenous lands, Native subjects were conspicuously absent or not seriously considered in most renderings of Clark’s life. While “setting the record straight” on Clark by pointing out the various misinterpretations of his writings could be rigorous, it would not redress the obfuscation of Indigenous history that the very focus on Clark produces.

I looked to my advisors and peers for inspiration. During my first semester, I sat with the provocative texts assigned by my professors and the thoughtful projects generated by my colleagues in the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Workshop. The works that resonated most with me were products of collaborative research: their approaches took Indigenous ways of knowing seriously and were accountable to Indigenous communities. Although I still held only foggy ideas of what collaborative research and accountability meant, I learned that my first step could be reaching out to those already engaged in this sort of work.

In the late winter of 2020, I sent an email to a Myaamia historian whose scholarship I admired. George Ironstrack was the Assistant Director of the Myaamia Center, a cooperative initiative between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University of Ohio, which produces and supports scholarship related to Myaamia revitalization of “distinct ways of knowing, speaking, and being.”^[1] Ironstrack was gracious with his time and expressed excitement for my project, but let me know that I would more appropriately direct my questions to Diane Hunter, then Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) for the Miami Tribe. Hunter and I connected briefly before COVID-19 interrupted our plans to speak, but we scheduled another call that summer wherein she asked an important question: what do you want from us?

Much of the work produced by settler scholars about Indigenous communities has been extractive. Historians and anthropologists are infamous for entering into community spaces and taking what they deem useful: objects, other-than-human relations, stories of places and names. Ultimately, I was (and am) a settler scholar, and I too wanted something. I wanted to complete a dissertation, to get a degree, and perhaps a job. To scour Myaamia history for a dissertation topic for the sake of graduating would only perpetuate this extraction.

I do not have an exact record of how I answered Hunter’s question. I know I told her that I wanted my work to be useful, and I wanted to know whether the Tribe would be interested in seeing the project move forward. As we began to talk about the details, Hunter and I outlined what collaboration and accountability could look like. She told me she would appreciate being able to review chapter drafts to give ongoing feedback, and she recommended reaching out to the THPO for the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma as well. I also reconnected with Ironstrack, who informed me of a few lost documents to keep an eye out for, and suggested that the Myaamia Center would like to receive updates on my work if I came across new sources. Within a year, I was able to have a dual meeting with both THPOs about the scope of my dissertation and emergent themes I saw rising from the research. My project slowly evolved away from being a solitary object of internal study, and as it did, my perception of historical work changed with it.

Nestled within these meetings were the seeds of a research article. During my first Zoom call with Hunter, as I spoke about Clark’s interactions with Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people), Hunter mentioned that they were involved in the landmark Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, wherein the Marshall court enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery to determine that Native nations had the right to sell their lands, but only to the federal government. I then bought and annotated a copy of Blake Watson’s Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights. I found myself staring at his rendering of the land cession and thinking back to Ironstrack’s scholarship, which dealt with Myaamia conceptions and renderings of place and space. As I put Ironstrack’s maps next to written descriptions from 18th century settler land companies, the boundaries seemed at odds. Notably, it seemed as if Peeyankihšia land cessions were isolated to the west side of the river, protecting their continued access to the waterway. I thought I had found a paper.

I asked for a meeting with Ironstrack and explained my basic argument. This sale to the land companies could be read as a Peeyankihšia effort to build new relationships with potential east coast settlers while also maintaining their connection to the Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi (Wabash River) and thereby their Myaamia relatives. I then detailed how this observation had largely come from my comparison of the land maps and finding discrepancies between them.

Ironstrack told me he saw where I was coming from, but that I was working with incomplete data. The map scans I used were old, and the cession boundaries were likely marked by the settlers, not the map’s Indigenous creator. He explained that he was curious about what kinds of environments were encompassed within the land tracts. Maybe that would shed some light on how Peeyankihšia people viewed this agreement? Ironstrack’s own work was instructive in this regard, and as I sat with his comments, I began translating a French colonial ledger from Vincennes, Indiana, a town in Myaamionki (Miami homelands) that was important to Peeyankihšia people and eventually to Clark.

Not everything was lining up in my head. The usual story goes that Peeyankihšia people, in the face of depopulation or at the prompting of a few greedy leaders, sold their territory to rich easterners. Except even after this land deal, Peeyankihšia people retained their villages near the sold lands demarcated by the settler land companies for at least a decade. This would not be an issue if village sites gained all their subsistence from nearby plots of corn agriculture. But as I learned from Ironstrack, there were any number of important ecosystems from which to draw seasonal nutrition. If Peeyankihšia people opted not to trap, sugar, or gather tubers within the ceded land, they would have had to travel farther and farther afield to attain the calories needed to survive.

Then came a moment of serendipity. The French colonial ledger, which I had been using largely as language practice, conveyed how common it was for Indigenous groups passing through and living at Vincennes to exchange food and gifts with the town’s residents. The land companies offered gifts that were similar even in amount, just as a lump sum. To this point, I envisioned my project as a way to demonstrate how Peeyankihšia people were preserving their relationship to their homelands even during negotiations with land surveyors. But I began to suspect that I needed to challenge my most basic assumption about this research. What if Peeyankihšia people had never actually “sold” their lands at all? What if they interpreted this land deal as they had previous negotiations, where they would gain access to new trade networks and community alliances, but ideally without losing access to their old networks? This could be a story of preparing for bountiful futures rather than predicting their own “decline.”

More than the eventual thesis of the article, I interpret writing against “decline” as one of the central importances of collaborative research as a method. Narrating Indigenous “declension” has long been a hallmark of U.S. public memory work. Striking tones at times mournful, celebratory, or stoic, Indigenous “disappearance” before settler “civilization” or “progress” is an integral story to U.S. mythos. In my experience, collaboration explicitly insists upon what Indigenous nations already know: that Indigenous people have not disappeared. Moreover, collaborative research demands that scholars recognize the expertise of Native knowledge-holders, and to make space for culturally informed renderings of new and old questions.

Collaborative research will look different to every circumstance—in my early meetings with Hunter, we were careful to outline just what it meant for us. For me, collaboration means steady communication. It means a willingness to be wrong, and to learn. What was perhaps most difficult for me was letting go of the disciplinary desire to be the first or only person to set eyes on and publish exciting source material. I learned that history does not have to be lonely. There were, of course, many points in the research process where I was physically alone—I’m far from the first graduate student to have spent hours tucked in a backroom surrounded by boxes. But each stage of this project was defined by others, from Hunter introducing the topic and her impactful comments on the article draft, to Ironstrack’s conversations and feedback, to my peers’ reflections, and my advisors’ guidance.

As the writer, I was an important part of this process, and the finished version bears my own voice and arguments. I have come to suspect the impact of collaborative research is not only on the work it generates but on the perceptions held by the researcher. Accountability was something I began to carry with me into archival corners. I felt, and feel, obligated to reciprocate the time and aid gifted to me by the Miami Tribe by working ethically and thoroughly. The excitement of research became not just what I could find, but what I could share.

Josh A. McGonagle Althoff is an advanced doctoral student in history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he works with Drs. David Chang and Jean O’Brien. His dissertation research focuses on the displacement of Myaamia (Miami) narratives within sites of state and national memory in contemporary Indiana, and how that displacement has been challenged and navigated by Miami and Peoria peoples.

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^[1] “About the Myaamia Center,” Miami University of Ohio, https://miamioh.edu/myaamia-center/about/index.html.