Message
from Phil DeloriaMessage
from Phil DeloriaI'm an Associate Professor in the Department
of History and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.
My research and teaching are in cultural history, environmental history, and
American Indian history, with my major publications being *Playing Indian* (Yale
UP, 1998) and (ed., with Neal Salisbury) *The Blackwell Companion to American
Indian History.* I'm currently finishing a project concerning Indian people
in late 19th and early 20th century America. None of this is particularly relevant,
I suppose, to my interest in the ICHM, but maybe it offers some useful context.
My next project is going to focus on the Leonid meteor storm of 1833. This has
long been used to synchronize plains Indian winter counts (pictographic/mneumonic
calendars), which were often idiosyncratic to individual bands and which tend
not to mark "obvious" events (the Little Big Horn fight, for example,
doesn't show up on most
winter counts) so much as memorable oddities. Since the 1833 event was particularly
intense, I'm interested in using it not only to explore Indian worlds, but also
to examine a broader American response--that of slaves, New York millenialists
and Mormons, Philadelphia scientists, the Mexican southwest. So that's where
I'm at... a cultural historian interested in how people responded to an extraordinary,
shared, event.
-Phil Deloria