Description
In this presentation, I investigate how archival sources provide insights into Indigenous peoples’ historic environmental connections, interventions, and roles. Primary sources held by the Newberry Library and other institutions illustrate how Native peoples and nations have navigated imposed environmental and geographic dislocations, ruptures, and transformations throughout the central and western Great Lakes region. These places are the homewaters and homelands of the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi), Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Kiash Matchitiwuk (Menominee), Meskwaki (Fox), Myaamia (Miami), Odawa, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Sauk (Sac), Wyandotte (Huron), and other Indigenous peoples. By narrowing in on a handful of case studies, this talk presents environmental relationships, movements, and maneuverings reflective of larger patterns, dynamics, and structures. These examples relate to intergenerational fishing sites, harvesting technologies (e.g., sturgeon weirs), stewardship practices (e.g., applications of Native fire), efforts to maintain geographic bonds despite removals and dispossessions, and articulations of the consequences of specific dams and canals. In this presentation, I follow strands concerning water and fire that illuminate the specificities of Native nations’ and peoples’ environmental relationships, their respective navigations of imposed land/water-use practices impacting these longstanding connections, and resonances expressed across the waters of Turtle Island.
About the Speaker
Elan Pochedley is the current Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS) Faculty Fellow at the Newberry Library. He is the 1855 Professor of Great Lakes Anishinaabe Knowledge, Spiritualities, and Cultural Practices in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, where he is an affiliate faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) program. He is the author of Restoring Indigenous Place Names: Making Anishinaabe Toponyms Visible Throughout the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation (Cambridge University Press, 2026, forthcoming), and is finishing a second book tentatively titled Neshnabé Geographies. These works focus on Bodéwadmi and Ojibwe place-based knowledges, ecological relationships, and environmental histories.
As the 2025-2026 NCAIS Faculty Fellow, Pochedley is conducting archival research concerning Indigenous peoples’ and nations’ historic environmental relationships, roles, interventions, and practices, with specific attention on the interpretation of sustainability ethics within archival texts. This historic research focuses on the traditional territories of Native nations and peoples throughout the central and western Great Lakes region, including the Bodéwadmi, Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Kiash Matchitiwuk, Meskwaki, Myaamia, Odawa, Ojibwe, Sauk, and Wyandotte, among other peoples. In this research project, he also examines how Native peoples/villages/bands/nations have navigated removals, relational and geographic dislocations, and environmental changes impacting their homelands, homewaters, and other-than-human relatives. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Charles Eastman Fellowship at Dartmouth College, and an 1855 Professorship at Michigan State University. Pochedley is Neshnabé/Bodéwadmi and an enrolled citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
About Colloquium
Colloquium is a weekly series of talks featuring staff, fellows, and scholars who are working with the library’s vast collections. These events bring together experts from various fields to share their research on a wide range of topics, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and engage in conversation.
Colloquium is open to the public and offers a chance to explore fascinating ideas and new discoveries. No advance registration is required.