Native Americans / Native American History

Margaret Jacobs is the Charles Mach Professor of History and the director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. At the Center, she co-directs the Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors project. This partnership between the Center and the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma aims to reconnect the tribe to its southeast Nebraska homeland and educate non-Natives about Indigenous history in Nebraska. Each year since 2022, the tribe has celebrated Otoe-Missouria Day on Sept. 21 in the Lincoln area. Jacobs, who is of settler background, collaborates with Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk on Reconciliation Rising, (reconciliationrising.org), a multimedia project that showcases Indigenous people and settlers who are working together to honestly confront painful and traumatic histories; promote meaningful and respectful dialogue between Natives and non-Natives; and create pathways to reconciliation. Jacobs also is co-founder and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project at UNL. This project locates and makes available all the government records related to the Genoa school as an act of archival reconciliation of bringing history home to tribal nations. Its aim is to support descendant communities in telling more complete stories of Genoa and to promote awareness and truth-seeking about the boarding schools among all Americans. Jacobs has published more than 35 articles and four books, primarily about the U.S. government’s policy and practice of Indigenous child removal and family separation for over a century. She published “After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands” with Princeton University Press in 2021. (Updated March 2025.)

Katrina Jagodinsky is a Susan J. Rosowski Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. Her first book, "Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in Puget Sound and Sonoran Borderlands, 1854-1946" (Yale University Press, 2016), examined Native women's legal claims prior to U.S. citizenship. She has published a number of articles that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jagodinsky recently launched PetitioningforFreedom.org, a digital project that chronicles and indexes nearly 2,000 legal cases filed between 1812-1924. (Updated March 2025.)

Angel Hinzo’s research centers around Ho-Chunk history, federal Indian law in the United States, Native American women’s history and feminist theory. She is a Fellow in the Center for Great Plain Studies and is an active community member at the Lincoln American Indian Center. She is also developing a book manuscript that focuses on 19th and 20th century Ho-Chunk history and self-determination in the settler state.