Jacki Thompson Rand is Choctaw maternally and is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Mississippi Choctaw. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies, Associate Vice Chancellor for Native Affairs and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor on Native Affairs Issues at the university of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests center on federal Indian law and policy, settler colonialism, and global indigenous histories. Rand’s areas of interest also cover the history of Native North America, museums and human rights in addition to public history. Recently, Rand is the first editor of a new collaborative digital humanities project that focuses on the indigenous Midwest.
Rand is the author of Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (2008), which illuminates the ways in which Kiowas on the southern plains dealt with the U.S. government and efforts to control them after they were forced onto a reservation by an 1867 Treaty. The Kiowa underwent considerable loss of land and population decline, as well as political, cultural, economic, and religious sovereignty and traditions. Rand demonstrates that Native struggles against the encroachment of the state go well beyond armed resistance and political strategizing. Rand shows that the Native response was born of everyday survival and the yearning for well-being and community.
Prior to entering graduate school, Rand worked for the Smithsonian Institution from 1983 to 1994. From 1990 to 1994 she organized numerous consultations between senior staff members of the National Museum of the American Indian and Native community members throughout the United States. Rand was also one of the co-founders of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation American Indian Studies Consortium (CIC AIS) and served on the Executive Committee from 2000-2006. She organized the first CIC AIS graduate research conference in 1999 at the University of Iowa. Presently, she is member of the University of Iowa’s Native American Council and the Office of the State Archaeologist Indian Advisory Council.
Contact Information:
• jacki-rand@uiowa.edu • 319-335-2301
Selected Recent Works:
Rand, Jacki Thompson. “Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 29, no. 2-3 (2008): 51–58.
Rand, Jacki Thompson. Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Rand, Jacki Thompson. “Primary sources: Indian goods and the history of American colonialism and the 19th-century reservation.” In Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, edited by Nancy Shoemaker, 137–60. New York: Routledge, 2002.