John Bird is a member of Peguis First Nation and is currently a 2023-2025 Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. During his doctoral studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Bird was awarded an Indigenous Student Achievement Award for Leadership in 2020 and spent a year at Yale University as the 2021-2022 Henry Roe Cloud Doctoral Fellow. His research focuses on Anishinaabe historical representation, particularly how Anishinaabe authors wrote about the history and future of their own people.
His dissertation, “‘And by Publishing, to Preserve:’ Envisioning Indigenous Futures in Anishinaabe Historical Writing, 1814–1893,” focuses on the historical writings of nineteenth century Anishinaabeg authors, particularly Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay), George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), and Francis Assiginack. Bird explores these authors’ representations and interpretations of Anishinaabe history, as well as their work to challenge settler-colonial attempts to erase the Indigenous past. He argues that historical writing was, and continues to be, a critical site of colonial struggle, where these Anishinaabeg authors sought to bring about political changes and to envision Indigenous futures.
Since 2015, Bird has participated in community-engaged and public-facing research projects. These include Stó:lō cemetery mapping and oral histories, collaborative research with Mistawasis Nêhiyawak, and the NYU-Yale Indian Sovereignty Project. At the University of Saskatchewan, Bird volunteered as a student witness at the inaugural Building Reconciliation Annual National Forum which focused on meeting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. As a research assistant in the office of the Vice-Provost Indigenous Engagement, he participated in community-engaged decolonization and Indigenization research. This work led to the creation of the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous strategy in 2021.
Currently, as a postdoctoral fellow, Bird is researching for a monograph on Anishinaabeg journeys to the British Isles from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries, examining the patterns of resistance, kinship, diplomacy, education, tourism, and representation. His project is entitled, “In This Land of Refinement, I Will Be an Indian”: Sovereignty and Reconciliation in Anishinaabe Journeys Through the British Cultural Borderlands, 1761-1946.
Contact:
jrb102@mail.usask.ca
John Bird
Faculty of History
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Selected Publications:
“‘And by Publishing, to Preserve:’ Envisioning Indigenous Futures in Anishinaabe Historical Writing, 1814–1893.” PhD diss., University of Saskatchewan, 2023.
“Settler Salvation and Indigenous Survival: George Copway’s Reconciliatory Vision, 1849-1851.” London Journal of Canadian Studies 35, no. 1 (November 2020): 138-153.
“‘Stranger in a Strange Land:’ Cultural Hybridity and Mimicry in George Copway’s Engagement with Christianity, Freemasonry, and Literacy.” MA thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2017.