Kasey Keeler (she/her) is a citizen of the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians and is a direct descendant of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is an Associate Professor jointly appointed in the School of Human Ecology and in the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Keeler earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her scholarship examines federal Indian policy, land, housing, and American Indian (sub)urbanization with an emphasis on the everyday experiences of off-reservation Native people.
Her first book, American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota, explores how U.S. housing policies intersected with federal Indian policy to shape urban and suburban Indian lives in the 20th century. She is currently working on several new projects – an edited volume that investigates Paul Bunyan mythology as a cultural tool of Indigenous dispossession and environmental transformation across the Great Lakes region, a book length project on American Indians and the Homestead Act, and a digital mapping tool that centers the Ho-Chunk history of the Madison area, a region known as Teejop.
Dr. Keeler’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, and the Center for the Humanities First Book Program. Her scholarly and public-facing work includes collaborations on oral history, land dispossession, and Indigenous placemaking, notably through the Mapping Teejop digital history project and the Ȟaȟa Wakpadaŋ / Basset Creek Oral History Project.
She has also contributed to public discourse through appearances on WORT Radio, Edge Effects, Belt Magazine, Minnesota Public Radio, and Wisconsin Public Radio, helping to bring Indigenous-centered histories and land-based storytelling to broader audiences.
Contact Information:
Email: krkeeler@wisc.edu
Phone: 608-263-3595
Selected Recent Work:
“History Forum: American Indians & the American Dream With Kasey Keeler.” Minnesota Historical Society. YouTube. February 7, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld1v9qe60jY.
“American Indians and the American Dream | University Place.” PBS Wisconsin. YouTube. November 6, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv-el02WpKU.
American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
“Paul Bunyan Narratives Loom Large in the Northwoods.” Edge Effects, October 24, 2023. https://edgeeffects.net/paul-bunyan-narratives/.
“Episode 1 – Dr. Kasey Keeler,” Hennepin History Museum. YouTube. September 9, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv9oUyT2A48.
“Home/Lands – Belt Magazine.” Belt Magazine – Dispatches From the Rust Belt and Greater Midwest, July 6, 2022. https://beltmag.com/home-lands-indigenous-diaspora-great-lakes/.
“Putting People Where They Belong: American Indian Housing Policy in the Mid-Twentieth Century.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 70-104. https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.3.2.0070.