Robert Caldwell is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, Louisiana, and an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). His interdisciplinary research centers Indigenous mapping and cartographic representation, ethnohistorical work for his own tribal community, and Native migration across the U.S. Southwest and Southeast borderlands.
Caldwell earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2018, following earlier graduate work in Heritage Resources (M.A., Northwestern State University of Louisiana) and Labor Studies (M.S., University of Massachusetts Amherst). He also holds a B.A. in Anthropology and History from the University of New Orleans. His dissertation, “Indians in their Proper Place,” explores 150 years of thematic cartography of American Indian homelands and was supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the American Antiquarian Society.
He is the author of Choctaw-Apache Foodways (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015), a cultural history of his community’s culinary traditions, which earned him designation as a Louisiana Tradition Bearer by the Louisiana Folklife Commission. His most recent book, Choctaw-Apache Voices (co-edited with Thomas Parrie), is a multidisciplinary volume that includes poetry, oral history, folklore, and historical essays by members of the Choctaw-Apache.
Caldwell has held faculty appointments at Hampshire College, Brown University, McNeese State University, and SOWELA Technical Community College. He has also worked as a library digitization specialist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the co-founder and Secretary of the HoMinti Society, a cultural nonprofit dedicated to preserving Choctaw-Apache knowledge systems. Caldwell is a regular contributor to academic journals and community-centered projects on Indigenous history, cultural survival, and mapping. His upcoming monograph based on his dissertation is set to be published by the University of Nebraska Press, and his book Zwolle Tamales (Louisiana State University Press) will further explore Indigenous foodways and memory.
Contact:
Email: rcaldwel@buffalo.edu
Website: https://robertbcaldwell.com/
Select Recent Work:
Indians in their Proper Place: Social Sciences and the Mapping of Native America. (Working Title) University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming.
“Lewis and Clark Expedition.” In History of Cartography: The Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Roger J.P. Kain, vol 5. University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming.
“Be-ing and Longing in the Shadow of Jeffrey Amherst.” In Belonging in Higher Education: Perspectives and Lessons from Diverse Faculty, edited By Nicholas D. Hartlep, Terrell L. Strayhorn, and Fred A. Bonner II. Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Belonging-in-Higher-Education-Perspectives-and-Lessons-from-Diverse-Faculty/Hartlep-Strayhorn-BonnerII/p/book/9781032442976
Co-edited with Thomas Parrie. Choctaw-Apache Voices. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023. https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781622889389/choctaw-apache-voices/
“Persistence on the Edge: The Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb,” Native South 19 (2020): 190-203. 10.1353/nso.2020.0006
“Robert Caldwell – Pow Wows, Foodways, Passing the Ball,” Bvlbancha Public Access. YouTube. November 16, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l820QjoJbIY.
“Choctaw Frontier: Incursions and settlement in Northwest Louisiana and East Texas, 1760-1836,” North Louisiana History 51 no. 3-4 (2020): 119-149.
Co-producer. The River Bottom. Directed/edited by Avery Lowery. Southern Foodways Alliance, 2016. https://www.southernfoodways.org/film/the-river-bottom/
Choctaw-Apache Foodways. Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015. https://www.tamupress.com/search-results/?keyword=Choctaw-Apache-Foodways