Overview
Professor Hale is a scholar of Indigenous religious traditions whose work focuses on nineteenth century Native American history and United States race relations. She holds a PhD from the Department of History at Yale University and an M.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before coming to Barnard, she was the 2017-2018 Andrew W. Mellon Native American Scholars Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Philosophical Society. She has also held fellowships at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Newberry Library D’Arcy McNickle Center in Chicago. Professor Hale teaches courses in global Indigenous religious traditions, Native American history, and religion in the Americas. Her book manuscript, titled Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Native American Resistance After the US Civil War is under contract with Yale University Press.
Research Focus
Native Ratio: Indigeneity as Global Framework
Viewing Indigeneity through the lens of global politics, international diplomacy, and world history raises serious problems of scale. With a few important exceptions, many Indigenous Studies scholars have shied away from global analyses due to an understandable commitment to community-based research methods. This is not a problem per se, since such close studies provide invaluable detail and perspective. This commitment also reflects a move toward more ethical scholarly approaches that center Indigenous worldviews. Field-wide inattention to scale, however, risks eliding the extent to which nation-states, religious institutions, and non-governmental organizations are deeply enmeshed in efforts to manage Indigenous populations in ways that necessarily involve global and transnational forces. With its chosen theme of “Scale,” Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities Fellowship will enable me to pursue the completion of my second book, titled Native Ratio: Indigeneity as Global Framework. The 2025-26 theme of “Scale” is uniquely suited to the aim of this project, which will
open up new means by which university students and policymakers can make sense of the complex ways that Indigeneity operates at international levels.
