Elan Pochedley, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and 1855 Professor of Great Lakes Anishinaabe Knowledge, Spiritualities, and Cultural Practices, was awarded the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS) long-term faculty fellowship to research how Indigenous peoples’ expressions of environmental stewardship and governance have been practiced, sustained, interrupted, and/or rekindled throughout the central and western Great Lakes region.

“I’m really trying to dive into the diversity of human-environmental relationships in the Great Lakes region across time,” Pochedley said. “I’ll look at archival sources from physical and digital collections to find stories that speak to how Indigenous peoples have understood their relationships to waterways and sites of significance — to explore what it means to be in a place and to be of a place.”

During the 2025-2026 academic year, with support from the NCAIS Faculty Fellowship and the Jenison Fund Career and Research Continuity Support, Pochedley is conducting his research at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which contains one of the largest collections of books and manuscripts on American Indian and Indigenous Studies in the world, and a few other libraries throughout the Great Lakes region.  

A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Pochedley is particularly interested in studying how Indigenous peoples’ traditional territories and environments have been altered over time, examining how disruptions of waterways have had profound impacts on peoples, animals, plants, and the relationships between these living beings. The draining of wetlands and the damming of rivers to prevent flooding or regulate water flow for commerce, for example, are just a few ways the efforts to try to control waterways have intervened in landscapes with rippling consequences.

“The removal of Native peoples…is one part of the environmental and ecological history of the Great Lakes region. Another part is the imposed alteration of bodies of water, which often impacted Native peoples, plants, and animals.”

“The removal of Native peoples, or their confinement within reservations if they weren’t removed, is one part of the environmental and ecological history of the Great Lakes region,” Pochedley said. “Another part is the imposed alteration of bodies of water, which often impacted Native peoples, plants, and animals who relied on those habitats and the diverse ecosystems that were made possible through existing wetlands, rivers, and lakes.”

Pochedley is exploring not only what happened, but the why and the “so what?” In other words, not only documenting which environmental disturbances occurred over time, but also examining their ecological impacts and the motivations of the actors who pursued or facilitated various forms of habitat transformation.

Pochedley’s current archival research also addresses Native peoples’ own environmental interventions, bringing together records describing their ecological roles and lifeways with discussions of Indigenous peoples’ and nations’ respective worldviews, ethics, and protocols. In doing so, he hopes to trace when, if, and how understandings of sustainability or obligations with other-than-human relatives guided or governed these interactions. Examples include Indigenous fire stewardship (controlled burns) and the creation of weirs that assisted in harvesting fish such as lake sturgeon.

“I’m interested in how different Native peoples intervened in their environments as well, looking at the ways that different Native peoples and villages themselves engaged with their environments for specific reasons,” Pochedley said. “My research looks at how ethics, orientations towards the world, and concerns of sustainability have influenced human-environmental relations across time throughout the Great Lakes region.”

“My research looks at how ethics, orientations towards the world, and concerns of sustainability have influenced human-environmental relations across time throughout the Great Lakes region.”

One interesting historical case that Pochedley is investigating involves a specific group of 111 Potawatomi people from northern Indiana who were relocated to Kansas in 1837 on what was called the Osage River Reservation. In January 1838, the group’s leader, To-pe-na-pee, petitioned the U.S. President and Congress, requesting to take land in allotments as individuals on the new reservation because certain members were claiming large portions of the forested shoreline.

“Through conversations with Dr. Kelli Mosteller and other Potawatomi people, I’ve come to understand that part of the disruptive experience of being forced from the woodlands and the abundant waters of northern Indiana to Kansas was that there weren’t plentiful trees, and that you’re taking a woodland people whose mode of transportation, whose shelter, and so many things critical to their way of life are made from different woods, barks, roots, and pitches, and you’re displacing them to a place where trees are far less abundant,” Pochedley said.

“And in that petition,” Pochedley added, “it says trees can only be found along the river, being ‘confined almost exclusively to the low grounds along the water-courses.’ As I’ve interpreted this document, this petition is saying, ‘We want to prevent greed within our community because people need to have access to trees, because harvesting and having relationships with trees has long been central to our survival as Neshnabé people.’”

Pochedley recently presented on this archival research at the 2025 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conference in Oklahoma City.

While the petition and a land survey were made, Pochedley said he hopes additional archive research will help him learn whether the request was granted, as well as what other forces may have influenced this 1838 petition. Given the history of dispossession commonly associated with the allotment of Native reservations, the petition concerning equitable divisions of shoreline and forested lands offers a strikingly complex entry point for investigating how Potawatomi people navigated unfamiliar terrains while developing methods for effecting community support, accountability, and health.

For context, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) 50 years later, which divided Native American reservation lands into parcels. The act was designed to separate Native families and sever community bonds by encouraging the development of individually owned Native American farms, with “surplus” lands (being those remaining after the allotment process) sold to Euro-American settlers. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “Although Native Americans controlled about 138 million acres of land before the Dawes Act…Only 48 million acres of land remained in tribal control by 1934.”

Pochedley’s previous research focused primarily on the Anishinaabeg, or Neshnabék, a group of culturally related Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region in North America, which includes the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa, and Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi). His Newberry project, however, will focus on the diversity of Native peoples and nations throughout the Great Lakes region, including the Sauk (Sac), Meskwaki (Fox), Kiash Matchitiwuk (Menominee), Myaamia (Miami), Wyandotte (Huron), Ho-Chunk, Dakota, and others.

He said he hopes to integrate the archival material he finds for this project into his classes at MSU to further demonstrate how Native peoples have sought to retain connections with their other-than-human relatives, even when faced with threats to these relationships associated with environmental transformations and dispossession of their territories.

“How can we write about relationships to different waterways and different environments in a way that’s inclusive of those peoples’ and nations’ relationships, as well as Anishinaabe people’s bonds to their homelands and homewaters?”

As a result of the forced and coerced removals of many Indigenous nations and villages from the Great Lakes region in the early- to mid-1800s, as well as the frequent confinement of Native peoples’ within reservations for those able to remain within their traditional territories, Indigenous peoples’ intergenerational environmental connections aren’t always included in existing narratives of their homewaters and homelands.

“So that’s one thing I’m trying to think about,” Pochedley said. “How can we write about relationships to different waterways and different environments in a way that’s inclusive of those peoples’ and nations’ relationships, as well as Anishinaabe people’s bonds to their homelands and homewaters?”

If Pochedley’s research results in a book, he said he would like to divide the chapters by different waterways, which could be a helpful way of looking at Native peoples’ relationships to those bodies of water, while also exploring their interactions with each other — looking at environmental changes over time and different ways that bodies of water were altered, as well as the subsequent ecological and relational impacts.

Other Research and Book Projects

Pochedley joined Michigan State University in Fall 2023 as an 1855 Professor in MSU’s Department of Religious Studies, a position created by the Office of the Provost and named for the year MSU was founded.

He’s been working on a book that is scheduled to be published in early 2026 through Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research series, titled Restoring Indigenous Place Names: Making Anishinaabe Toponyms Visible Throughout the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation.

The book focuses on place names throughout Gaa-waabaabiganikaag (the White Earth Reservation) in what’s known as present-day northwestern Minnesota, and how environmental knowledge and geographic relationships are reflected in the original Ojibwe language names for lakes and rivers.

Pochedley also is writing another book based on his research with four Potawatomi and Ojibwe nations, tentatively titled Neshnabé Geographies: Storied Environments, Ecological Restorations, and Interspecies Care of the Potawatomi and Ojibwe. He says this work examines Neshnabé and Anishinaabe people’s obligations to other-than-human relatives and waters both historically and in the present, as well as efforts to maintain or revitalize their connections to these relatives and places of significance.

“I really want to make sure that the research I’m doing can reach people, that it’s accessible in a way similar to the book on the Ojibway place names, which will be open access, free, and available to anyone online.”

He hopes a third book will result from his work with the Newberry Library under the NCAIS Faculty Fellowship, possibly with a public-facing component such as a digital cartography project depicting the research and associated archival sources.

“I really want to make sure that the research I’m doing can reach people, that it’s accessible in a way similar to the book on the Ojibway place names, which will be open access, free, and available to anyone online,” Pochedley said. “There are so many different learning styles and ways of knowing in the world so I really like the idea of creating digital maps, or something like that, for sharing the Newberry project down the road.”

By Lynn Waldsmith and Kim Popiolek