The OAH Conference on American History is the leading conference for American historians and the study of American history that occurs in Spring of every year. We invite all those interested in American history to join us in Boston, March 31-April 3. Those who are not able to attend the in-person conference are invited to join us for the concurrent OAH Virtual Conference.

INDIGENOUS / AMERICAN PASTS AND FUTURES

Across the world, as many as 500 million Indigenous people—defined by and tied to long histories in place—struggle on the front lines of climate change and global pandemic, even as they fight the legacies of violent histories of dispossession. Their histories matter, both around the planet and in the United States. While historians now routinely gesture toward settler colonialism, and Native histories win major prizes, it is still the case that American Indian, Alaska Native, and Kanaka Maoli peoples struggle to find a place in historical narratives focused on American national politics, racial formation, capitalism, slavery, immigration, citizenship, rights, and other familiar organizing principles. The integration of indigeneity into the field of American history has proceeded in fits and starts—and indeed, Native histories are still subject to the erasures predicted by settler colonial theory.

The 2022 Program Committee recognizes the important transformations accompanying the conjunctural crises of mid-2020—pandemic disease, economic dislocation, mass resistance to structural racial inequity, and continued degradation of the American political system. While we cannot anticipate the uncertainties of the months that lie ahead, we know that the work of making sense of the present demands the insights of history and the labor of historians.