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Faculty & Staff

Areas of Expertise

Indigenous land rights, Indian policy, and colonialism; federal acknowledgment and tribal nation sovereignty ; indigenous communities, the reservation system, and racial hierarchy in 18th century southern New England; gender and power in colonial contexts; women, political activism, and policy making in Native New England; indigenous peoples, human rights, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Degrees

PhD, University of Connecticut

Professional Publications & Contributions

• "Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook", co-edited with Jean M. O’Brien, release date: June, 2013, University of North Carolina Press.
• "Colonial Violence and the Gendering of Post-War Terrain in Southern New England: Native Women and Rights to Reservation Land in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut," Landscapes of Violence, Vol. 2 (1) (2012).
• (Invited film review essay) We Still Live Here, Anne Makepeace Productions, 2010, Film review essay of the documentary on Wampanoag language revitalization and Wampanoag ingist Jessie Little Doe Baird in American Anthropologist, Vol. 114 (4), December 2012.
• Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press (2005).
• “Locating the Cannibals: Conquest, North American Ethnohistory, and the Threat of Objectivity,” History and Anthropology, Vol. 18 (2): 101-133 (2007).
• “Recovering Gendered Political Histories: Local Struggles and Native Women’s Resistance in Colonial Southern New England” (co-authored with Trudie Lamb Richmond), in Interpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds. Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts (2003).
• “Altered State? Policy Narratives, Recognition, and the ‘New’ War on Indians in Connecticut,” forthcoming in Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien eds., Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook (University of North Carolina Press).

Additional Information

Amy Den Ouden received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut, with a specialization in Native North America. Her current research is focused on colonialism, Native land rights, and the construction of “race” in southern New England. She has done extensive archival and ethnographic research as a part of her work on the federal acknowledgment projects of the Eastern Pequot and Golden Hill Paugussett nations, and has taught a number of courses on Native American history and culture, as well as courses on gender and power in cross-cultural contexts. Den Ouden’s continuing research on cultural identity, gender, and resistance in the history of the Native peoples of Connecticut has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, where she held a predoctoral fellowship, and by the American Philosophical Society, Phillips Native American Fund.

Den Ouden is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation, and is working with a committee of Native American educators and activists in Connecticut to establish an Indian Affairs Commission of Connecticut.  

She is also an Advisory Board member for First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies; an invited consultant and co-coordinator, Connecticut Native History Project - ConnecticutHistory.org, Connecticut Humanities Council; and an invited lecturer for the upcoming National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for Teachers - Native Americans of New England: A Historical Overview, July 7-8, 2013.  Lecture topic: “Land, Resistance, and ‘Race’ in the Eighteenth Century.”

Den Ouden's recent publications include her book Beyond Conquest: Native Peoples and the Struggle for History in New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), "Locating the Cannibals: Conquest, North American Ethnohistory, and the Threat of Objectivity," in History and Anthropology (Vol. 18, no. 2, 2007), and the essay "Recovering Gendered Political Histories: Local Struggles and Native Women's Resistance in Colonial Southern New England," co-authored with Trudie Lamb Richmond, in the volume Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience.

She also teaches courses and advises students in the Historical Archaeology Graduate (MA) Program.