I am retiring at the end of fall semester. I do not wish to be included in this.
Indigenous land rights and the reservation system in colonial southern New England, Historical anthropology and colonialism, Federal acknowledgment and tribal nation sovereignty in the 21st century, Indian policy and racial hierarchy, Gender studies and Feminist Theory, Indigenous women and political activism in North America, Human rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in global perspective
PhD, University of Connecticut
MA, Trinity College
Amy E. Den Ouden earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, with a specialization in Native North America. She has done extensive archival, oral history and ethnographic research as a part of her work for the federal acknowledgment projects of the Eastern Pequot and Golden Hill Paugussett tribal nations in Connecticut from 1991 through 2002, and her community engaged research on indigenous rights, federal acknowledgment, the cultural, political and historical significance of reservation land, and tribal nation histories in Connecticut continues. Most recently, Prof. Den Ouden organized and chaired a panel entitled “Cultural Heritage, Historical Trauma, and the Space for Justice: Eastern Pequot Reservation Land and Its Significance in the 21st Century” for the Cultural Landscapes & Heritage Values conference at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, May 2015.
Prof. Den Ouden is a member of the faculty for UMass Boston’s Human Rights Minor, and she also serves as affiliated faculty for the School for the Environment. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, where she held a predoctoral fellowship in the National Museum of American History, and by the American Philosophical Society, Phillips Native American Fund. She has been an Advisory Board member for First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies, and an invited consultant for the Connecticut Native History Project/ ConnecticutHistory.org of the Connecticut Humanities Council. Prof. Den Ouden has also served on the Advisory Board for the Wampanoag Indigenous Program at Plimoth Plantation. Den Ouden was invited to present her research for the scholars’ workshop on Settler Colonialism, Gender, Sexuality and the Question of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut (April 2013), where she presented a paper entitled “Indian Policy’s Executions: Katherine Garrett, Colonial Narratives of Condemnation, and Local Chronologies of Violence in Southern New England.” In addition, she has presented her ongoing research on colonialism, indigenous resistance, racial discourse and Indian policy for the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on The Petition in North America: Interpretive, Spatial, Statistical, and Political Approaches, as a part of the panel entitled “Native Voice and Native Space – Land and Representation in Native American Petitioning” (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, March 2014), the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for Teachers, Native Americans of New England: A Historical Overview (University of Massachusetts Amherst, July 2013), for which she lectured on reservation land, racial formation, and indigenous resistance in the 18th century, and the American Studies Summer Institute, “Public Enemies: Imagining the Social Threat to American Communities and the Nation” (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and University of Massachusetts Boston, July 2011).
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