UMass Boston

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

• "Histories with Communities: Struggles, Collaborations, Transformations," forthcoming in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, Chris Andersen and Jean M. O'Brien, eds., Routledge.
• "Recognition and Rebuilding," Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O'Brien, in The World of Indigenous North America, Robert Warrior, ed., Routledge, 2015.
• Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O'Brien, eds., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, June 2013.
• "Altered State? Policy Narratives, Recognition, and the 'New' War on Indians in Connecticut," in Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O'Brien eds., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, June 2013.
• "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), 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.
• "Gender, Culture, and Colonialism: A Critical Feminist Perspective on Native-Angloamerican Struggles over Land in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut," Crosscurrents: The Journal of Graduate Research in Anthropology 8 (Autumn):23-33 (1996).

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).

Courses Taught:

• Introduction to Human Rights (WGS-ANTH 295)
• Gender and Film (WGS 341)
• Native American Women (WGS 270)
• Feminist Thought (WGS 400)
• Gender, Culture and Power (WGS 360)
• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 106)
• Anthropology on Film: Watching Film/Seeing Culture (ANTH 260)
• Native Peoples of North America (ANTH –AMST 270)
• Sociocultural Theory (ANTH 345)
• Contemporary Issues in Native North America (ANTH-AMST 476)
• Land, Law and Indigenous Rights (HONORS 290)
• Research Methods in Historical Anthropology (ANTH 670 - graduate seminar)
• Colonialism and Culture Contact (ANTH 672 - graduate seminar)