Making the Black Hills thrive, forever. Enjoy giving!

From 2022-2023, I was delighted to serve as a visiting professor in the History Department at UM. There, I finished my book, "Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement" (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024). I had a wonderful time teaching classes on the history of the American West, mentoring students, and leading two summer institutes aimed at inspiring high schoolers to explore careers in history. I also had a great time helping expand the department's public history program, including helping launch the Griz130 History Initiative -- a public-facing project to commemorate the university's 130th anniversary. After leaving UM at the end of the fall semester 2023, I became a "faculty affiliate" in the History Department, and I continue to volunteer as a mentor to students and a partner to my former colleagues on the faculty.

From 2015 to 2023, I was a volunteer researcher and historian for the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project. This Indigenous-led community research initiative began as an effort to locate and memorialize the graves of children who died at the Rapid City Indian School, a federal boarding school, in the early 20th century. It has expanded to include a community-wide public history and advocacy project focused on the Indigenous history of Rapid City, and specifically, the history of urban dispossession and dislocation in our community.The project has three goals: 1) to build a memorial to remember, protect, and honor the children; 2) to find a positive, creative solution to some irregularities in the allocation of former boarding school lands in Rapid City; and 3) to educate our community and others about this story and provide a model for engaging with challenging histories in constructive ways. For this work, the Project Team earned the Honorable Mention for the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project from the National Council on Public History and won the 2020 Alice Smith Prize in Public History from the Midwestern History Association.

History is strategy. As a senior historian at Vantage Point Historical Services, Inc., I helped people, communities, and institutions leverage the lessons of their past to meet their mission. My work varied from story to story and medium to medium: One day, I captured oral histories to help a global philanthropy leverage lessons from its past to achieve strategic goals. The next, I organized community meetings to help a Native American tribe build consensus around how best to make museum exhibits resonate while inspiring young tribal members to preserve their languages and defend tribal sovereignty. By Wednesday, I was preparing a public presentation on how historic preservation can strengthen community cohesion and promote economic development. As the week wound to a close, I put the finishing touches on a collaborative digital history project, drafting some exhibit text, then helped organize a volunteer research initiative with the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project.It was wonderful to have an opportunity to do such diverse and meaningful work. While at Vantage Point, I helped develop several major and award-winning museum exhibits in collaboration with Split Rock Studios (MN). I also worked on history-centered projects for the Ford Foundation (NYC), the Rockefeller Foundation (NYC), and the Legler Benbough Foundation (San Diego). I also wrote "The Question Is 'Why?': Stanford M. Adelstein, A Jewish Life in South Dakota" (Rapid City, SD: Vantage Point Press, 2019) and am a co-author (with Eric John Abrahamson) of "Expanding the Energy Horizon: A History of Black Hills Corporation Since 1883" (Rapid City, SD: Black Hills Corporation, 2018).