Kaden Jelsing

Kaden Jelsing is a historian of the US West, Indigenous North America, settler colonialism, and the environment. His research is focused on Indigenous-settler relationships, particularly in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. A lecturer in the American Studies Department at Smith College, Jelsing teaches courses at the intersection of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Environmental Studies.

Jelsing was a Killam Predoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia where he researched how Indigenous and settler visions of the future articulated through prophecy expressed different modes of relationality towards the land, humans, and other-than-human beings. His dissertation, “Sovereign Futures: Indigenous and Settler Prophecies in Two Nineteenth-century American “Northwests” won the Beverly Purrington-Richard White Dissertation Award from the Western History Association. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on this dissertation.