The Land Beneath Our Feet: Mapping Indigenous Peoples in North America with Claudio Saunt

The Western History Lecture Series, co-produced by Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Department of History, presents Claudio Saunt, Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and Regents' Professor at the University of Georgia. Saunt's talk, "The Land Beneath Our Feet: Mapping Indigenous Peoples in North America," will be held on Wednesday, January 18, 2023 in the History Corner.

One of 180 artists, writers, scholars and scientists honored by the Guggenheim Foundation in 2022, Saunt is  widely recognized as one of the nation’s foremost scholars of Native American history and a pioneer in the field of digital history. His Stanford talk will focus on the same subject as his Guggenheim Fellowship project, “The Land Beneath Our Feet." In great depth and detail, "the project maps Cherokee families who lost their homes in the Southeast in the 1830s, creating a virtual representation of the Cherokee Nation just before the United States drove its sixteen thousand citizens off their farms and across the Mississippi River," writes Alan Flurry in an article about Saunt's award. "It relies on a unique set of records, produced by the federal government, that make the Cherokees perhaps the best-documented people in the entire world in the 1830s."

We hope you'll join us at the Lane History Corner for a scholarly discussion on a topic of vast importance to the history of the American West.

Photo of Claudio Saunt by Andrew Zawacki