MSU professor studies Indigenous environmental stewardship 

Elan Pochedley, assistant professor of religious studies and 1855 professor of Great Lakes Anishinaabe Knowledge, Spiritualities and Cultural Practices, was awarded the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies long-term faculty fellowship. His project explores how Indigenous peoples’ expressions of environmental stewardship and governance have been practiced, sustained, interrupted or rekindled across the central and western Great Lakes region.

“I’m really trying to dive into the diversity of human-environmental relationships in the Great Lakes region across time,” Pochedley said. “I’ll look at archival sources from physical and digital collections to find stories that speak to how Indigenous peoples have understood their relationships to waterways and sites of significance to explore what it means to be in a place and to be of a place.”

During the 2025-26 academic year, with support from the NCAIS Faculty Fellowship and the Jenison Fund Career and Research Continuity Support, Pochedley is conducting his research at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of books and manuscripts on American Indian and Indigenous studies, as well as other libraries throughout the Great Lakes region.

A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Pochedley is particularly interested in how Indigenous peoples’ traditional territories and ecosystems have been altered over time. He studies how disruptions to waterways have affected people, animals, plants and their relationships. The draining of wetlands and the damming of rivers for flood control or commerce, he notes, have reshaped landscapes with lasting consequences.

“The removal of Native peoples, or their confinement within reservations if they weren’t removed, is one part of the environmental and ecological history of the Great Lakes region,” Pochedley said. “Another part is the imposed alteration of bodies of water, which often impacted Native peoples, plants and animals who relied on those habitats and the diverse ecosystems that were made possible through existing wetlands, rivers and lakes.”

Pochedley is exploring not only what happened, but the why and the “so what?” In other words not only documenting which environmental disturbances occurred over time but also examining their ecological impacts and the motivations of the actors who pursued or facilitated various forms of habitat transformation.

Pochedley’s current archival research also addresses Native peoples’ own environmental interventions bringing together records describing their ecological roles and lifeways with discussions of Indigenous peoples’ and nations’ respective worldviews, ethics and protocols. In doing so, he hopes to trace when, if and how understandings of sustainability or obligations with other-than-human relatives guided or governed these interactions. Examples include Indigenous fire stewardship (controlled burns) and the creation of weirs that assisted in harvesting fish such as lake sturgeon.

“I’m interested in how different Native peoples intervened in their environments as well, looking at the ways that different Native peoples and villages themselves engaged with their environments for specific reasons,” Pochedley said. “My research looks at how ethics, orientations toward the world and concerns of sustainability have influenced human-environmental relations across time throughout the Great Lakes region.”

One historical case Pochedley is investigating involves 111 Potawatomi people from northern Indiana who were relocated to Kansas in 1837 to the Osage River Reservation. In January 1838, their leader, To-pe-na-pee, petitioned the U.S. president and Congress for permission to take individual land allotments because some community members were claiming large portions of the forested shoreline.

“Through conversations with Kelli Mosteller and other Potawatomi people, I’ve come to understand that part of the disruptive experience of being forced from the woodlands and the abundant waters of northern Indiana to Kansas was that there weren’t plentiful trees and that they were taking a woodland people whose mode of transportation, whose shelter and so many things critical to their way of life are made from different woods, barks, roots and pitches and they were displacing them to a place where trees are far less abundant,” Pochedley said.

“And in that petition,” Pochedley added, “it says trees can only be found along the river, being ‘confined almost exclusively to the low grounds along the water-courses.’ As I’ve interpreted this document, this petition is saying, ‘We want to prevent greed within our community because people need to have access to trees, because harvesting and having relationships with trees has long been central to our survival as Neshnabé people.’”

Pochedley recently presented on this archival research at the 2025 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference in Oklahoma City.

While the petition and a land survey were made, Pochedley said he hopes additional archive research will help him learn whether the request was granted as well as what other forces may have influenced this 1838 petition. Given the history of dispossession commonly associated with the allotment of Native reservations, the petition concerning equitable divisions of shoreline and forested lands offers a strikingly complex entry point for investigating how Potawatomi people navigated unfamiliar terrains while developing methods for effecting community support, accountability and health.

For context, Congress passed the General Allotment Act 50 years later which divided Native American reservation lands into parcels. The act was designed to separate Native families and sever community bonds by encouraging the development of individually owned Native American farms, with “surplus” lands remaining after the allotment process sold to Euro-American settlers. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “Although Native Americans controlled about 138 million acres of land before the Dawes Act…Only 48 million acres of land remained in tribal control by 1934."

Pochedley’s previous research focused primarily on the Anishinaabeg, or Neshnabék— culturally related Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region, including the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa and Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi). His Newberry project, however, will focus on the diversity of Native peoples and nations throughout the Great Lakes region, including the Sauk (Sac), Meskwaki (Fox), Kiash Matchitiwuk (Menominee), Myaamia (Miami), Wyandotte (Huron), Ho-Chunk, Dakota and others.

He aims to integrate the archival material he finds for this project into his classes at MSU to further demonstrate how Native peoples have sought to retain connections with their other-than-human relatives even when faced with threats to these relationships associated with environmental transformations and dispossession of their territories.

As a result of the forced and coerced removals of many Indigenous nations and villages from the Great Lakes region in the early- to mid-1800s as well as the frequent confinement of Native peoples within reservations, Indigenous peoples’ intergenerational environmental connections aren’t always included in existing narratives of their homewaters and homelands.

“So that’s one thing I’m trying to think about,” Pochedley said. “How can we write about relationships to different waterways and different environments in a way that’s inclusive of those peoples’ and nations’ relationships as well as Anishinaabe people’s bonds to their homelands and homewaters?”

If his research leads to a book, Pochedley envisions organizing chapters by different waterways, which could be a helpful way of looking at Native peoples’ relationships to those bodies of water, while also exploring their interactions with each other looking at environmental changes over time and different ways that bodies of water were altered, as well as the subsequent ecological and relational impacts.

Other Research and Book Projects

Pochedley joined Michigan State University in fall 2023 as an 1855 professor in MSU’s Department of Religious Studies, a position created by the Office of the Provost and named for the year MSU was founded.

He’s been working on a book that is scheduled to be published in early 2026 through Cambridge University Press’ Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research series, titled Restoring Indigenous Place Names: Making Anishinaabe Toponyms Visible Throughout the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation.

The book focuses on place names throughout Gaa-waabaabiganikaag in what’s known as present-day northwestern Minnesota and how environmental knowledge and geographic relationships are reflected in the original Ojibwe language names for lakes and rivers.

Pochedley also is writing another book based on his research with four Potawatomi and Ojibwe nations, tentatively titled Neshnabé Geographies: Storied Environments, Ecological Restorations and Interspecies Care of the Potawatomi and Ojibwe. This work examines Neshnabé and Anishinaabe people’s obligations to other-than-human relatives and waters both historically and in the present as well as efforts to maintain or revitalize their connections to these relatives and places of significance.

He hopes a third book will result from his work with the Newberry Library under the NCAIS Faculty Fellowship, possibly with a public-facing component such as a digital cartography project depicting the research and associated archival sources.

“I really want to make sure that the research I’m doing can reach people, that it’s accessible in a way similar to the book on the Ojibway place names which will be open access free and available to anyone online,” Pochedley said. “There are so many different learning styles and ways of knowing in the world so I really like the idea of creating digital maps or something like that for sharing the Newberry project down the road.”

This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.