Meet the Mellon Fellows: Dr. Joshua Wachuta

Dr. Joshua Wachuta

Loyola University Chicago
PhD, Public History and American History

Host Site: Effigy Mounds National Monument
Fellowship Title: Negotiating the Law of the Land: US-Indigenous Treaty-Making at Prairie Du Chien, 1825-1830
Project Description: Dr. Wachuta will explore the US-Indigenous treaties concluded at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, utilizing oral traditions, texts, and other sources. The outcome will be an examination and interpretive products that explore these treaties and their continuing influence on the park, descendant communities, and the upper Mississippi River region.

Bio:

Dr. Joshua Wachuta is a public historian specializing in the nineteenth-century American Midwest, histories of settler colonialism, and historic site interpretation. He earned a Ph.D. in Public History and American History at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Wachuta has worked in a variety of public history roles, including as a site manager for the Wisconsin Historical Society at Villa Louis Historic Site, as a park interpreter at Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota, and as a freelance exhibit designer and researcher.

Tell us about your research interests!

I have wide-ranging interests in the history of the Upper Mississippi Valley and the adjacent states, as well as global histories of settler colonialism and comparative economic systems. My doctoral dissertation examined how U.S. policies in the nineteenth-century Upper Mississippi region commodified American Indian lands and kinship obligations into private financial assets that fueled settler capitalism, as well as some of the alternative economic strategies practiced by Ho-Chunk and Dakota people who resisted removal from their homelands. U.S.-Indigenous treaty councils had a central place in this history, as they codified the financial obligations between the U.S. and Indigenous nations while also creating documentation of differing cultural perspectives on the period's political economy.

How does your research connect to the mission of the National Park Service, which serves both parks and communities?

Effigy Mounds National Monument is one of many locations administered by the National Park Service that includes spaces created by and sacred to Indigenous communities. The U.S. established the national monument without initially involving modern Indigenous people, who had to fight for many decades before having their voices heard and their concerns respected. This research will serve Effigy Mounds National Monument by helping to connect the monument's core history of Indigenous mound-building to the later histories of descendant communities and their ongoing nation-to-nation relationships with the United States.

What are you most excited about as you begin your fellowship?

The four treaties of Prairie du Chien took place from 1825-1830, so the year 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of the first treaty council. More than just historic documents, these treaties are living agreements. Taken together, they recognize the sovereignty of more than a dozen Indigenous nations and explicitly delineate many of their territories and legal rights. At the same time, these treaties serve as the legal foundation for the United States' occupation of large parts of the states of Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Although the treaties were flawed compacts made in a context of uneven political power, they remain part of the law of the land for both Indigenous nations and U.S. settlers like myself. I look forward to learning more about how these diplomatic encounters have reverberated over the last two centuries and their ongoing legacies in contemporary communities.

Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

This project was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship program is administered through a partnership between NPS, NPF, and American Conservation Experience.