John C. Winters

I am fascinated by the confluence of Native American history, public history, and memory.

As an historian, my research focuses on the entangled histories of Native American history, memory, and museums. I explore how these memories and museum spaces were not only important zones of contact where Indigenous and American history and memory collided, but were also where individual Native and non-Native peoples worked, lived, and even decolonized. I am endlessly fascinated by the ways in which these individuals defied or reinforced damaging stereotypes, shaped public knowledge and historical memory, influenced American and Native Americans’ sense of their own national or cultural identity, and embedded that work in spaces that still exist as monuments to the many ways that “authenticity” and identity—in all their forms—were shaped and challenged over time.

As a public historian, I have worked for years in various capacities at public humanities organizations and historic house museums. Museums and cultural centers are vital community resources, and I have dedicated my career to studying their history, strengthening their ties to the community, and making them more accessible. I have served in various roles at the Roosevelt House Institute for Public Policy, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, The Institute for Thomas Paine Studies, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

As a college educator, I am also interested in exploring the many ways that these topics can enrich classroom pedagogy. I therefore encourage students in my history courses to read unfamiliar sources and scholarship, but also to engage with varied museum exhibitions, digital history projects, and the public history sites in their own backyards. These exposures remind them that history is more than names and dates—history is us. Confronting and understanding these varied narratives and perspectives allows each of us to reflect on our own lived experience and relationship to history, to challenge the ubiquity of well-worn tropes, and to understand the value and importance of those voices that have been ignored or left behind.