I have taught history for more than thirty years.  Aware always that for every professor there are dozens of Ph.D recipients who would love to work in academia, but will never have the chance, I have worked with determination to be the best teacher and scholar I can be. I am aware of the privileges I have enjoyed, and recognize the obligations that places upon me to do good work. Even with a heavy teaching load, large numbers of advisees, and spending my career at small colleges with few resources to support faculty research, I believe it is important to continually be productive and continually to grow and improve as a professor of history. Especially now, with an administration in charge that has declared war on the very enterprise of history.

I began studying the history of Indigenous peoples as an undergraduate student at the California State University at Long Beach, to which I transferred after two years at a local junior
college. I did not have the opportunity to work with members of Indigenous Nations until I began my academic teaching career at Montana State University-Billings, a small, open-admissions campus that was part of the larger Montana State University system. I taught survey courses in American history at MSU-B, the department’s required course in Historical Research Methods, and upper-division courses covering the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National Periods. I was an effective and popular teacher. I won the college’s Winston and Helen Cox Fellowship for the year 1996-1997, awarded annually to an outstanding junior faculty member, and one year later the Outstanding Faculty Award, presented by the Associated Students.

But I most valued my work with the Crow and Northern Cheyenne students who attended MSU-B, from whom I learned much. Most of them were older students. They traveled a great distance, sometimes every day, to attend class. They struggled with the costs of college, and the burdens of caring for children and grandchildren while attending school. Almost none of them finished in four years. Some were perennial part-time students. Many of them took my course in Native American History, required for the Native American Studies major and minor, and they taught me a great deal about the power of working together. For example, I began a research project on race relations between members of the Crow Nation and white residents in Hardin, Montana, a reservation border town in which half the population was Indigenous. After Native American students at Hardin High School protested some callous treatment by non-Indian students, a white supremacist group distributed on doorsteps throughout Hardin a despicable racist pamphlet. I began to investigate the story. I could not accomplish as much as I wanted. It was difficult to drive the 120-mile round-trip to Hardin and get much work done there, and I found it difficult to get anti-Crow white people to speak honestly and candidly about their town. But I did talk to sympathetic whites, and many Crow people, who described their lived experiences in Hardin, a town where residents remembered seeing “No Dogs or Indians” signs in downtown businesses. It was a searing experience. I never published on the topic, but the experience taught me at an early point in my career the obvious but often overlooked point that an important part of writing the history of a community involves forging relationships with members of that community. Collaboration, I learned, was integral to good community history. We can learn much from even those projects we do not finish.

Billings was a tough place to work as a professor. Resources were
scarce, the pay was low, and the teaching load was seven courses a year. Most of my colleagues worked summer jobs to help make ends meet. As much as I loved the students, I could not stay. I never completed the Hardin project because I left Billings in 1998 for a new position at the State University of New York, College at Geneseo. I had signed a contract with Cornell University Press to publish my first book, Dominion and Civility, and that provided an opportunity to make a move that was better for my family. Except for one year I spent at the University of Houston in 2009-2010, I have been at Geneseo ever since.

Geneseo, like Billings, is a small, underfunded, public college. Though Geneseo was a much more selective college at the time I arrived, my job was essentially what it had been in Billings: teach
Colonial and Revolutionary US, Research Methods, and the college’s required course in the Humanities. I also developed and taught my Native American survey, a course on American Indian
Law, and an upper-division course in Haudenosaunee history. At Geneseo, as in Billings, I succeeded in the classroom and as a scholar, winning the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching in 2003, and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activities in 2013 (both the highest SUNY system-wide awards given in those areas). I was also named James and Julia Lockhart Professor from 2005 to 2008 and promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2015, the highest rank for any faculty member in the SUNY system. I published a lot, including a textbook in Native American history now in its third edition, and helped develop the college’s minor in Native American Studies. At Geneseo, as in Billings, I greatly value the work I have done outside of the classroom with Indigenous peoples in New York State.

In Geneseo I was presented with opportunities that were not nearly as available in Montana. Shortly after my arrival in 1998, for example, I was invited by the Tonawanda Seneca Nation to
provide research and expert witness testimony in their efforts to recover Grand Island, New York, purchased from them in 1815 by the state of New York in violation of the federal Indian Trade and
Intercourse Act. It was the first of several Indigenous rights cases in which I was involved over the next two and a half decades. I was privileged to work with the Onondaga Nation, the Akwesasne
Mohawks, and the Oneida Indian Nation, all on cases involving their efforts to recover lost lands. I have also worked on gaming and taxation issues involving Haudenosaunee nations in New York
State. This work brought important benefits, and led to several of my book projects: Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams, and Peacemakers: The United States, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794, both published in 2015.

Finally, collaborative work led to The Central Fire of the Iroquois: A Five-Hundred Year History of the Onondaga Nation, published in September of 2026 by Yale University Press. Back in 2010 I began working with the Onondaga Nation on research related to cleaning up Onondaga Lake, once the most polluted body of water in North America. The Superfund law allows Indigenous nations to have a say in the cleanup process if they can demonstrate a cultural tie to the polluted site. My job was to demonstrate that connection. Over several years I completed a 900-page annotated bibliography, with links to copies of all the documents, illustrating this massive history. Working on the history of Onondaga Lake with the Nation led to work writing the history of the Onondaga Nation itself. It has been a massive project. 

While work on the history of the Onondaga Nation takes up much of my time, since late 2018 I have served as the founding director of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. I am very proud of this work. New York, under law, requires every municipality, from the smallest crossroads to the largest city, to have an appointed historian. Many of these town and local
historians are amateurs. They are elderly, and they may not have much or any training as a historian. But it seemed to me that partnering with them would benefit our students, help the historians, and increase the public’s awareness of their community’s history. I have succeeded in obtaining grant funding to support this important work. I place students from three colleges and universities in paid summer fellowships in local historians’ offices across New York State. I oversee their work and help disseminate their efforts. By the end of next year the Center will have placed more than a hundred students from 7 colleges in high-paying fellowships across the width and breadth of New York State. Another fifty students, since early 2019, have completed independent studies on local history topics in their communities, and unpaid internships in their hometowns. Given that much of this work was done during the pandemic, I am very proud of what the Center has accomplished.

I am now at work on a book called Fighting Genocide. At one level, it is a history of the American invasion of the Haudenosaunee homeland during the American Revolution.  At another, it will focus on the centrality of Indigenous dispossession to the movement for independence, and raise provocative questions about settler colonialism.  If landowners in New York State are the beneficiaries of a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that violated treaties and the laws of the United States, what obligations does that reality place upon us today? I hope to have Fighting Genocide in bookstores by 2029.

I love research and writing. I also love undergraduate teaching. Apart from the four years I spent in grad school at Syracuse
University, my entire career has been spent at undergraduate public colleges where teaching is job one. Despite the challenging times facing public higher education, when I meet my students, I
remain optimistic about the future. I look forward very much to continuing to innovate, improve, and develop my skills as a classroom teacher.  The kids are all right. They are our best hope. I see that every day I go to work. 

I post regularly at Bluesky (@michaelleroyoberg@bsky.social), blog regularly.  Please consider following me on Bluesky and consider checking out and following me here.