Intro Blog – Devan Boone

Hello! My name is Devan, and I am a senior majoring in ANSO and minoring in Religious Studies and Environmental Studies. My academic interests lately have centered a lot around human-environment relationships and how that intersects with social justice topics. I spent this summer working on a project about Indigenous representation in Glacier National Park, which was a great project and learning opportunity. I am really looking forward to broadening my knowledge about the topics I studied on a small scale over the summer and last academic year, because I know a lot about Native American history in one place but not a lot about the topic as a whole. I definitely feel like my education on Native American history in high school and certainly through popular culture and media was insufficient compared to my education on other topics, and my personal experience and observations are that Indigenous history is often overlooked and missed completely when an attempt to pull together a history or narrative about a place, even though in America, the history of just about everywhere starts with Indigenous people and involves displacement and violence in some way. I am hoping to close that knowledge gap through this class and through a continued interest in learning more about this history independently. I am also excited because this is the first true history class I’ve taken since high school since I just take a lot of anthropology classes, so I’m excited to learn a little more about the methods from a different discipline!