Thousands of people each year go to Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon, but how many would know that the Grand Canyon is still home to two Native American tribes?
Not many, which is precisely why Assistant Prof. Christian McMillen would like to enlighten more people about Native American issues.
In the process of doing so, McMillen teaches "Native America" and "Culture and Politics of Indian Rights" in the history and American Studies departments, respectively.
His interest in Native American issues began when he worked for the National Park Service throughout the West during and after his years at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. While there, McMillen saw the tension between Native Americans and the federal government, so when he attended Yale University for graduate school, he decided to pursue that same topic.
"I was a park ranger in the Grand Canyon, and there's very little sense, as a visitor to the parks and certainly as someone working there, that there's any Indian history in the region at all," McMillen said. "There's two major tribes that historically [lived] and continue to live in the Grand Canyon, and most visitors and employees would never know that."
In the spring of 2000, McMillen began research for a book that will be published next fall on land claims litigation in the 20th century and how changes in federal Indian law here affect the law of land claims all around the world. For this book, he spent a lot of time working with the Hualapai tribe, which has a reservation on the northwestern edge of the Grand Canyon.
"Corresponding with [the Hualapai] over the years, the most satisfying thing has been being able to dig out of the archives a story of Indian activism in the [early 1900s] that had in some respects been forgotten on the reservation or that the details of it weren't that well known," McMillen said. "There were some memories of this generation of early American Indian legal activists that I've been able to add a lot of details to for them, and they've been able to add a lot of details to the story for me."
McMillen has only been teaching at the University since the fall of 2004, but he said he is enjoying his time here so far. He noted that he especially enjoys working with the students, who seem to be truly interested in the information he has to share.
His class on Native America is currently only about 60 students, but McMillen said he would like to see it become a big lecture class of more than 100 people so that more students could learn about Native American history.
"It's a long, complicated history that begins long before 1492 and has undergone significant changes in those 500 years -- it's not a simple story of good versus evil, right versus wrong," McMillen said. "Especially in the 20th century, Indians really began to revive and understand how to resist some of the power of the U.S. government over their lives. I want the [students] to see that U.S. history is extremely complicated when we put Indians into the picture ... and just how interesting Indian history is"
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