Rosalyn LaPier

Rosalyn LaPier (she/they) is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, having joined the faculty in fall 2022, and also holds an appointment in the American Indian Studies Program. An enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, LaPier is an award-winning Indigenous writer, environmental historian, and traditionally trained ethnobotanist. Their research examines Indigenous landscape management practices, traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotany, bison and grassland ecologies, Native American relationships with the natural world, and Native American and Indigenous history of Chicago and Illinois. LaPier serves as research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution from 2025 to 2028, and advises public history projects at the Smithsonian, Field Museum of Natural History, and Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. They co-founded Saokio Heritage, a community-based organization led by Indigenous women to revitalize traditional ecological and ethnobotanical knowledge. LaPier works nationally with the National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs and the National Native American Language Resource Center to strengthen public policy for Indigenous languages, and collaborates with The Natural History Museum on projects such as Unfence the Future and Red Natural History.

LaPier authored Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the John C. Ewers Book Award and Donald Fixico Book Award from the Western History Association, and co-authored City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 with David R.M. Beck (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Robert G. Athearn Book Award from the Western History Association. Their scholarship includes dozens of articles and commentaries published in The Conversation, High Country News, Environmental History, Montana The Magazine of Western History, and other venues, such as “Land as Text: Reading the Land” (Environmental History, 2023), “Ella Mad Plume Yellow Wolf Photographs by a Native American Woman in the Early 1940s” (Montana The Magazine of Western History, Winter 2021/22; Spur Award Finalist, 2022), and “The Legacy of Colonialism on Public Lands Created the Mauna Kea Conflict” (High Country News, 2019; Honorable Mention, Native American/Indigenous Journalists Association). Previously, LaPier taught at the University of Montana, worked at the Piegan Institute to revitalize the Blackfeet language, and taught at NAES College.

Professional Email: rrlapier@illinois.edu