Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota and a former Chair of the Department of American Studies and the Department of American Indian Studies. She is the author of Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), First and Lasting: New England Indians In and Beyond the Nineteenth-Century Local Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and numerous articles. She has served on the Council of the American Studies Association and American Society for Ethnohistory, and was a member of the Steering Committee that founded the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.