Kaden Jelsing

Kaden Jelsing is a historian of the US West, Indigenous North America, settler colonialism, and the environment. His research is focused on Indigenous-settler relationships, particularly in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. At Smith, Jelsing teaches courses at the intersection of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Environmental Studies.

Jelsing was a Killam Predoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia where he researched how Indigenous and settler visions of the future articulated through prophecy expressed different modes of relationality towards the land, humans, and other-than-human beings. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on this dissertation tentatively titled Sovereign Futures: Indigenous and Settler Prophecy in Nineteenth-Century American Northwests.