In my career as a historian, I have learned in a personal way that being a witness to history is a two-way path. In one direction, encountering events and people from the past has enabled me to construct and refine historical narratives, to shine a scholarly searchlight on forgotten — or suppressed — stories. In the other direction, those moments of witness have insisted on their own power to teach and inspire this teacher.
The two-way nature of bearing witness — venturing out to explore but returning enriched — has most pointedly come home in four decades of work as a formal witness, an expert in court for more than a dozen Native communities across North America. That work has given me a faith in humanity and in our collective future, a faith I otherwise would never have known.
