Heidi Katter

Heidi Katter is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her research examines how federal territorial surveillance in the Great Lakes region fueled treaty- and policymaking with Indigenous peoples. She blends spatial history and Native American history to illuminate how federal agents coopted Indigenous knowledge to determine the extractive and settler colonial value of Native lands. In so doing, she investigates how the U.S. government’s approach to Indigenous dispossession facilitated natural resource extraction and transformed the landscape of the American West. Heidi received her B.A. in History from Yale and her M.Phil. in American History from the University of Cambridge.