Margaret Jacobs
Reconciliation as a Way of Life and Sustained Relationship: White Women and Settler Colonialism
A descendant of White settlers of Indigenous lands, Margaret Jacobs is an award-winning author and professor of history and gender studies who has focused for over two decades on Indigenous child removal and family separation. She studies the history of the American West in a transnational and comparative context with a focus on women, children, and families. Her Bancroft Prize-winning book, White Mother to a Dark Race (2009), concerns government-enforced removal of Indigenous children from their families, and the role of White as well as Indigenous women with respect to those policies. Her most recent projects delve into truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation efforts between Indigenous peoples and settlers, including through voluntary land repatriation. "I have come to see reconciliation not as a one-time effort," she says. but "as a practice, as a way of life, in which all of us can engage" by uncovering the history of our land and place, and through sustained, respectful relationships. Read Full Bio »
