Hayden L. Nelson

Hayden L. Nelson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. He earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he minored in both ancient studies and American Indian studies, and completed a certificate in Ojibwe language, and earned an MA in history from the University of Montana. Nelson specializes in the environmental and Indigenous history of the 19th-century North American West. His dissertation is a forest history of the fur trade, examining how the inhabitants and interlopers in the forested region of northeastern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Ontario’s Lake Superior watershed experienced and materially transformed the region’s forests. Nelson has also conducted extensive research on the Montana-Canadian borderlands, Kansas Territory, and the Kanza Sacred Red Rock, Iⁿ‘zhúje‘waxóbe.