American Society for Ethnohistory

American Society for Ethnohistory 2026 Annual Meeting – Call for Papers

Indigenous Mobility and Movement in “Modern” Worlds

Tulsa, Oklahoma | October 7–10, 2026

PROPOSAL DEADLINE: May 1, 2026

In 1926, the United States officially designated U.S. Route 66, the iconic highway that would come to symbolize mobility, migration, and modernity across the American landscape. In 2026, communities along what John Steinbeck called “the Mother Road” will mark the centennial of this historic transportation corridor, with Oklahoma — home to the longest continuous stretch of the original alignment — serving as a central site of celebration, reflection, and preservation.

Yet the histories embedded in and alongside Route 66 extend far deeper and wider than the highway itself. Long before numbered highways, Indigenous peoples traversed, tended, and sustained these lands through trails, trade routes, and seasonal movements that connected places now bisected by asphalt. The public history of Route 66 has often ignored and erased these older infrastructures of travel, obscured or disavowed Indigenous presence, and flattened complex relations between Native nations and state, local, and private actors who shaped the “modern” roadscape.

Held in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the downtown Arvest Convention Center the 2026 conference situates these conversations in a region long shaped by Indigenous movement and modernity. Oklahoma’s lands — home to dozens of Native nations — have been crossroads of migration, removal, labor, and cultural exchange. The conference location invites reflection on figures such as Will Rogers, whose itinerant career exemplified Indigenous engagement with mass media and modern mobility, as well as on infrastructures such as Route 66, which layered twentieth-century transportation systems atop much older Indigenous pathways. These local histories offer a powerful backdrop for broader ethnohistorical conversations about movement, sovereignty, and Indigenous modernities.

While Route 66 provides a powerful symbolic and material entry point, the conference welcomes work that ranges far beyond the highway, temporally, geographically, and conceptually. This conference treats Indigenous mobility not as a premodern artifact or adaptation, but as constitutive of modern worlds, infrastructures, and political geographies.

We invite proposals from scholars, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, community historians, artists, public historians, archivists, and graduate students working in history, ethnohistory, anthropology, Native American and Indigenous studies, geography, museum studies, and related fields.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Indigenous trails, footpaths, and trans-regional movements predate, parallel, or contest colonial and state infrastructures of mobility (including Route 66).
• Indigenous engagements with modern infrastructure regimes, including roads, railways, waterways (including the construction of lakes like Grand Lake/Lake Thunderbird in Oklahoma, air travel, and digital networks, and their effects on sovereignty, jurisdiction, and land use.
• Movement under constraint: forced migration, removal, incarceration, labor mobility, militarization, and surveillance, and Indigenous strategies of survival and adaptation.
• Indigenous entrepreneurship, tourism, and cultural economies along Route 66 or elsewhere.
• Memory, heritage, and preservation, with attention to Indigenous archives, museums, oral histories, and community-based practices that challenge dominant narratives of “progress,” infrastructure, and modernity.
• Material culture and landscapes of movement, including the intersections of Indigenous space with built environments, commemorative practices, and preservation regimes.
• Ethnohistorical methodologies for studying movement and modernity, including approaches that center Indigenous epistemologies, languages, and relational frameworks.
• Comparative perspectives on Indigenous mobility and settler-national transportation projects elsewhere in the Americas.

Submission Information

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should include:

1. Title of paper or panel
2. Author name(s) and affiliation(s)
3. A brief description of the project and its relation to the conference theme
4. A 2–3 sentence statement of methodology or theoretical framing (especially for ethnohistorical work)
5. Brief description of individual presentations if submitting a panel proposal

Until we have an online portal, please submit proposals by May 1, 2026 to ethnohistory2026@gmail.com.

Please direct questions about the program to the meetings program committee chair, Prof. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, at cgenetin@gmu.edu.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 15, 2026.

For general questions about the meeting, please contact the conference director, Prof. Julie Reed at Jlr7688@utulsa.edu.

Conference Site and Hotel

The conference will take place at the Arvest Convention Center.

ASE has a block of rooms reserved at:
DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Tulsa Downtown
616 W. Seventh Street Tulsa, Oklahoma 74127-8983 USA
Across the street from the Convention Center

To reserve a room please use this link:
2026 Ethnohistory Doubletree Tulsa

Conference Features

• Keynote presentations from leading Indigenous scholars and ethnohistorians.
• Community roundtables with tribal partners from Oklahoma’s 39 nations (including voices from academically and publicly engaged Indigenous organizations).
• Public history tours in Tulsa and along nearby Oklahoma Route 66 corridors.

Organizing Committee
Robbie Ethridge, Emeritus, University of Mississippi
Kallie Kosc, Oklahoma State University

Conference Director
Julie Reed, University of Tulsa

Program Committee
Joe Genetin-Pilawa, George Mason University
James Buss, Ball State University
Cathleen Cahill, Penn State University
Justin Carroll, Indiana University-East
Joan Bristol, George Mason University
Edward Polanco, Virginia Tech