Born and raised in northern Wisconsin, Katrina Phillips is a proud citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She’s an Associate Professor of History at Macalester College with a focus on Native history and the history of the American West. She holds a BA and PhD in History from the University of Minnesota
In her first book, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and Performances of Native American History (which won the Theatre Library Association Book Awards 2021 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live performance), Phillips centers what she calls “salvage tourism,” a phenomenon that draws from both salvage anthropology and heritage tourism in order to understand the ways in which communities across the United States have capitalized on the histories of Native nations in the creation of tourism enterprises.
Her current book project, “the land is the only thing”: Activism, Environmentalism, and Tourism in Northern Wisconsin, focuses on approximately a century’s-worth of Red Cliff history, from the Apostle Islands Indian Pageant of the 1920s and the battle over the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore to the creation of the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, Native American Tourism of Wisconsin, and Frog Bay Tribal National Park.
In addition to her academic work, Phillips is also a public historian. Her work has appeared in the “Made By History” section of the Washington Post; she’s appeared on Native America Calling, NPR’s 1A, and Indigeneity Rising; and she’s been quoted in The New York Times, the Associated Press, and Indian Country Today.
She’s written a number of children’s books, including I Am on Indigenous Land, Indigenous Peoples: Super SHEroes of History (Women Who Made a Difference), Indigenous Peoples’ Day, The Untold Story of Mary Golda Ross: Pioneering Space Engineer, and The Disastrous Wrangel Island Expedition. She’s also served as a historical and cultural consultant for books like Unstoppable: How Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Defeated Army and The Journey of York: The Unsung Hero of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.