Ian Tonat

Bio

Ian Tonat is a PhD candidate with research interests in North American colonial history, Native American history, and the early American West. In particular, he is interested in examining how Native societies and identities functioned and were structured, and how they influenced Native peoples' interactions with both other Native people and European colonizers. His research is focused in the Great Lakes region. He is working on his dissertation, proposed to focus on the overlapping and intersecting identities and social categories of Native people in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Green Bay region.

Ian received a BA in History from Carleton College in 2011 and his MA in History from the College of William and Mary in 2014. His MA thesis, "Thus Did God Break the Head of That Leviathan: Performative Violence and Judicial Beheadings of Native Americans in Seventeenth-Century New England," examines a series of anomalous beheadings of Native men by New England authorities during periods of conflict between colonists and Native people. In addition to attempting to explain why these executions were carried out in this method, against the usual judicial practices of both the colonies and England, the thesis also examines how performative violence revealed and structured relationships between Native people and colonists. In the spring of 2016 he passed comprehensive examinations in four fields: Colonial, Nineteenth-, and Twentieth-Century America, and Indigenous People and Empires. He was also an editorial apprentice at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture from 2012-2013 and has received a number of fellowships and rewards, including the Dr. William M. Kelso Graduate Fellowship in Early American Studies from the College of William and Mary, the Bicknell Fellowship from National Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims, and the Robert L. Middlekauff Fellowship from the Huntington Library.