Assistant Professor Justin Gage is a historian of Native American life in the late nineteenth century. He teaches courses that focus on the history of the United States, Native America, and the history of the American West. Gage studies Native American mobility and anticolonial activism, intertribal relationships, and settler colonialism in the American West. Gage also uses methods of digital humanities to better understand his own research and to engage in public history. Before joining the University of Florida in Fall 2022, Gage was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Helsinki and an Instructor at the University of Arkansas. He received his PhD from the University of Arkansas in 2015.
Gage’s first book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance, explores how western Native Americans used intertribal networks of communication to resist U.S. colonialism and to strengthen their cultures in the late nineteenth-century. It was awarded the 2021 Outstanding Western Book by the Center for the Study of the American West and the 2021 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. The book has a companion website, https://nativeamericannetworks.com, that presents the narrative, primary sources, and maps. His second book project, tentatively titled Writing to Resist, explores how late-nineteenth century Native Americans from over eighty western tribal nations corresponded with white Americans to push for justice and self-determination. The project was awarded a 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Western History Association, and the American Philosophical Society, among others.