Kabl Wilkerson (they/them) is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation (Bourassa & Muller families; Bear Clan) and is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Harvard University.
Kabl’s scholarly interests examine the evolving contradictions in U.S Indian policy from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as shifting forms of imperial, state-building practices. Their dissertation highlights the imposition of federal definitions for tribal membership in federal Indian policy and notes the way in which foreign observers took stock of these developments, primarily in Germany, as a continuing example of U.S. continental imperialism in the twentieth century.
Kabl has also worked on Great Lakes Indian Removal policy, practice, and resistance for public audiences with the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and maintains a collaborative, scholarly relationship with both institutions. In their free time, Kabl works on Bodéwadmik and Great Lakes Indian histories with other Neshnabé, non-Neshnabè, and non-native scholars, ranging from the early seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
Kabl received their B.A. from Texas Tech University in 2019 and their A.M. in History from Harvard University in 2023