Mark Schurr receives the 2008 Ganey Faculty Community-Based Research Award

Mark Schurr

Associate Professor, Anthropology

Since 1996, the 2008 Ganey Award recipient Mark Schurr, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology,has been using archeological investigation to explore this and related questions:  how did some Native American communities successfully resist the federal government’s attempts to remove them from their land in the 1800s? After the War of 1812, the federal government promised land to veterans. To make room for them, the government began moving native communities living in the old northwest -- Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio – to Kansas and Oklahoma, in what came to be known in historical terms as the Removal Period. Some Native communities resisted.

Professor Schurr began to explore factors leading to resistance in 1996 at Benack Village in the Potawatomi Wildlife Park in north central Indiana and, then later in Pokagon Village in southwest Michigan.  These investigations resulted in hypotheses about how different strategies of resistance are reflected in material culture.  Professor Schurr wanted a site to test his emerging theories.  The Kankakee Valley Historical Society invited him to investigate the Collier Lodge area along the Kankakee River.

In 2002, began an archaeological investigation at the Grand Kankakee Marsh, about 10 miles from Valparaiso University in Porter County, Indiana.  Evidence suggests that the area was home to Native Americans going back to the end of the last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago.  Indeed early on, Professor Schurr found items there that had been in use during the earliest occupations right after the glaciers retreated. The Hopewell Indian settlement known as Maysville was built there about 2, 000 years ago. The Potawatomi Native Americans were dislocated from the area in the Removal Period.  

The Kankakee Valley Historical Society nominated Mark Schurr for this award.  The Society has been part of the research every step along the way, in what has been referred to in printed materials on the project as a stellar effort in public scholarship. Over 200 people have participated in the project by assisting with field and laboratory work.