Jimmy Sweet (Lakota/Dakota) specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies with a concentration on interactions between American Indians and Euro-Americans. His current book project, “The ‘Mixed-Blood’ Moment: Race, Law, and Mixed-Ancestry Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest,” analyzes the legal and racial complexities of American Indians of mixed Indian and European ancestry with a focus on kinship, family history, land dispossession, and citizenship. Sweet is dedicated to Indigenous language revitalization and preservation. His research is driven by a need to understand the full effects of American colonialism on Indigenous Americans and how those consequences influence Native people today, doing so with the hope of contributing to the continued fight for Indigenous sovereignty and the healing of Indigenous communities.
Before joining the faculty at Rutgers, Sweet was a Henry Roe Cloud Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and served as managing editor of NAIS: The Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association from 2012 to 2017. He received his B.A. from the University of Tennessee, his M.A. from Montana State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in history.
