About
Greg Olson is an independent researcher and author who lives in Columbia, Missouri. He is the author of seven books and several scholarly articles about Native American history in Missouri and the Midwest. The Ioway in Missouri (2008) won the Missouri Humanities Council’s Governor’s Humanities Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement. His book, Ioway Life: Reservation and Reform, 1837-1860 (2016) was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2017. His most recent book is Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present (2023).
Featured Work
Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present
The history of Indigenous people in present-day Missouri is far more nuanced, complex, and vibrant than the often-told tragic stories of conflict with white settlers and forced Indian removal would lead us to believe. In this path-breaking narrative, Greg Olson presents the Show Me State’s Indigenous past as one spanning twelve millennia of Native presence, resilience, and evolution. While previous Missouri histories have tended to include Indigenous people only during periods when they constituted a threat to the state’s white settlement, Olson shows us the continuous presence of Native people that includes the present day.