Notre Dame's History with Native Peoples
Zada Ballew '19, Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of American Studies, shares findings and lessons from her research into Notre Dame's history with Native peoples in a fuller, more complicated story of how Notre Dame was founded, and why.
Experience the Event
Drawing from the records of Fr. Badin, Fr. Sorin, and Fr. Hesburgh, as well as Chief Leopold Pokagon, the founder of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Zada Ballew ’19 tells a fuller, more complicated story of how Notre Dame was founded and why. In this telling, Indigenous peoples are neither missing nor absent from the narrative — they are central to the history of the land that became Notre Dame. Understand more fully how the early history of the Potawatomi and Notre Dame is remembered on campus.
This event was recorded at Reunion 2026 as the Native American Alumni celebrated their first-ever Reunion.
Indigenous Voices is co-sponsored on ThinkND by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the College of Arts & Letters Native American Initiatives, and the Native American Alumni of Notre Dame.
MoreMeet the Faculty: Zada Ballew '19
Zada Ballew ’19 is an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and a member of the bear clan. She earned her BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Notre Dame and her MA and PhD in U.S. History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores the business history of her tribe from the fur trade in the seventeenth century to casinos today. Ballew’s work has been recognized by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Business History Conference, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Poetry Foundation, and forthcoming in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. In 2024, she was honored as one of ten inaugural Elouise Cobell Dissertation Writing-Year Fellows, an award which helped her complete her dissertation, “A Company of Kin: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the Business of Tribal Nationalism.”
In 2023-2024, Ballew served as the Historical Consultant and Cultural Liaison for the Native American Initiative of Notre Dame. In this role, she conducted “An Inquiry into Notre Dame’s History with Native Peoples,” starting before the University’s founding and continuing to the present. Through this work, she learned what many people have known all along: Indigenous peoples have profoundly shaped the history of Notre Dame in ways the broader community doesn’t quite yet know about. As a result of her work at Notre Dame, she was recognized as an Emerging Leader of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians by Mno-Bmadsen.
Beyond the academy, Ballew has served as the Chair of the Native American Alumni Board of Notre Dame, the Chair of the Governance Committee for the Better Way Foundation, and a Trustee for the Historical Society of Michigan Board of Trustees.