UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Several years ago, Julie Reed, a specialist in Native American history with an emphasis on Southeastern Indians and Cherokee history, realized she could benefit from adding some archaeological expertise to her scholarly toolkit, she said.

Now that goal is finally coming to fruition for the associate professor of history at Penn State, thanks to a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Reed will use the 26-month, $300,000 award to pursue a certificate in applied Southeastern archaeology through Western Carolina University’s Cherokee Studies program.

New Directions grants are given to scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences interested in pursuing “training outside their own areas of special interest,” according to the Mellon Foundation.

“I’ve been dreaming about this grant before it was even possible for me,” said Reed, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “I want to be able to ask these archaeological questions in my work. Historically, archaeology has not been a friend to Indigenous people — it’s been exploitative, it’s been extractive. So, there’s a need for archaeologists to rethink their relationships to Indigenous communities, and a need for more voices at the table. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be an archaeologist, but I do want to have conversations with archaeologists and do it from a place where I understand what they do, and in a way in which we can move forward in a more fruitful way.”

Reed will study full-time at Western Carolina during the 2025-26 academic year, as well as spend the next three summers attending field schools in the Southeast. Her first field school this summer will focus on geophysics, tools and methods that enable archaeologists to use non-invasive techniques to examine sites. The university itself has several sites located near its Cullowhee, North Carolina, campus.

“Western Carolina is doing phenomenal work in Cherokee studies, and the area around the campus has a large Native population,” Reed said. “The fact that I get to be a part of that community for a year is very exciting.”

Reed’s interest in archaeology developed a few years back when, as a faculty member at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she was invited by some researchers to go into caves located near former Cherokee towns. There, she helped the group interpret and contextualize writings in the Cherokee syllabary, the written version of the language that was developed by the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah in early 1800s.

Upon seeing the syllabary up close in these cave classroom settings, which had also been used a millennia earlier by the Mississippian and Woodlands people, ancestors to the Cherokee, Reed gained a whole new perspective on how its people went about preserving their culture while being subjugated by the U.S. government.

In fact, it was such a revelation that Reed completely changed the chronology and the title of her second book project, “ᎦᏙᎯ, ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, ᎠᎴ ᎠᏂᎨᏯᏠ (Land, Language, and Women): A Cherokee and American Educational History.” The book, Reed said, will refute the idea that Cherokee educational history began with Christian missionaries, U.S. officials and Sequoyah’s invention of the syllabary in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but rather has its roots in “older forms of knowledge transmission and a general belief among Cherokee people that every member of Cherokee society regardless of age or gender could learn from or teach every other member of society.”

“When you go into those caves, you think about time and geology differently. And it was mind-blowing to witness the continuity of thought taking place in these caves with the Cherokee using this brand-new educational technology,” said Reed, who plans to study Cherokee syllabary more intensely while at Western Carolina. “It fundamentally changed how I thought about my work. Not only do I want to understand the archaeology of that site, but there’s broader implications for it connected to Cherokee removal.”

Meanwhile, Reed and Davidson College faculty member Rose Stremlau also received a National Endowment for the Humanities collaborative award to co-author “Sovereign Kin: A History of the Cherokee Nation,” the first comprehensive history of the Cherokee Nation in 60 years. The book will be written for a general audience and will serve “as a resource for journalists, educators, and academics who seek accurate information; a reference for Cherokee and non-Cherokee people who want and need to understand Cherokee history; and a starting point for deeper learning and conversation about Cherokee sovereignty and survivance,” according to Reed.

“I do spend a lot of time thinking about how lucky I am that I get to do what I do,” Reed said. “It feels almost overwhelming that through the Mellon grant I get this opportunity to gain a new way to think about what I already think about. To be able to acquire another set of skills to continue deepening how I think about these questions is humbling. It does feel like a huge responsibility.”