Background

Clyde Ellis was born on March 29, 1958, in Greenville, North Carolina, United States, to James B. Ellis, a professor of journalism, and Gwen (Richardson) Ellis, a social service worker.

Education

Ellis became a Bachelor of Arts at the Lenoir-Rhyne College (now Lenoir–Rhyne University) in 1980. In 1986 he received his master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And finally, in 1993, he obtained doctor's degree from the Oklahoma State University.

Career

Professor Ellis served as a lecturer in history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for 4 years from 1989, also holding a position of a faculty fellow from 1990 to 1991. At the Oklahoma State University, he was an instructor in American history in 1988. Ellis worked at the post of an assistant professor of history at the East Central Oklahoma State University just for a year from 1993. Next year he moved to the Elon College, taking the position of an adjunct assistant professor, changing it to an assistant professor of history in 1995. Simultaneously, from 1994 till 1995, Ellis worked as a lecturer at the University of North Carolina. He held the same position at the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities in 1997.

The past 25 years Clyde Ellis had spent living and working on the Southern Plains in the Kiowa community of southwest Oklahoma conducting extensive fieldwork on boarding schools Christian missions, Native hymn traditions, and powwow culture.

Ellis worked as the Gordon Russell Endowed Visiting Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College in 2002. During 2007-2010 he served the Organization of American Historians as a Distinguished Lecturer, and in the summer of 2011, he was selected as a National Endowment in the Humanities summer scholar.

Ellis is a consultant on American Indian education. Recently he has developed his research, including southeast North Carolina's Indian communities to it, and has published a series of significant studies on that region's powwow culture.

Ellis is a contributor of articles and reviews to history journals and other magazines, including the Historian, the Chronicles of Oklahoma, and the VISaVIS. Later he worked as a book review editor of the American Indian Quarterly, and as a member of editorial board of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

Achievements

• Clyde Ellis was inducted into Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame on April 28 in a ceremony at the annual meeting of the Oklahoma Historical Society in Catoosa, Oklahoma. Ellis's induction included the presence of a large delegation of Native people, including two elders from the Kiowa Nation who sang an honor song for him.
  
  Ellis has also been a grant reviewer for the Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the National Science Foundation.
  
  At Elon he has been awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award from both the College of Arts & Sciences and the university.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains

    (This volume is a comprehensive history of of Southern Pla...)

    2003
  • To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920

    (Between 1893 and 1920 the U.S. government attempted to tr...)

    1996

Views

Although Ellis trained as a historian, he is interested in culture and how it’s constructed as he is in the often narrowly construed contours of historical narrative. Since his first visit to Oklahoma in 1977, Ellis has grown increasingly interested in contemporary Southern Plains ethnography. Because he has been lucky enough to spend a good deal of time with Indian people, he has come to realize that scholarship that doesn’t include their voices—indeed, which doesn’t give their voices primacy—is increasingly moribund, if not irrelevant.

Membership

Ellis is a member of the Western History Association and the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Interests

• fly fishing

• Sport & Clubs

  running, rock climbing

Connections

Ellis married a woman named Mary on December 29, 1990.

Father:

James B. Ellis

He is a professor of journalism.

Mother:

Gwen (Richardson) Ellis

She is a social service worker.

Wife:

Mary Ellis