Kent Blansett

Kent Blansett is a Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Shawnee and Potawatomi descendant from the Blanket, Panther and Smith families. Read more about his family history here: Kent Blansett’s Family History.

Blansett arrived at KU in 2020 as the Langston Hughes Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and History. Moving to Kansas has brought him closer to home. Blansett grew up in a small, rural town in the Ozarks region of Missouri and attended the University of Missouri for college. There, he joined, served and became president of From the Four Directions, a Native student organization. He spent the next four years engaged in protests, activism, student programming and Tribal engagement (including powwows and stomps throughout Kansas City and Columbia). As a college student Blansett also coordinated efforts to repatriate over 3,000 Indigenous ancestors from Mizzou’s Department of Physical Anthropology, volunteered with Cherokee Nation Head Start, tutored Native youth in Kansas City through Visible Horizons and conducted grant writing for the Santee Nation. He held internships with what was then called the Office of Indian Education Programs through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and worked for the executive director of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, an organization that had a profound influence later in his life as a young Indigenous scholar. During these years in the mid-1990s he worked with a great number of Tribal leaders, activists and repatriation officers, including, but not limited to, Dennis Banks, Michael Haney and Richard “Dick” Black. As a double major (History and Interdisciplinary Studies/American Indian Studies) he was fortunate to work with three wonderful Native faculty mentors at Mizzou: Dr. Karen Sunday Cockrell, Dr. Linda Sue Warner and Dr. Lee Francis.

After college Blansett moved to Albuquerque and became the special events coordinator of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico. There he met William (“Bill”) S. Yellow Robe Jr., who recruited him to perform and work for Wakiknabe, an Intertribal Native Theater Company. Blansett was active in Wakiknabe throughout his years of graduate studies (part time and then full time) when he pursued an M.A. in History at UNM. Blansett’s passion for activism and Native history eventually led him to research the Red Power Movement and, more specifically, the life of Akwesasne Mohawk activist Richard Oakes. During his doctoral studies, his research interests extended beyond Red Power to include histories of Indigenous migrations and Intertribalism in the South.