Warm welcome to our newest faculty member, Dr. Patrick Lozar

Patrick Lozar joins the UVic Department of History from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he received a PhD in History in 2019. Lozar specializes in the histories of Indigenous peoples in the North American West. His research explores how Native communities creatively responded to the pressures of colonialism and how Indigenous identities persisted and changed through these interactions. Specifically, his manuscript project focuses on the Native nations of the upper Columbia River region and their experiences with the Canada-United States border that was drawn through their homelands in the nineteenth century. Lozar drew from this research for an article published in the journal of Ethnohistory in 2018, and he has presented his research at conferences such as the Western Historical Association, American Society of Ethnohistory, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. He will be teaching courses this year on early Northwestern North America and on Native-Settler Relations in the United States.

Lozar hails from the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana where he is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Upon graduating with a BA from Montana State University, he returned to his home reservation to teach high school social studies. After a few years, he went back to school to pursue an MA in History at the University of Oregon. Lozar then continued and completed his graduate studies at the University of Washington. Lozar’s research interest in Native communities and international borders stems from his growing up on the Flathead Reservation. There, the reservation’s Kootenai, or Ktunaxa, people maintain relationships to Ktunaxa bands in British Columbia and Idaho. His desire to know more about these connections grew into his doctoral dissertation. Lozar looks forward to continuing his research and to teaching at UVic and to developing relationships with local communities and stakeholders.