Civil War Roundtable to focus on Native Americans

By Matt Petras

For the Mon Valley Independent

Dr. Clarissa Confer, a Cal U historian, believes Native American history doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves. Native people played an important role in the Civil War, for example. 

“I think in general Native American history is left out of American history. … Native people are very stereotyped as people who rode horses on the plains, and these Indians were very different,” Confer said. “They grew cotton, they owned slaves. They had a very different lifestyle.” 

Confer will discuss the intersection of Native American and Civil War history at this month’s California University of Pennsylvania Civil War Roundtable, set for 7 p.m. Thursday at the university’s Kara Alumni Building. 

Confer teaches and studies history at Cal U and runs the Civil War Roundtable. She received her bachelor’s at Lehigh University, her master’s at the University of Connecticut and her doctorate at Penn State University. She teaches Civil War classes at Cal U and runs the university’s Native American Studies Institute. Now she often gets to merge these areas of study. 

“There aren’t very many people that do this, so I’m considered one of the national experts on Indian territory in the Civil War,” Confer said. “I write a lot of chapters for books about the war, because they usually come to me because not a lot of people study this aspect of the war. Most people are more interested in Gettysburg and things they’ve heard of.”

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