Dr. Davies is an accomplished scholar in the fields of twentieth-century Native American, U.S. Western, and U.S. Sports history. In 2021, he received the John C. Ewers Award from the Western History Association for his book, Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970, which was the first comprehensive history of Indian country’s premier sport. In that book, Davies described the ways that a sport, plied by Christian missionaries and federal employees as a tool of social control and cultural integration, was instead adopted and transformed by Native boarding school students for their own purposes, ultimately becoming the “Rez ball”-incarnation of the sport that embodies Native American experience, identity, and community. Based on this work, Davies has also appeared in documentary films, including an NBA-TV production featuring the Warriors team of Arlee, Montana. He has also authored or co-authored numerous other books, book chapters, and articles related to twentieth-century Native American and U.S. Sports history, including Healing Ways: Navajo Health Care in the Twentieth Century; “We Are Still Here”: American Indians since 1890; and American Indian Sovereignty and Law: An Annotated Bibliography. His most recent projects include an upcoming edited volume on the history of COVID-19 and other pandemics in Native American communities; a comparative analysis of basketball’s influence on both Native American and overseas populations in the context of American colonialism; and a study of the shady business of promoting barnstorming basketball in the early twentieth-century United States.

For the past twenty years, Professor Wade Davies has taught courses for both the UM History and Native American Studies departments on Native American history (both colonial and twentieth-century), Indigenous sporting traditions, and research/writing methods. Throughout his teaching career, he has received numerous awards and accolades for his excellence as a classroom instructor and mentor to students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.