Episode 22 - Historical Board Games with Benjamin Hoy

Off-Campus History

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Professor Benjamin Hoy to discuss teaching history through board games, with a specific focus on the 2013 game Lewis & Clark: The Expedition as well as board game portrayals of Indigenous history.

Lewis & Clark is based on—you guessed it—the Lewis & Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 that was sent by US President Thomas Jefferson to explore lands in the Louisiana Purchase. The game sees players race each other to be the first to complete the trek from St. Louis to the Pacific Coast. Players will rely on extracting labour from, and trading goods with, Indigenous people in order to make their journeys. Thus, the game is an important depiction of relations between Indigenous people and Euro-Americans in the North American West.

My guest today, Benjamin Hoy, is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan whose research focuses on Indigenous people’s relationships to the creation and enforcement of the Canada-US border. Benjamin also researches the history of how Indigenous people have been represented in popular board games, and is an advocate for using games to teach history in classroom settings—he’s even designed his own historical board game.

Today we dig into the history behind the Lewis & Clark board game, and discuss historical board games more generally. How do board games teach history differently than other media like print or film? How have depictions of Indigenous people in board games changed over time? How does the game depict relations between Indigenous people and the Lewis & Clark expedition, and how does that compare to the historical reality? As we note in the episode, the game draws upon some tired and offensive stereotypes of Indigenous people—why do games continue to include these? And what advice does Benjamin have for educators who want to use board games to teach history?

If you’d like to learn more about representations of Indigenous history in board games, check out Professor Hoy’s article “Cardboard Indians: Playing History in the American West,” Western History Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2018): 299-324. Also check out his article “Teaching History with Custom-Built Board Games,” Simulation & Gaming 49, no. 2 (2018): 115-133. Last but not least, read his book A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), which won (among other awards) the Canadian Historical Association’s Best Book Prize!

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