Core Team Members
John Lutz
Co-director of Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History
Research Co-director for Who Killed William Robinson? Race, Justice & Settling the Land
Research Director for We Do Not Know His Name: Klatsassin & the Chilcotin War
John Lutz is an associate professor in History at the University of Victoria with a research focus on the Pacific Northwest from the moment of first contact between Indigenous People and Europeans in the 1770s to the refinements of the welfare state in the 1970s.
He is particularly interested in the histories of race, labour, and indigenous-settler relations. He also has a keen interest in the impact of digital technologies on research, teaching and dissemination of history, is a co-director of the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project and several other historical website projects. Lately he has been dabbling in computer assisted textual analyses and historical Geographic Information Systems.
He co-teaches an ethnohistory field school with the Sto:lo in alternating years and has served as director of the university’s Office of Community Based Research where he expanded his commitment to bringing the university to the wider community. His book, Makuk: A New History of Native-White Relations, won the Harold Innis Prize (since renamed the Canada Prize) for the best book in the Social Sciences in Canada in 2010.
