Michael L. Lawson

Michael L. Lawson is the President of MLL Consulting, LLC., an historical and public policy consulting firm in Annandale, VA. During a 20-year career in the federal government, he served as an historian for the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Lawson earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a doctorate in American history at The University of New Mexico. In 2022, he was the recipient of the South Dakota State Historical Society's Robinson Award for his lifetime scholarly contributions to the Society. He has also been honored by the Western History Association and the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society for his writing on Native American topics. Lawson has been a visiting lecturer at several colleges, including New York University, the College of William and Mary, the U.S. Naval Academy, and George Washington University. The Newberry Library in Chicago is the process of establishing a collection of his scholarly works.

Lawson's classic work, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980 (University of Oklahoma Press) provided the factual basis for Congressional legislation establishing tribal recovery trust funds totaling $385.8 million for five Sioux tribes in compensation for reservation infrastructure lost to Federal dam projects. What began as a purely academic exercise for Lawson to meet the requirements of writing a dissertation, eventually found a real world application between that has significantly benefited the Sioux people. The accrued income from the tribal recovery trust funds will eventually total billions of dollars. Lawson updated his original work with six new chapters, including two that describe the process by which the tribes were able to gain recovery trust funds from Congress. Entitled Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, this revised edition was published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. This book received the Independent Publishers Silver Medal Award ("IPPY") in the category of "Best Regional Nonfiction." It was also honored by the South Dakota Humanities Council as the One Book South Dakota selection. This is a program that encourages everyone across South Dakota to read and discuss the same book throughout the course of a year.