The award was established in 1981 to honor Dr. Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin and is awarded in recognition of the best book-length contribution to ethnohistory. The award includes an award certificate and a cash prize of $1000.
Book Award Submission Guidelines:
In order to be considered for the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award, nominations must have been published in the year prior to the current one. For example, books nominated for the 2023 award must have been published in 2022. Please mail a hard copy of the nominated book to each of the committee members listed below. Deadline for delivery of all submissions to committee members is APRIL 15 of the current year.
The award will be announced at the annual meeting, and we strongly encourage award recipients to attend the conference to receive the award in person.
2025 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award Committee:
To be determined.
PAST AWARD WINNERS:
2024 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award Winner: Mark Van de Logt, Between the Floods: A History of the Arikaras (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).
This book, deeply steeped in ethnohistory practice, unapologetically decolonizes Arikara history by privileging Arikara perspectives, oral history, and language to deliver startling new insights. Blending ethnographic, linguistic, archaeological, and historical sources, Between the Floods chronicles Arikara history from a flood that gave birth to the people to the construction of the 1953 Garrison Dam on the Upper Missouri River in North Dakota that destroyed the Arikara’s tribal economy and housing. Pointing to “the cancerous growth of internet memes, fake news, and misinformation” that we confront today, van de Logt confidently calls on historians to lean into oral traditions and histories rather than rely on “the (false) security of the written word” (5-6). He reminds us that some societies only have oral histories and, although some of these sources might be questionable, Indigenous generational knowledge is central to tribal histories. Between the Floods is beautifully written and is a remarkable methodological guide to how scholars should write Indigenous history.
2024 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award Honorable Mention: Hal Langfur, Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands (Stanford University Press, 2023).
In Adrift on an Inland Sea, Hal Langfur fills a hole in the historiography, taking readers to a place rarely centered in Portuguese and Brazilian histories – Brazil’s southeastern interior – to tell a larger history of 1750 to 1822. Langfur analyzes four expeditions led by vassals, soldiers, and scientific experts who attempted to extend Portugal’s imperial authority over Brazil’s backlands. Individual ambition often thwarted the Portuguese efforts to colonize the sea-like interior, frequently through misinformation that served the individual, not the crown. The interdisciplinary methodological approach in Adrift draws on ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, contributing to Indigenous studies, women’s history, conquest campaigns, and colonial rule. Langfur investigates expedition chronicles, military communications, Inquisition interrogations, ministerial inquiries, scientific field notes, and other primary sources to demonstrate the startling impotence of Portugal’s administrative control as Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, itinerate poor, vagabonds, and criminals “eluded, defied, redirected, and time and time again tamed Lisbon’s imperial aims” (5). Langfur’s Adrift on an Inland Sea is a remarkably innovative history that introduces us to a place, time, and people the archive often obfuscates.
2023 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award Winner: Brooke M. Bauer, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540-1840 (University of Alabama Press, 2023).
Becoming Catawba begins with the foundational premise that women have always stood at the center of processes that created and then preserved the sovereign tribal identity of Native nations. From this premise, Bauer constructs a riveting narrative about how the communities, economies, families, and polities of Catawbas in the Carolinas became intricately entwined and maintained over three centuries of turmoil brought about by European and U.S. colonialism. In so doing, she crafts not only a powerful counter narrative to male-dominated stories of colonial diplomacy and warfare, but also a narrative of national creation and building rather than one of decline. Built upon careful research, interdisciplinary source-mining, and convincing arguments, the writing and telling of this story is entirely engaging as Bauer shows how to combine family research with archaeological and documentary research with huge rewards for specialists and non-specialists alike.
2023 Wheeler-Voegelin Honorable Mention: Sarah T. Hines, Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022).
Sarah T. Hines provides a beautifully written and cogently argued analysis of the Cochabamba Water War at the turn of the 21st century and the subsequent rise of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) to explore the democratization of water access within deeper historical struggles around land, agriculture, mining, and urbanization. In the process, Hines brings much needed recognition to Indigenous actions and agency in the modern age when it is often overlooked and/or in Latin American nations where it is often registered via classed terms such as arrimantes or campesinos. Ably moving between oral history and archival research, Water for All both beautifully distills a complicated and complex history while offering framing capacious enough to engender rich comparison with Indigenous activism throughout the Americas.
2022 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award Winner: A. S. Dillingham, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021).
Oaxaca Resurgent brings together two important conversations in Mexican Indigenous history: the ongoing colonialism of national development and the longstanding Indigenous resistance. Using twentieth-century Oaxaca both as case study and as exemplar, Dillingham offers an illuminating window into Indigenous political activism in the face of postrevolutionary state appropriation of Indigenous culture and history. Examining what he calls the “double bind of indigenismo,” a space for Indigenous resurgence that emerges from the tension between state constructions of Indigeneity and the strategic deployment of those constructions by Native peoples from the state of Oaxaca, Dillingham carefully reconstructs how Indigenous individuals and communities forwarded—and continue to forward—their own anticolonial projects by leveraging and undermining nationalistic invocations of Indigeneity. The book draws on an impressive range of sources, including declassified surveillance documents and oral histories, and it is beautifully written. This innovative work will resonate broadly with Indigenous activists and scholars alike.
2022 Wheeler-Voegelin Honorable Mention: Damon Akins and William J. Bauer Jr., We Are the Land: A History of Native California (Univ. of California Press, 2021).
We Are The Land reminds readers that California is a place that has been shaped by the long presence of Indigenous lives even through the imposition of multiple iterations of colonial-inflected ideas of “California.” Akins and Bauer trace Indigenous experiences in European colonization, attempted genocide, and statehood, highlighting Indigenous activism throughout, and ending with the sovereignty of today’s casino economy. Countering the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the present day, the authors skillfully bring crucial academic interventions of Native American and Indigenous Studies to this decidedly public-facing work, which stands to transform how history is constructed in California and how ethnohistorians engage in that increasingly important work. Through Indigenous oral histories, elegant place-based vignettes, and accounts of Indigenous geopolitical ingenuity, the authors chart their central argument: that the many Indigenous nations who lived in and adjacent to what would later become called California were always and still are the People of particular Places.
2021 – Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (University of Toronto Press)
2021 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award: The 2021 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Prize Committee selects for its award Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (University of Toronto Press). Doodem and Council Fire argues for the ancient and ongoing historical salience of the doodem (or clan) and council fire (a political meeting place for sometimes diverse groups in alliance) in Anishinaabe law, politics, and culture. Bohaker exemplifies the multidisciplinary approach of ethnohistory by drawing on a vast array of documentary, pictorial, linguistic, archaeological, and material culture evidence from archives and museums on both sides of the Atlantic, culled and interpreted in close collaboration with Anishinaabe knowledge keepers. In turn, Bohaker’s research has enriched the cultural patrimony of her Anishinaabe colleagues. This thoroughly documented, creative, humane, and clearly written book exemplifies the aspirations of generations of ethnohistorians and is most worthy of this award.
2021 Honorable Mention – Shawn Michael Austin, Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (University of New Mexico Press)
2021 Honorable Mention: The 2021 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Prize Committee makes Honorable Mention of Shawn Michael Austin, Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (University of New Mexico Press). Austin contends that Guarani kinship ways profoundly shaped the coercive Spanish colonial institutions of encomienda and mission and the identities of the various people of sixteenth and seventeenth Paraguay. Drawing on Guaraní, Spanish, and Portuguese sources and approaching them from a nimble, cross-disciplinary perspective, Austin highlights the voices and priorities of historically marginalized actors, most notably, Indigenous women. In so doing, he recovers a colonial world of contestation, negotiation, mutual identification, and compromise, not just exploitation. By virtue of having captured a complex history in all of its complexity and bringing Indigenous people to the fore in fresh new ways, Colonial Kinship deserves this Honorable Mention.
2020 – Brianna Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
The 2020 Wheeler-Voegelin Prize committee is pleased to recognize Brianna Theobald for Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century. In Reproduction on the Reservation, Theobald asserts that “colonial politics have been—and remain—reproductive politics.” The work offers a beautifully written history of the struggle of indigenous women for reproductive self-determination based on extensive archival research and oral histories of Crow women. Using an indigenous methodology of working through families and networks of female kin, Theobald centers the stories of Crow women’s experiences of childbirth, motherhood, and reproductive activism over multiple generations in her comprehensive analysis of changing federal Indian policies. The study reveals the diverse strategies and life choices of indigenous women by placing the “contingencies, particularities, and possibilities” of a Crow case study within broader patterns throughout Indian country. We congratulate Dr. Theobald on this impressive achievement.
2020 Honorable Mention – Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
The 2020 Wheeler-Voeglin Prize committee makes an Honorable Mention to Maurice Crandall for his excellent book These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912. This ambitious study traces the adaptation of indigenous governance in the Pueblo, Hopi, Yaqui, and Tohono O’odham nations through the Spanish colonial and the Mexican and United States national periods. Crandall combines new readings of ethnographies, images, oral histories, and archival and tribal materials, respecting sacred knowledge and indigenous perspectives, to shed light on native voting and electoral politics. The study reveals how indigenous peoples adopted and adapted imposed colonial structures while maintaining native democratic concepts of “consensus, dialogue, persuasion, and the power of words.” These political practices and structures allowed indigenous peoples in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to assert their political rights and to both accommodate and oppose colonial powers. We congratulate Dr. Crandall on this outstanding achievement.
2019 – Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
2018 – Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
2017 – James Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre. (W.W. Norton and Company, 2016).
2016 – Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
2015 – Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
2014 – Gary Van Valen, Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in LIberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842 – 1932. (The University of Arizona Press, 2014).
2013 – Leslie A. Robertson, Standing Up: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom. (University of British Columbia Press, 2013).
2012 – Peter Sigal, The Flower and Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture. (Duke University Press, 2012).
2011 – Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
2010 – Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Shirleen Smith, People of the Lakes: Stories of Our Van Tat Gwich’in Elders//Googwandak Nakhwach’ànjòo Van Tat Gwich’in. (University of Alberta Press, 2010).
2009 – Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderland Massacre and the Violence of History. (Penguin Books, 2009).
2008 – Christian W. McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory. (Yale University Press, 2008).
2007 – Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. (Harvard University Press, 2007).