The award was established in 1980 to honor Dr. Robert F. Heizer, ethnohistorian and archaeologist noted for his research in California and Mesoamerica and is awarded in recognition of the best article in the field of ethnohistory. The award includes an award certificate and a cash prize of $500.
Article Award Submission Guidelines:
In order to be considered for the Robert F. Heizer Article Award, nominations must have been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal during the year prior to the current one, so articles nominated for 2023 must have been published in 2022. Note that all articles published in the journal of Ethnohistory are automatically considered for this prize.
To submit an article from a journal other than Ethnohistory for consideration, please send an electronic copy to each member of the committee listed below. Emails should have the subject line “Heizer Award nomination” with the article attached. 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.
2024 Robert F. Heizer Article Award Committee:
PAST AWARD WINNERS:
2023 Robert F. Heizer Award Winner: Isaiah Lorado Wilner, “Body Knowledge: Dance, Anthropology, and the Erasure of History” (Part I); and “Motion, Memory, and the Mythology of Modernity” (Part II), Journal of the History of Ideas 83, nos. 1-2 (2023).
The article was first among a strong field of essays that were a delight to read. Criteria used to rank the entries were historiographical and theoretical contributions, depth and novelty of the research, and the structure and style of the narrative. Wilner’s work, specifically, shows depth of research which included archival research, considerable engagement with descendent communities and immersive research about body movement and the dances themselves. Dance is linked to known macro and micro histories that shed light on native memories and native senses of history. Also, as one committee member pointed out, it destabilizes the traditional/modernity binary. The article provides a way of thinking about an indigenous modernity that’s not simply a reaction to colonialism or a pale reflection of Western “modernity.”
2022 Robert F. Heizer Award Winner: Margaret Huettl, “Treaty Stories: Reclaiming the Unbroken History of Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Sovereignty,” Ethnohistory 68, no. 2.
In this brilliant essay, Huettl locates Indigenous sovereignty beyond the settler legal system in sacred histories intertwined with the labor of Anishinaabe men and women. By fishing, hunting deer, and harvesting wild rice, Ojibweg lived out their nation’s sovereignty through their labor on the land, and in their treaties with the United States, they enshrined protections for those activities. Huettl powerfully argues that Ojibweg enfolded and embedded these treaties, which were far more than simple tools of dispossession, in the web of relations that defined Ojibwe sovereignty. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Ojibweg invoked treaty provisions in their conflicts with state and federal officials who violated their rights. These incidents and the stories Ojibweg told about them reinforced continuities across centuries of Ojibwe history and “carried their sovereignty forward to the present generation.
2022 Honorable Mention: Barbara E. Mundy, “No Longer Home: The Smellscape of Mexico City, 1500-1600,” Ethnohistory 68, no. 1.
In an essay that is both methodologically and interpretively innovative, Barbara Mundy examines the changes wrought on the smellscape of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) as Spanish invaders conquered the city and altered it according to their cultural values around odors. Drawing on a vast array of visual and documentary sources, Mundy gives equal attention to Indigenous and European understandings and interpretations of the urban smellscape in this beautifully written and persuasively argued essay. The long-lasting consequences of these transformations ranged from “sensory alienation” among Aztec inhabitants of the city to the spread of epidemic disease to an ongoing “eco-nightmare” of alternating floods and droughts in the Basin of Mexico.
2021 Robert F. Heizer Award – Iris Montero Sobrevilla, “The Disguise of the Hummingbird: On the Natural History of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex” (Ethnohistory, Volume 67, Number 3)
2021 Robert F. Heizer Award: The 2021 Heizer Award goes to Iris Montero Sobrevilla for the article, “The Disguise of the Hummingbird: On the Natural History of Huitzilopochtli in the Florentine Codex,” published in the Ethnohistory, Volume 67, Number 3. As a methodology and group of scholars in the organization, Ethnohistory seeks to weave together interdisciplinary approaches that center the histories of Indigenous peoples. This year’s winner of the Heizer Award embodies these commitments and draws upon sources in Nahuatl and Spanish, as well as visual texts. Her work centers the avian nature of the tutelary god of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli (“Hummingbird on the Left”) while arguing that there is a “natural history of Huitzilopochtli” deployed in book 11 of the Florentine Codex, devoted to “earthly things.” Sobrevilla’s analysis re-entangles hummingbird ethology with Huitzilopochtli’s cult, a bond that was severed in the early days of colonization. A close reading of the Nahuatl, Spanish, and visual texts in the book, she argues, reveals that seasonal cycles and hummingbird behavior—energy budgeting, flower nectar diet, swift flight, and long-haul migration—can be interpreted as inspiring the three main feasts of Huitzilopochtli in the Mexica ritual year. Furthermore, reading the natural history entries in book 11 as related to the avian god illuminates how central hummingbirds were as markers of the dry and rainy seasons and their effects in Nahua social and ritual life.
2021 Honorable Mention – Morgan Ritchie and Bill Angelbeck, “’Coyote Broke the Dams’: Power, Reciprocity, and Conflict in Fish Weir Narratives and Implications for Traditional and Contemporary Fisheries” (Ethnohistory, Volume 67, Number 2)
2021 Honorable Mention: The 2021 Heizer Award Honorable Mention goes to Morgan Ritchie and Bill Angelbeck for their article, “’Coyote Broke the Dams’: Power, Reciprocity, and Conflict in Fish Weir Narratives and Implications for Traditional and Contemporary Fisheries,” published in Ethnohistory, Volume 67, Number 2. This article examines the social and political implications of the geographically widespread and cross-cultural oral narratives related to the releases of salmon into the rivers of the Pacific Northwest through the destruction of weir-dams. This study illustrates how these narratives convey episodes of contradictory interests, exploitation, social struggle, reconciliation, and moral charter for communities over a broad area. The analysis also highlights how the messages of these narratives are just as pertinent today as they were in the past.
2020 Robert F. Heizer Award – Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives” (William & Mary Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2019): 649-96)
2020 Robert F. Heizer Award: The 2020 Heizer Award goes to Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly for their article, “Singing Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the Moravian Archives,” published in the William & Mary Quarterly. The committee notes that Ethnohistory has been a method and organization that weaves together interdisciplinary approaches that center the histories of Indigenous peoples. More recently, this organization, like others, has considered the role that descendent communities could and should play in our scholarly work. This year’s winner of the Heizer Award embodies those commitments and models what is possible when we not only have interdisciplinary conversations, but co-author pieces that provide exemplary models for where interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship can take us. “Singing Box 331,” by a scholar of mission history and a musicologist, describes the questions that brought the scholars to a set of 1740s Mohican language hymns long thought to be translations of German-Moravian into Mohican. As their work shows, instead these hymns represented original Mohican language texts that traveled with Mohican people into the multi-faceted spaces of their lives. In collaboration with Mohican language revitalization work, the two scholars walk us through “the complex webs of human relationships that created and were created by Box 331” and in so doing demonstrate the webs of individuals that contributed to this work.
2020 Honorable Mentions:
- Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, “Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas,” Ethnohistory 66, no. 2 (2019): 223-48.
- Bianca Premo and Yanna Yannakakis, “A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond,” American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (2019): 28-55.