2023
Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii): Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation
The winner of the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation (Harper Collins, 2022) by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii).
Sniderman is a writer, lawyer, and Rhodes Scholar from Montreal who has written for the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and Maclean’s. He has also argued before the Supreme Court of Canada, served as the human rights policy advisor to the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, and worked for a judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court. Sanderson is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and has served as a senior policy advisor to Ontario’s attorney general and minister of Indigenous affairs. He is Swampy Cree, Beaver clan, of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation.
Divided by a beautiful valley and 150 years of racism, the town of Rossburn and the Waywayseecappo Indian reserve have been neighbors nearly as long as Canada has been a country. Their story reflects much of what has gone wrong in relations between Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians. It also offers, in the end, an uncommon measure of hope.
2022
Alaina E. Roberts: I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
The winner of the 2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is author Alaina E. Roberts for I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Dr. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to the modern day. She holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts in History, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She writes, teaches, and presents public talks about Black and Native history in the West, family history, slavery in the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indian Nations), Native American enrollment politics, and Indigeneity in North America and across the globe.
I've Been Here All the While tells the stories of the Black, Native, and white people who made Indian Territory, now known as the state of Oklahoma, their home," Roberts said. "This history is often overlooked, so it’s such an honor for my book to be recognized by the Center for Great Plains Studies, which houses important projects like Black Homesteaders, that do so much to educate the public on the diverse history of the Plains."
The Center for Great Plains Studies’ Stubbendieck book prize celebrates the most outstanding work about the Great Plains during the past year, chosen by an independent group of scholars.
Book Prize lecture: Sept. 7, 2022, 5:30 p.m., virtual and in-person at the Center for Great Plains Studies. Watch the lecture.
2021
Leo Killsback
The winner of the 2021 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is author Dr. Leo Killsback for the two-volume set “A Sacred People: Indigenous Governance, Traditional Leadership, and the Warriors of the Cheyenne Nation” and “A Sovereign People: Indigenous Nationhood, Traditional Law, and the Covenants of the Cheyenne Nation” (Texas Tech University Press, 2020).
Dr. Killsback is an Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at Montana State University who specializes in indigenous governance, traditional law, sovereignty, and treaty rights. Dr. Killsback grew up on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and is devoted to the preservation and resurgence of Cheyenne language and culture. He sustains relationships within his nation by means of collaborative methodologies that neither exploit nor marginalize.
“I am honored and humbled to be selected for this prestigious prize. It is important that Indigneous histories, experiences, and voices are recognized as new horizons in scholarship are reached in Great Plains and Native American studies,” Dr. Killsback said. “As an Indigenous scholar, I will continue to contribute research and scholarship that is meaningful and significant to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Nea'ish (thank you).”
2020
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
Lakota America (Yale University Press) is a complete account of the Lakota Indians from the early 16th to the early 21st Century, including the history of the iconic figures of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull.
Pekka Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor of American History at St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford. He specializes in indigenous, colonial, imperial, environmental, and borderlands history in North America. Before Oxford, he taught at Texas A&M University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. His 2008 book, The Comanche Empire, received 12 book awards, including the 2008 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and the Bancroft Prize.
2019
No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas
C.J. Janovy, an arts reporter and editor for public radio in Kansas City, MO, tells the compelling story of LGBT Kansans as they realized they would have to fight to create equality in their state. Using extensive interviews and research, she shares the diverse voices and experiences of LGBT community members living on the Plains and working for social change.
University Press of Kansas
2018
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm
Genoways is a contributing editor at Mother Jones, The New Republic and Pacific Standard. His last book, "The Chain: Farm, Factory and the Fate of Our Food," was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Writing and Literature.
W.W. Norton & Company
2017
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains
Dan Flores is a writer and historian who specializes in environmental and cultural history of the American West. Before his retirement, Flores held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
2016
Métis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People
Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor in History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario
Publisher: University of Regina Press in Canada and University of North Carolina Press in the U.S.
2015
Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Elizabeth Fenn, Professor of History, Unviersity of Colorado at Boulder
Publisher: Hill & Wang
2014
Architecture of Saskatchewan: A Visual Journey, 1930-2011
Bernard Flaman, conservation architect for Canada’s Public Works and Government Services
Publisher: University of Regina Press
2013
Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice
William E. Farr, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Montana, senior fellow and founding director of the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2011
The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory
James N. Leiker, Associate Professor of History, Johnson County Community College; and Ramon Powers, Former Executive Director of the Kansas State Historical Society
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2010
Hancock's War:
Conflict on the Southern Plains
William Y. Chalfant, Attorney, Hutchinson Kansas
Foreword by Jerome A. Greene
Publisher: Arthur H. Clark
2009
Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild
Michael Forsberg, Conservation Photographer, Lincoln, Nebraska
with Dan O'Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
2008
The Comanche Empire
Pekka Hämäläinen, Associate Professor of History, University of California at Santa Barbara
Publisher: Yale University Press
2007
Ruling Pine Ridge
Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee
Akim D. Reinhardt, Associate Professor of History, Towson University, Towson, Maryland
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
2006
Indians and Emigrants:
Encounters on the Overland Trails
Michael L. Tate, Professor of History and Native American Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
2005
Buffalo Bill's America:
William Cody and the Wild West Show
Louis S. Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, University of California, Davis
Publisher: Knopf
Note: 2012 is missing because of a change in titling Book Prizes. After 2012, awards were named for the year the award was given. Before 2012, awards were named for the year the book was published.