Each year the Center for Great Plains Studies presents a prize for the previous year's best book on the Great Plains. The Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize carries a cash award of $10,000, generously supported by Jim and Cheryl Stubbendieck. Publishers or authors may make nominations; each publisher may submit up to five titles. Only first edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2022 are evaluated for this year's award, which is chosen by an independent committee.
2023 WINNER

Valley of the Birdtail
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.
The Book Prize lecture will be scheduled for fall 2023.
Other finalists: Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West by Anne F. Hyde (W.W. Norton) and Cattle Beet Capital: Making Industrial Agriculture in Northern Colorado by Michael Weeks (University of Nebraska Press)
PAST WINNERS
- 2022 Winner
Alaina E. Roberts
University of Pittsburg - 2021 Winner
Leo Killsback
Montana State University - 2020 Winner
Pekka Hämäläinen
University of Oxford - 2019 Winner
C.J. Janovy
Kansas City, MO - 2018 Winner
Ted Genoways
Lincoln, Nebraska - 2017 Winner
Dan Flores
University of Montana Emeritus - 2016 Winner
Michel Hogue
Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario - 2015 Winner
Elizabeth Fenn
University of Colorado at Boulder - 2014 Winner
Bernard Flaman
Saskatchewan, Canada
- 2013 Winner
William E. Farr
University of Montana - 2011 Winner
James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers
Overland Park, Kansas - 2010 Winner
William Y. Chalfant
Hutchinson, Kansas - 2009 Winner
Michael Forsberg
Lincoln, Nebraska - 2008 Winner
Pekka Hämäläinen
University of California at Santa Barbara - 2007 Winner
Akim Reinhardt
Towson University - 2006 Winner
Michael L. Tate
University of Nebraska at Omaha - 2005 Winner
Louis S. Warren
University of California, Davis