Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize

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 recently increased to $10,000. Publishers or authors may make nominations; each publisher may submit up to five titles. Only first edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2019 are evaluated for this year's award, which is chosen by committee.

2020 WINNER

Lakota America

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power

By Pekka Hämäläinen (Yale University Press)

Lakota America 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.

The Center for Great Plains Studies’ book prize celebrates the most outstanding work about the Great Plains during the past year. 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.

Along with a $10,000 cash prize, book prize winners are invited to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to present a lecture on the book's topic. First-edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2019 were eligible for the award. Nominations were made by publishers or authors.

2020 FINALISTS

Stringing Rosaries

Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors

By Denise K. Lajimodiere (North Dakota State University Press)

Stringing Rosaries presents a brief history of Indigenous American boarding school programs along with interviews with boarding school survivors and the story of the author's own healing journey with her father. Lajimodiere is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Belcourt, North Dakota, and an assistant professor in education at North Dakota State University.

Our History is the Future

Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

By Nick Estes (Verso Books)

Our History is the Future connects traditions of resistance to the largest Indigenous protest movement in the 21st Century – the Dakota Access Pipeline encampment. Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

PAST WINNERS