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 2023 are evaluated for this year's award, which is chosen by an independent committee.
2024 WINNER
Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir
The winner of the 2024 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is “Birding While Indian: A Mixed-Blood Memoir” (The Ohio State University Press, 2023) by Thomas C. Gannon.
Gannon is an Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Associate Director of Ethnic Studies. This marks the first time the book prize has been awarded to a UNL faculty member and current Great Plains Fellow.
From the publisher: "Thomas C. Gannon’s Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author’s life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon’s traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother’s tears when coworkers called her “squaw,” and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the Indigenous humans, animals, and land of the United States.
Birding has always been Gannon’s escape and solace. He later found similar solace in literature, particularly by Native authors. He draws on both throughout this expansive, hilarious, and humane memoir. An acerbic observer—of birds, of the aftershocks of history, and of human nature—Gannon navigates his obsession with the ostensibly objective avocation of birding and his own mixed-blood subjectivity, searching for that elusive Snowy Owl and his own identity. The result is a rich reflection not only on one man’s life but on the transformative power of building a deeper relationship with the natural world."
Other finalists: The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance by Rebecca Clarren (Viking) and American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes (University of Pennsylvania Press)
PAST WINNERS
- 2023 Winner
Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) - 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