PREVIOUS PUBLICATION AWARD WINNERS
2024 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD (Co-Winners)
Sarah Hernandez
We Are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition (The University of Arizona Press, 2023)
After centuries of colonization, this important new work recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.
Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations. -from University of Arizona Press
Shalene Wuttunee Jobin
Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: Nehiyawak Narratives (University of British Columbia Press, 2023)
Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships explains settler colonialism through the lens of economic exploitation, using Indigenous methodologies and critical approaches. What is the relationship between economic progress in the land now called Canada and the exploitation of Indigenous peoples? And what gifts embedded within Indigenous world views speak to miyo‐pimâtisiwin ᒥᔪ ᐱᒫᑎᓯᐃᐧᐣ (the good life), and specifically to good economic relations?
Shalene Wuttunee Jobin draws on the knowledge systems of the nehiyawak ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐊᐧᐠ (Cree people) – whose distinctive principles and practices shape their economic behaviour – to make two central arguments. The first is that economic exploitation was the initial and most enduring relationship between newcomers and Indigenous peoples. The second is that Indigenous economic relationships are constitutive: connections to the land, water, and other human and nonhuman beings form who we are as individuals and as peoples. This groundbreaking study employs Cree narratives that draw from the past and move into the present to reveal previously overlooked Indigenous economic theories and relationships, and provides contemporary examples of nehiyawak renewing these relationships in resurgent ways. In the process, Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships offers tools that enable us to reimagine how we can aspire to the good life with all our relations.
This study will interest not only scholars and students of Indigenous studies, particularly Cree studies, but also Indigenous community members involved in community and economic development, planning, and governance.-from University of British Columbia Press
Best First Book: Honorable Mention
Alfred Peredo Flores
Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023)
Committee Members: Elizabeth Ellis, Hi’ilei Julia Hobart, Karyn Recollet Committee Chair: Nick EstesBEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly
Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal people and colonial commemorations in so-called Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2023)
In the aftermath of Australia’s James Cook anniversary commemorations in June 2020 and the statue-toppling Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, dozens of police were sent to guard a statue of Cook in Hyde Park, Sydney. Despite the police presence, two women spray painted ‘sovereignty never ceded’ across the statue.
Around the world, societies are reassessing memorials that no longer reflect today’s values. Should such monuments be removed, destroyed or amended?
Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal people and colonial commemorations in so-called Australia by Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly is a new title published by Aboriginal Studies Press that is essential reading for anyone interested in how a society commemorates and acknowledges its complex history.
The book investigates why commemorations were erected and the meaning these have for First Nations people in Australia while comparing Australia’s experience with that in other countries.-from Aboriginal Studies Press
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK: Honorable Mentions
Farina King
Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century(University Press of Kansas, 2023)
Monique Mojica and Brenda Farnell
Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2023)
Committee Members: Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Genner Llanes-Ortiz, Nepia Mahuika, Malinda Maynor Lowery
Committee Chair: Kevin Bruyneel
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
Dane Allard
“Kitchen Table Politics: Bannock and Métis Common Sense in an Era of Nascent Recognition Politics,” Native American and Indigenous Studies, Vol. 10, Issue 2 (Fall 2023).
Abstract
Bannock, a simple bread made of water, flour, and lard—fried or baked—is a staple of Indigenous diets across what is now called Canada. A pan-Indigenous symbol, bannock is a historically dynamic food grounded in both European and Indigenous origins. On both counts, it presents a paradox to the settler imagination, which clings to fixed definitions of Indigenous Peoplehood essentialized in precontact traditions. For Métis, however, bannock is no paradox. Neither its European origins nor its diverse forms and composition across time and place cause confusion. Rather, in oral history interviews Métis positioned bannock as a critical component that sustained a Métis identity through the twentieth century. Bannock offers important lessons for understanding the place of Métis within Canadian history and reveals how Métis mediated state interventions into Indigeneity in the 1980s. Tracing this historical trajectory, I suggest a useful inversion of Mark Rifkin’s concept of settler common sense to focus on what I call a Métis common sense; that is, those aspects of a Métis livedness that were obvious for Métis. I follow other Métis writers who have proposed the kitchen table as a site of Métis identity survivance that functions as an alternative to public, androcentric expressions of Métis-ness legible to Canadian recognition politics. Métis interviewees negotiated with, and simultaneously rejected, essentialist assumptions of their Indigeneity. Interviewees understood bannock as a key marker of kinship sustained through female labor and activism within a matrilocal Métis Peoplehood.
Committee Members: Brooke Bauer, Jessica Cattelino, Kasey Keeler
Committee Chair: Katrina Phillips
2023 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
Elizabeth Ellis
The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization. Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples. The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.-from University of Pennsylvania PressHi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
David Tavárez
Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2022) As the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture. In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s. In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities. Committee Members: Bonita Lawrence (York U), Shannon Speed (UCLA), Torjer Olsen (UiT The Arctic University of Norway) Council Committee Coordinator: Jessica Bissett Perea (UC Davis)MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
Lorinda Riley, Anamalia Su’esu’e, Kristina Hulama, Scott Kaua Neumann and Jane Chung-Do
“Ke ala i ka Mauliola: Native Hawaiian Youth Experiences with Historical Trauma,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022, Vol. 19(19):12564 Abstract Native Hawaiians (NH), like other Indigenous peoples, continue to experience the subversive impacts of colonization. The traumatic effects of colonization, especially the forced relocation from land that sustained their life and health, have led to complex, interconnected health disparities seen today. NHs have described a collective feeling of kaumaha (heavy, oppressive sadness) resulting from mass land dispossession, overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, cultural loss, and early loss of loved ones. Although historical trauma is linked to high rates of substance misuse, depression, suicidality, and other mental health disparities in American Indian populations. However, the link between NH historical trauma and health disparities among NHs has been less explored. This qualitative study used Indigenous talk story interviews with 34 NH ʻōpio (youth) and ka lawelawe (service providers) to explore how NH ʻōpio understand and experience historical trauma. Eight themes and 35 sub-themes were identified covering individual, community, and systemic domains representing the first step in addressing NH historical trauma.Tiara R. Na’puti
“Disaster Militarism and Indigenous Responses to Super Typhoon Yutu in the Mariana Islands” Environmental Communication, 2022, Vol. 16(5), 612-629 Abstract On 24 October 2018, Super Typhoon Yutu devastated the Mariana Islands with 185 km/hr winds, unnaturally exposing the ongoing consequences of United States’ colonialism and disaster militarism. Yutu also revealed the local Indigenous responses as resilience rhetorics, characterized by relationality, responsibility, reciprocity, and justice. This essay argues that U.S. media perpetuation of disaster militarism surrounding Yutu must be understood alongside reverberating Indigenous resilience. First, it outlines the Mariana Islands as a U.S. colony; then, it examines U.S. media and the production of ignorance around empire and militarism; and finally, it concludes with Mariana Islands fieldwork to consider how resilience is rhetorically manifested and locally mediated to challenge colonial power, disaster militarism, and to enact Indigenous environmental justice. Committee Members: Christine Delucia (Williams College), Doug Kiel (Northwestern U), Christopher Pexa (U of Minnesota), Katrina Phillips (Macalester College) Council Committee Coordinator: Kiara M. Vigil (Amherst College)2022 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
JAMAICA HEOLIMELEIKALANI OSORIO
Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo’olelo, Aloha ‘Āina, and Ea (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
Remembering Our Intimacies centers on the personal and embodied articulations of aloha ʻāina to detangle it from the effects of colonialism and occupation. Working at the intersections of Hawaiian knowledge, Indigenous queer theory, and Indigenous feminisms, it seeks to recuperate Native Hawaiian concepts and ethics around relationality, desire, and belonging grounded in the land, memory, and the body of Native Hawai’i.
Committee Statement
“Based on the impressive submissions the committee received for the 2022 NAISA First Book Award, we can say without hesitation that the discipline of Indigenous Studies is producing a remarkable number of thoughtful, rigorous, and theoretically innovative scholarly works. We congratulate all the authors for their contributions. The committee had a tough task, but after careful consideration and discussion, we are pleased to announce that the 2022 First Book Award goes to Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio for Remembering our Intimacies: Mo’olelo, Aloha ‘Āina, and Ea. The committee was impressed by the poetic and political range of Osorio’s work in its close and intimate explorations of the archives of Indigenous language and its activist mobilizations on behalf of the Mauna. Osorio illustrates the theoretical power and abundance of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholarship and language for providing new insights for Indigenous Queer theory and Native feminisms. With the central metaphor of ‘upena (fishing net), this work makes a compelling case for holding, caring for, and restoring multiple forms of pilina (intimacy). Grounded, place-based, and in deep conversation with Kanaka ‘Ōiwi knowledge, Osorio’s work should be read and engaged by all who are interested in the power of Indigenous Studies to articulate Native histories, desires, and futures.”
Committee Members: Chad Allen, University of Washington; José Antonio Lucero, University of Washington; and Ranae Watchman, McMaster University
Council Committee Coordinator: Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, University of Texas at Austin
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
JOANNE BARKER
Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist (University of California Press, 2021)
New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These do not represent new demands for social justice and treaty rights, which Indigenous groups have sought for centuries. But owing to the extraordinary visibility of contemporary activism, Indigenous people have been newly cast as terrorists—a designation that justifies severe measures of policing, exploitation, and violence. Red Scare investigates the intersectional scope of these four movements and the broader context of the treatment of Indigenous social justice movements as threats to neoliberal and imperialist social orders.
In Red Scare, Joanne Barker shows how US and Canadian leaders leverage the fear-driven discourses of terrorism to allow for extreme responses to Indigenous activists, framing them as threats to social stability and national security. The alignment of Indigenous movements with broader struggles against sexual, police, and environmental violence puts them at the forefront of new intersectional solidarities in prominent ways. The activist-as-terrorist framing is cropping up everywhere, but the historical and political complexities of Indigenous movements and state responses are unique. Indigenous criticisms of state policy, resource extraction and contamination, intense surveillance, and neoliberal values are met with outsized and shocking measures of militarized policing, environmental harm, and sexual violence. Red Scare provides students and readers with a concise and thorough survey of these movements and their links to broader organizing; the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people; and the relevant alternatives we can find in Indigenous forms of governance and relationality.
Committee Statement
Joanne Barker’s book Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist is a critical and innovative intervention into the ongoing history of the relationship between the US State and Indigenous Nations. She draws attention to the way Indigenous people have been represented in racist ways as terrorists to justify the oppression of Indigenous activism. She shows how contemporary activism and fights for land and Indigenous life are not new, but the latest iteration of this fight by indigenous peoples, which has been fought urgently and consistently since first invasions. This text resonated with all 3 judges, who think that Barker’s book should be widely read and believe that it speaks not only to the relationship of Indigenous peoples and the U.S. State but to other relationships between settler colonial states and Indigenous Nations. Its accessible style makes the book suitable for students, scholars, and laypeople alike.
Committee Members: Astri Dankertsen, Nord University; Daniel Heath Justice, University of British Columbia; and Crystal McKinnon, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Council Committee Coordinator: Astri Dankertsen
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
MEREDITH DRENT & JEAN DENNISON
“Moving to a New Country Again: The Osage Nation’s Search for Order and Unity Through Change,” Native American and Indigenous Studies, Vol. 8 (2), Fall 2021 pp. 62-91
Abstract
As Native nations reclaim dominion over our histories, stories, and territories, we continue to grapple with how to transform our governance systems to navigate ongoing settler colonialism. Building on existing discussions about the importance of reintroducing Indigenous values into contemporary governance in the face of the politics of recognition, we offer the Osage principle of “moving to a new country.” This principle marks the reproduction of Indigenous values through a process of continuous deliberation and adaptation to foster a unified and healthy government system, even in the midst of massive upheaval. Historical vignettes exemplify the process of moving to a new country as Osages sought order and unity amid attempts at assimilation and massive colonial devastation. In the twenty-first century, the Osage Nation Supreme Court’s decisions offer a guide for the newly reconstituted government’s debates over authority. Citing historical and contemporary characteristics of Osage life, the court is again linking living values of change, order, and unity to the nation’s current government structure. Ultimately, the idea of moving offers a model for how Native nations could embrace ongoing change to support living values and meet contemporary needs.
Committee Statement
The prize committee for the Most Thought-Provoking Article category was very pleased to receive 32 articles for consideration in 2022. We were impressed by the high quality of the articles and the diverse range of topics. This made our task hard but extremely enjoyable. In making our decisions, the committee took into consideration the application of Indigenous knowledges, the best new concept, and evidence of an ethical citational practice. The committee chose both a winner and an honorable mention both have been chosen for their commitments towards Indigenous futures, refusal of settler colonial infrastructures, and their depth in collaborative world-making. The strength of our selection for the Most Thought-Provoking Article Award is situated in the author’s thoughtful exploration of Osage values within the Nation’s governance mechanisms. The clarity in this discussion provides inspiration and challenges for First Nations people to consider the proposition of ‘Moving to New County’ as an approach to explicating the entanglements of colonialism. The authors have deftly and ethically presented their logics through privileging Osage elders, leaders, and other First Nations scholars. We appreciate this work for the way that it amplified a relational ethics of care through collaborative practice. An intervention into the grammars and systems of ‘order’ and possession – the practices denoted here are intentional, thoughtful, and carefully situated as organizing principles for their community. This elsewhere is a socially just and collective rendering of relations within the worlding processes of community.
Committee Members: Aileen Moreton-Robinson, University of Queensland; Karyn Recollet, University of Toronto; and Gary Thomas, RMIT University
Council Committee Coordinator: Aileen Moreton-Robinson, University of Queensland
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE – HONORABLE MENTION
SKAYU LOUIS
“Sensory Access at Sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ: Blockages, Fluidities and Futures,” Journal of Environmental Media, Vol. 2 (Supplement), 2021 pp 9.1-9.16
Abstract
In the summer of 2020, tensions rose at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ, an ancestral fishing village site, for the Syilx Okanagan Peoples due to a landowner seeking to exclude access to a portion of q̓awsitkʷ (Okanagan) river. Access to sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ is integral for Syilx Nation building and realizing embodied relationships with the Salmon peoples, which have been hindered by a multiplicity of factors that almost removed salmon completely from the Territory. Sensory access throughout the village site is not only important to rebuild relations with the salmon, but also those with the place itself. sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ remains a portal of relationality with waterscapes from the high mountains into the Pacific Ocean. Waterscapes connect peoples, polities and humans/more-than-humans throughout their motion spaces. In an era of altered river pathways, intensified relationships grounded in particular waterscapes can help to build relations beyond the structural blockages that fragment the flow of the river and its ecologies. These relationships are important for collaborative healing throughout the watershed. Renewing relations with ecologies of flow and motion bring to question the fragmented jurisdictions that seek to carve up Indigenous territories.
2021 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
DYLAN ROBINSON
Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press)
Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives, presenting case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,” Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality.
BEST FIRST BOOK – FINALISTS
MICHELLE ERAI
Girl of New Zealand: Colonial Optics in Aotearoa (University of Arizona Press)
Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies.
Viewed through Māori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the Māori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the “innocent eye.” Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence.
In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai’s timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial “others”—outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities.
NATASHA VARNER
La Raza Cosmética: Beatuy, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press)
In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in homes: there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.
Critically examining beauty pageants, cinema, tourism propaganda, photography, murals, and more, Natasha Varner shows how postrevolutionary understandings of mexicanidad were fundamentally structured by legacies of colonialism, as well as shifting ideas about race, place, and gender. This interdisciplinary study smartly weaves together cultural history, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, film and popular culture analysis, and environmental and urban history. It also traces a range of Indigenous interventions in order to disrupt top-down understandings of national identity construction and to “people” this history with voices that have all too often been entirely ignored.
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
GINA STARBLANKET & DALLAS HUNT
In August of 2016, Cree youth Colten Boushie was shot dead by Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley. Using colonial and socio-political narratives that underlie white rural settler life, the authors position the death of Boushie and trial of Stanley in relation to Indigenous histories and experiences in Saskatchewan. They point to the Stanley case as just one instance of Indigenous peoples’ presence being seen as a threat to settler colonial security, then used to sanction the exclusion, violent treatment, and death of Indigenous peoples and communities.
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD – FINALISTS
NANCY MARIE MITHLO
Knowing Native Arts (University of Nebraska Press)
Knowing Native Arts brings Nancy Marie Mithlo’s Native insider perspective to understanding the significance of Indigenous arts in national and global milieus. These musings, written from the perspective of a senior academic and curator traversing a dynamic and at turns fraught era of Native self-determination, are a critical appraisal of a system that is often broken for Native peoples seeking equity in the arts.
Mithlo addresses crucial issues, such as the professionalization of Native arts scholarship, disparities in philanthropy and training, ethnic fraud, and the receptive scope of Native arts in new global and digital realms. This contribution to the field of fine arts broadens the scope of discussions and offers insights that are often excluded from contemporary appraisals.
KEVIN FELLESZ
Listen but Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the Transpacific (Duke University Press)
Performed on an acoustic steel-string guitar with open tunings and a finger-picking technique, Hawaiian slack key guitar music emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Though performed on a non-Hawaiian instrument, it is widely considered to be an authentic Hawaiian tradition grounded in Hawaiian aesthetics and cultural values. In Listen But Don’t Ask Question Kevin Fellezs listens to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian slack key guitarists in Hawai‘i, California, and Japan, attentive to the ways in which notions of Kanaka Maoli belonging and authenticity are negotiated and articulated in all three locations. In Hawai‘i, slack key guitar functions as a sign of Kanaka Maoli cultural renewal, resilience, and resistance in the face of appropriation and occupation, while in Japan it nurtures a merged Japanese-Hawaiian artistic and cultural sensibility. For diasporic Hawaiians in California, it provides a way to claim Hawaiian identity. By demonstrating how slack key guitar is a site for the articulation of Hawaiian values, Fellezs illuminates how slack key guitarists are reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging, aesthetics, and politics throughout the transPacific.
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
MEREDITH ALBERTA PALMER
“Rendering Settler Sovereign Landscapes: Race and Property in the Empire State.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38:5 (Oct 2020): 793-810.
Abstract
This article examines the politics of race, indigeneity, and landscape in US American enactments of property. Its substance is the homelands of the Haudenosaunee, now territorialized as upstate New York. The 2005 US Supreme Court case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation denied the Oneida of the Haudenosaunee the right to expand their sovereignty onto former reservation lands through the purchase of land title. In this article, I follow the genesis of the term “non-Indian character” of an area, first written in the Sherrill decision. In tracing the genealogy of this term, I examine the racial tenets embedded in US land survey tools and discourse of property-making after the Revolutionary War. I then discuss how efforts of the Holland Land Company, New York state agents, and yeoman settlers rendered settler sovereign landscapes through acts of Haudenosaunee dispossession and concepts of Indian inferiority. As Indigenous people continue to challenge US legal concepts of property today, the settler state has reauthorized this framing of Native American sovereignty that is bounded and may only recede territorially. I consider how racist understandings of Indian inferiority maintain land as property, to show how US sovereignty rests territorially on anti-indigenous concepts of race and place.
SAʻILIEMANU LILOMAIAVA-DOKTOR
“Oral Traditions, Cultural Significance of Storytelling, and Samoan Understandings of Place or Fanua.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 7:1 (Spring 2020): 121-151.
Abstract
Oral tradition is at the heart of Indigenous cultures. Despite being central to Indigenous histories, oral sources and ancient stories have not been fully incorporated into scholarly understandings of land and “place,” which remain couched in economic terms and treated as abstractions in dominant theoretical conceptualizations. The rich oral tradition of Samoan storytelling, as heard in the tala le vavau (ancient stories, often translated as myths and legends) of Metotagivale and Alo, highlights the core cultural values that underscore fa’a-Samoa (Samoan culture and ways of knowing) of fanua or place. I argue that Samoan Indigenous ways of understanding place can be synthesized with the phenomenology approach to contribute to a broader academic understanding of place and physical resources. In addition to the memories, emotions, and values that make places significant according to humanist and phenomenological perspectives, the language, proverbs, names, and place-names in Samoan oral traditions demonstrate Samoan relationships with place and ecological knowledge. The tala le vavau theoretically transmit and reinforce conservation ethics and ecological perspectives. The core of Indigenous Samoan ecological knowledge is the achievement of balance and the recognition of equivalence and complementarity of vā/social relations and tapu. Respect is key to maintaining balance, and we can achieve redemptive change by promoting storytelling in place-based curricula.
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2020 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
NOELANI ARISTA
The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai’i and the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press)
In 1823, as the first American missionaries arrived in Hawai’i, the archipelago was experiencing a profound transformation in its rule, as oral law that had been maintained for hundreds of years was in the process of becoming codified anew through the medium of writing. The arrival of sailors in pursuit of the lucrative sandalwood trade obliged the ali’i (chiefs) of the islands to pronounce legal restrictions on foreigners’ access to Hawaiian women. Assuming the new missionaries were the source of these rules, sailors attacked two mission stations, fracturing relations between merchants, missionaries, and sailors, while native rulers remained firmly in charge.
In The Kingdom and the Republic, Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) uncovers a trove of previously unused Hawaiian language documents to chronicle the story of Hawaiians’ experience of encounter and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Through this research, she explores the political deliberations between ali’i over the sale of a Hawaiian woman to a British ship captain in 1825 and the consequences of the attacks on the mission stations. The result is a heretofore untold story of native political formation, the creation of indigenous law, and the extension of chiefly rule over natives and foreigners alike.
Relying on what is perhaps the largest archive of written indigenous language materials in North America, Arista argues that Hawaiian deliberations and actions in this period cannot be understood unless one takes into account Hawaiian understandings of the past—and the ways this knowledge of history was mobilized as a means to influence the present and secure a better future. In pursuing this history, The Kingdom and the Republic reconfigures familiar colonial histories of trade, proselytization, and negotiations over law and governance in Hawai’i.
BEST FIRST BOOK – FINALISTS
CHRISTOPHER J. PEXA
Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte (University of Minnesota Press)
Translated Nation examines literary works and oral histories by Dakhóta intellectuals, highlighting creative Dakhóta responses to violences of the settler colonial state. Bringing together oral and written as well as past and present literatures, it expands our sense of literary archives and political agency and demonstrates how Dakhóta peoplehood not only emerges over time but in everyday places, activities, and stories.
LEILANI SABZALIAN
Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools (Taylor and Francis)
Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools examines the cultural, social, and political terrain of Indigenous education by providing accounts of Indigenous students and educators creatively navigating the colonial dynamics within public schools. Through a series of survivance stories, the book surveys a range of educational issues, including implementation of Native-themed curriculum, teachers’ attempts to support Native students in their classrooms, and efforts to claim physical and cultural space in a school district, among others. As a collective, these stories highlight the ways that colonization continues to shape Native students’ experiences in schools. By documenting the nuanced intelligence, courage, artfulness, and survivance of Native students, families, and educators, the book counters deficit framings of Indigenous students. The goal is also to develop educators’ anticolonial literacy so that teachers can counter colonialism and better support Indigenous students in public schools.
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
SHANNON SPEED
Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State (University of North Carolina Press)
Indigenous women migrants from Central America and Mexico face harrowing experiences of violence before, during, and after their migration to the United States, like all asylum seekers. But as Shannon Speed argues, the circumstances for Indigenous women are especially devastating, given their disproportionate vulnerability to neoliberal economic and political policies and practices in Latin America and the United States, including policing, detention, and human trafficking. Speed dubs this vulnerability “neoliberal multicriminalism” and identifies its relation to settler structures of Indigenous dispossession and elimination. Using innovative ethnographic practices to record and recount stories from Indigenous women in U.S. detention, Speed demonstrates that these women’s vulnerability to individual and state violence is not rooted in a failure to exercise agency. Rather, it is a structural condition, created and reinforced by settler colonialism, which consistently deploys racial and gender ideologies to manage the ongoing business of occupation and capitalist exploitation.
With sensitive narration and sophisticated analysis, this book reveals the human consequences of state policy and practices throughout the Americas and adds vital new context for understanding the circumstances of migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
JOHN BORROWS
Law’s Indigenous Ethics (University of Toronto Press)
Law’s Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools.
With characteristic depth and sensitivity, John Borrows brings insights drawn from philosophy, law, and political science to bear on some of the most pressing issues that arise in contemplating the interaction between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal traditions. In the course of a wide-ranging but accessible inquiry, he discusses such topics as Indigenous agency, self-determination, legal pluralism, and power. In its use of Anishinaabe stories and methodologies drawn from the emerging field of Indigenous studies, Law’s Indigenous Ethics makes a significant contribution to scholarly debate and is an essential resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indigenous rights, societies, and cultures.
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK – FINALISTS
DAVID BRUCE MACDONALD
The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation (University of Toronto Press)
Confronting the truths of Canada’s Indian residential school system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In The Sleeping Giant Awakens, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Starting with a discussion of how genocide is defined in domestic and international law, the book applies the concept to the forced transfer of Indigenous children to residential schools and the “Sixties Scoop,” in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and placed in foster homes or adopted.
Based on archival research, extensive interviews with residential school Survivors, and officials at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, among others, The Sleeping Giant Awakens offers a unique and timely perspective on the prospects for conciliation after genocide, exploring the difficulties in moving forward in a context where many settlers know little of the residential schools and ongoing legacies of colonization and need to have a better conception of Indigenous rights. It provides a detailed analysis of how the TRC approached genocide in its deliberations and in its Final Report.
Crucially, MacDonald engages critics who argue that the term genocide impedes understanding of the IRS system and imperils prospects for conciliation. By contrast, this book sees genocide recognition as an important basis for meaningful discussions of how to engage Indigenous-settler relations in respectful and proactive ways.
LISA BLEE & JEAN M. O’BRIEN
Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (University of North Carolina Press)
Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin’s statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue’s unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist’s home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University’s campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes.
As Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien show in this thought-provoking book, the surprising story of this monumental statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people. Dallin’s statue, set alongside the historical memory of the actual Massasoit and his mythic collaboration with the Pilgrims, shows otherwise hidden dimensions of American memorial culture: an elasticity of historical imagination, a tight-knit relationship between consumption and commemoration, and the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism.
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
KRISTINA JACOBSEN & SHIRLEY ANN BOWMAN
“‘Don’t Even Talk To Me If You’re Kinya’áanii’ [Towering House]: Adopted Clans, Kinship, and ‘Blood’ in Navajo Country” in Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, 1 (2019): 43-76.
Abstract
This article examines ideologies surrounding the Diné kinship system, or k’é, in which Diné people are connected to one another through an elaborate matrilineal descent network of systems of obligation and reciprocity, otherwise known as the clan system (dóne’é).5 As elsewhere, kinship in Diné contexts is culturally specific, cultivated through daily use, and not a given, natural fact. As Gary Witherspoon noted over forty years ago, “The point here is that there is no set of biological or sexual ties unless they are said by the culture to exist. The nature of these ties, if they exist, is culturally explained, and the meaning attributed to such ties is culturally derived and assigned. Each culture independently explains the nature and meaning of kinship” (1975, 12). Using oral histories, interviews, archival materials, humorous memes, comedy routines, data from Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian census rolls, and contemporary scholarship from Diné scholars, we foreground the story of so-called adopted clans, or clans that reveal the Diné practice of adopting and incorporating non-Diné peoples into Navajo society as a way to solidify kin relationships. For example, out of some fifty-three clans identified by anthropologist Gladys Reichard in 1928, twenty-one, or over one-third, are listed as adopted clans or as clan names created for individuals or other Pueblo or Mexican groups that originally came from outside the Navajo Nation (1928, 16). Putting these various sources in conversation with one another, we attend to the “floating gap” (Vansina 1985, 23; cf. Gardner 2015) that exists between the “mythic time” of clan histories and the “calendrical time” of Diné settler-colonial histories from Spanish contact (ca. 1539) onward, dwelling in the space of possibility between the two histories. Using clans as a window into the ways Diné society historically included and incorporated non-Navajos into the fabric of the Navajo Nation, we probe what implications these stories might have for a Diné politics of citizenship and belonging today.
HI’ILEI HOBART
“At Home on the Mountain: Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit,” in Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, 2 (2019) 30-50.
Abstract
It was the middle of the summer in Hawai‘i, and snow was falling on the summit of Maunakea.1 Screen grabs taken from webcams bolted to the exteriors of the powerful telescopes that stand sentinel up there showed the unseasonal blanket of white that drifted down from the sky on July 17, 2015.2 One view, taken from the vantage of the Canada-France- Hawai‘i telescope, appeared on the Instagram feed managed by @protectmaunakea with a hashtag that read #PoliahuProtectingMaunakea (Figure 1).3 The commenters agreed that the timing seemed purposeful, with one writing, “The Mauna is protecting itself—at least for a while.” These reactions to the snowfall celebrated the fact that freezing conditions had temporarily halted activity and access to the construction site for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which protesters had been occupying for nearly four months.4
Attributing the snow to Poli‘ahu, an important akua (god) of the cold who is known to reside at the top of Maunakea, many Kānaka Maoli recognized the event to be an exercise of her desire to protect the sacred mountain from desecration. The snow and reactions to it importantly signal Kanaka Maoli perspectives on the agential forces of the elements as not just atmosphere, precipitation, and temperature but as intention, ancestor, and spirit. In the context of the TMT controversy and Native Hawaiian resurgence more generally, animacy has emerged as a potent point of resistance that contends with Western colonialism’s effects on land and knowledge formations. In contrast, much of Maunakea’s development, from earliest Western contact to the present day, has been predicated on an idea of its emptiness. This article analyzes how elemental agency takes on particular importance on the summit because it is there that animacy most challenges how modern- day formations of terra nullius have been employed toward capitalist ends in the name of science. Such an argument is not limited, however, to Hawai‘i: the superimposition of Western spatial imaginaries—particularly emptiness—upon Indigenous geographies has been used to justify a number of development projects, from uranium mines and the Nevada nuclear test sites, to the construction of oil pipelines across unceded Native territories.
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2017 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
THERESA MCARTHY
In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (University of Arizona Press)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
DAVID CHANG
The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (University of Minnesota Press)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
VICENTE DIAZ
“In the Wake of Mata ‘pang’s Canoe: The Cultural and Political Possibilities of Indigenous Discursive Flourish” in Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements from First World Locations (University of Arizona Press, 2016)
BEST STUDENT PAPER PRESENTED AT THE 2017 NAISA CONFERENCE
KAHIKINA DE SILVA
“Loea Mele: A Brief Study of 20th Century Kanaka Maoli Discussions of Mele”
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2015 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
SARAH DEER
The Beginning and End of Rape (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
AILEEN MORETON-ROBINSON
The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
DAVID CHANG
“’We Will Be Comparable to the Indian Peoples’: Recognizing Likeness between Native Hawaiians and American Indians, 1834–1923″ American Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 3, (September 2015), pp. 859-886.
BEST STUDENT PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE 2015 NAISA CONFERENCE
DAVID UAHIKEA MAILE
“He Moena Pāwehe Makana: Weaving Anti-Capitalist Resistance into Kanaka Maoli Critiques of Settler Colonialism.”
WAASEYAA’SIN CHRISTINE SY
“Relationship with Land as Method and Theory in Indigenous Women’s Research”
MARY “TUTI” BAKER
“Cultivating Aloha ʻĀina: A Case Study in Indigenous/Anarchist Practice”
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2014 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
AUDRA SIMPSON
Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across The Borders Of Settler States (Duke University Press)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
CHRIS ANDERSEN
Métis: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood (University of British Columbia Press)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON
“Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation” (Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2014).
BEST STUDENT PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE 2014 NAISA CONFERENCE
JENNA HUNNEF
“A Doubtful Outlaw in the Old I.T.: The Indigenous Repoliticization of Ned Christie in Rober J. Conley’s Ned Chritie’s War”
JESSICA KOLOPENUK
“Becoming Native American: Facializing Indigeneity in Canada through Genetic Signification and Subjection”
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2013 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
KIM TALLBEAR
Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota, 2013)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
THOMAS KING
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (University of Minnesota, 2013)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
K. TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA
“The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherent America,” published in a joint special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures 25.2: 333-351 (Summer 2013)
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2012 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
ALICE TE PUNGA SOMERVILLE
Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
CHADWICK ALLEN
Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
PATRICK WOLFE
“Against the Intentional Fallacy: Legocentrism and Continuity in the Rhetoric of Indian Dispossession” published in American Indian Culture & Research Journal 36.1: 3-45 (2012)
BEST STUDENT PAPER PRESENTED AT THE 2012 NAISA CONFERENCE
ANDREW EPSTEIN
“Decolonizing the Empire State: The Everett Report & Haudenosaunee Sovereignty in Early 20th Century New York”
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2011 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
JODI BYRD
The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
MARK RIFKIN
When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2011)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
LISA BROOKS
“The Constitution of the White Earth Nation: A New Innovation in a Longstanding Indigenous Literary Tradition” published in Studies in American Indian Literatures 23.4: 48-76 (Winter 2011)
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2010 PUBLICATION AWARDS
BEST FIRST BOOK AWARD
MALINDA MAYNOR LOWERY
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
BEST SUBSEQUENT BOOK AWARD
JEAN M. O’BRIEN
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING ARTICLE AWARD
DANIKA MEDAK-SALTZMAN
“Transnational Indigenous Exchange: Rethinking Global Interactions of Indigenous Peoples at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition,” American Quarterly 62.3: 591-615 (2010)