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ARRELL M. GIBSON AWARD

No time period or geographic restrictions apply, and essays will be judged on their significance to the field of Native American history, their contributions to knowledge, and their literary quality. 

Any WHA member, publisher, or author of an essay/article, may nominate work that was published in 2023Journal editors and authors may submit nominations electronically through the email addresses provided below. Submissions must be one pdf file and include:

    1. Brief cover page (author contact information and title of submission) 
    2. Cover page of journal and copyright page
    3. table of contents of the journal/anthology
    4. Journal article or essay

    -2024 Awards Cycle opens January 15, 2024

    -2024 Award Submission (Postmark) Deadline: April 15, 2024


    The WHA office sends notifications to selected award recipients at the end of August. 


    GIBSON AWARD COMMITTEE

    Khalil Anthony Johnson, Chair
    Wesleyan University
    kajohnson01@wesleyan.edu


    William Bauer
    University of Nevada, Las Vegas
    wbauer@unlv.edu


    Stephen Hausmann

    University of St. Thomas

    srhausmann@stthomas.edu


    PAST RECIPIENTS:

    ARRELL M. GIBSON AWARD

    2023 | Holly Miowak Guise, “‘Who is Doctor Bauer?’: Rematriating a Censored Story on Internment, Wardship, and Sexual Violence in Wartime Alaska, 1941-1944,” Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2022)


    2022 | Stephen Hausmann, "Erasing Indian Country: Urban Native Space and the 1972 Rapid City Flood," Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2021)


    2021 | Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, "Land-Grab Universities," High Country News (March 2020)


    2020 Doug Kiel, “Nation v. Municipality: Indigenous Land Recovery, Settler Resentment, and Taxation on the Oneida Reservation,” Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal (Fall 2019)


    2019 Rodger C. Henderson, “The Piikuni and the U.S. Army's Piegan Expedition: Competing Narratives of the 1870 Massacre on the Marias River,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Spring 2018)


    2018 | Monika Bilka for "Klamath Tribal Persistence, State Resistance: Treaty Rights Activism, the Threat of Tribal Sovereignty and Collaborative Natural Resource Management in the Pacific Northwest," Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2017)


    2017 | Brianna Theobald for Nurse, Mother Midwife: Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail and the Struggle for Crow Women's Reproductive Autonomy,” Montana The Magazine of Western History (Fall 2016)


    2016 | Allyson Stevenson for “The Adoption of Frances T: Blood, Belonging, and Aboriginal Transracial Adoption in Twentieth Century Canada,” The Canadian Journal of History (Winter 2015)


    2015 | Khalil Johnson for “The Chinle Dog Shoots: Federal Governance and Grass-roots Politics in Postwar Navajo Country,” Pacific Historical Review (February 2014)


    2014 | Sarah M.S. Pearsall for “Having Many Wives in Two American Rebellions,” American Historical Review (October 2014)


    2013 | Steven Sabol for “Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization: The ‘Touch of Civilisation’ on the Sioux and Kazakhs,” Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2012)


    2012 | Jesse Schreier for “Indian or Freedman?: Enrollment, Race and Identity in the Choctaw Nation,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2011)


    2011 | Khal Schneider for “Making Indian Land in the Allotment Era: Northern California's Indian Rancherias,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2010)


    2009 | Benjamin Madley for “California‘s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History,” Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2008)


    2007 | Dr. Paul C. Rosier for “’They Are Ancestral Homelands’: Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945-1961,” Journal of American History (March 2006)


    2006 | Margaret D. Jacobs for “Material Colonialism: White Women and Indigeneous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2005)


    2005 | Jessica R. Cattelino for “Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development,” in Colleen O‘Neill  and  Brian Hosmer, eds., Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Colorado, 2004)


    2004 | Pekka Hämäläinen for “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History (December 2003)


    2003 | Thomas G. Andrews for “Turning the Tables on Assimilation: Oglala Lakotas and the Pine Ridge Day Schools, 1889-1920s,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2002)


    2002 | Andrew Fisher for “They Mean to Be Indian Always: The Origins of Columbia River Identity, 1860-1885,” Western Historical Quarterly (Winter 2001)


    2001 | Paige Raibmon for “Theatres of Contact: The Kwakwada ‘wakw Meet Colonialism in British Columbia and at the Chicago World‘s Fair,” Canadian Historical Review (June 2000)


    2000 | James F. Brooks for “Violence, Justice and State Power in the New Mexican Borderlands, 1780-1880,” in Richard White and John M. Findley, editors, Power and Place in the North American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999)


    1999 | Elliott West for “Called Out People: They Cheyennes and the Central Plain,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Summer 1998)


    1998 | Nancy Shoemaker for “How Indians Got to be Red,” American Historical Review (June 1997)


    1997 | Gregory Evans Dowd for “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1996)


    BACKGROUND:

    ARRELL M. GIBSON

    Arrell M. Gibson (1921-1987) was a historian and author specializing in the history of Oklahoma. He earned a B.A. from Missouri Southern State College, an M.A. (1948) and Ph.D. (1954) from the University of Oklahoma. He was professor of history and government at Phillips University in Enid and at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. His works include: Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries (University of Oklahoma Press 1965, 1981), The Oklahoma Story (University of Oklahoma Press 1978), and other histories of the state. Gibson served as the Oklahoma Center for the Book's first president, and the Center named its highest award in honor of the Norman historian. Seven of the 21 authors on the official Literary Map of Oklahoma are recipients of the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. It is given annually to an Oklahoman for a body of literary work. Gibson died in Norman November 30, 1987.


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