When I initially applied for this award, I was absolutely sincere when justifying the “why” of my submission. I am one of those historians who comes from a Religious Studies department, and while I do not have a monopoly on oddness, I pretty regularly experience some form of confusion meets unfamiliarity in academic spaces. As a scholar of Indigenous childhood and American Catholicism, my interdisciplinary methodologies generate a multiplicity of question marks. This is not necessarily a complaint—they breed a lot of excitement too, and its fantastic being able to collaborate with so many different fields! But it has primed me to expect to operate in the fringe spaces at conferences, and thus my opening statement. When I initially applied for this award, I expected some substantial networking, better positioning as a scholar of religion in a history space, and a satisfying panel discussion. I was beyond surprised to have a far more complex experience!

My encounter with the 2024 WHA conference has impacted the way I think and do research and pedagogy. I actually scheduled my flight to attend one of the earliest panels, “Removal and Dispossession: Teaching Indigenous Histories in University/College Classrooms.” The contributions of Dr. Elise Boxer (Dakota) and Dr. Jerome Clark challenged how I practically and theoretically engage with Native American Indigenous Studies, and have helped me tremendously in both strengthening my pedagogy and clarifying the why behind practices I intuitively valued but could not quite explain. I was also able to attend a panel addressing child removal and dispossession that Dr. Brenda Child participated in, the day that President Biden issued his public apology regarding boarding schools. As is the case for so many of us who do Indigenous history, Child has been foundational to my own scholarship, and being able to hear her succinctly articulate the complexity of that moment was a moment I will be referencing in classrooms forever.

These panels were unexpectedly insightful and innovative, and I’m quite certain its not only because of the brilliance of so many of the WHA’s scholars, but due to the vibrant community that forms the organization. While so many academic spaces give in to competitiveness and posturing—and understandably so with so much scarcity meets overwork meets bureaucratic negligence—somehow the WHA has resisted this fate. Because of my own positionality and scholarly focus, I was especially moved by the incredibly robust and active Native community composed of so many scholars of differing nations, backgrounds, trajectories, and career stages. I was able to renew existing relationships and form new ones, which I am confident will be collaborative, reciprocal, and long-lasting. As a scholar who has not been situated in spaces with such a strong and continuously growing Native presence, I know where I am bringing future graduate students and precious friends. I’m excited to contribute to a panel and a roundtable discussion (assuming the proposals are accepted!), and I have already involved a dear friend (also from Religious Studies!) in one of these projects. I’m excited to collaborate, network, and learn during future meetings.   

My own panel, while somewhat unluckily scheduled at the end of the conference, deeply benefitted from the WHA’s emphasis on community and its dedication to history that does something. While one of our panelists had to drop out very unfortunately, we managed to maintain a solid temporal flow and a generative Q&A. I received valuable feedback, interesting questions, and important reading recommendations. I met the publisher behind one of my favorite books who just happened to be attending our panel. While receiving this prize was so validating as an early career scholar, even more validating was my reception throughout the meeting. I am very careful when recommending venues to my Indigenous and other minority friends and colleagues, because I’m aware of how academic spaces can reproduce violence even when the work is directly counter to hate and inequity. While I am not trying to present the WHA as a paradisical space immune to the reproduction of social and cultural systems of harm, my experience was decidedly not disheartening, and I have a good sense this was not a one off, but the labor and love of a community of brilliant scholars dedicated to inclusivity and sharedness.