Ethnohistory News: ASE 2011 Prizes
From a field of 53 contenders, we have selected Tiya Miles’ The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story as the winner of this year’s Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize. In this book, Miles tells the story of the Diamond Hill Plantation, the home of Cherokee chief James Vann and now a Georgia historical site. Using the house and residents of Diamond Hill as her foundation, Miles reconstructs the story of the Cherokees’ transformation in the Early National era. Miles also expertly reconstructs the lives of the African-American slaves and Moravian missionaries whose lives intersected with the Vann family and whose distinctive religious and cultural values shaped its embrace of evangelical Christianity and plantation agriculture. Miles’ analysis of the gender dynamics of power within the Vann household also exposes the pathology of domestic violence that lay beneath its projection of bourgeois respectability.
This book is many things: a study of memory, historic preservation, and public history; a multiracial history of the American South at a time of profound economic transformation; an intimate, multi-generational family history; and a microcosm of the traumas associated with Cherokee Removal. Most importantly, its compelling narrative gives voice to the African American and Native American experiences that shaped the emergence of the antebellum South.
We would also like to recognize with honorable mentions our other two finalists for the prize, David Chang’s The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 and David J. Silverman’s Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America. Both of these books deal persuasively with the issues of race, removal, and intercultural relations in nineteenth-century North America, reconstructing uniquely Native American perspectives on the intersection between land ownership and national identity.
The Heizer committee awards the 2010 HEIZER PRIZE to Nicolas Argenti for his article, “ Things that Don’t Come by the Road: Folktales, Fosterage, and Memories of Slavery in the Cameroon Grassfields,” published in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. The committee was unanimous in choosing Argenti for this award but we also were all agreed that all of the articles were of the highest quality. Argenti’s article, however, stood out even among this impressive group of articles. Departing from traditional, psychoanalytical interpretations, Argenti’s article argues that children’s folktales in the Cameroon Grasslands represent the distillation of social reality rather than simply serving as a safety valve for children’s frustrations. Based on a collection of over forty folktales, Argenti skillfully interweaves theory, secondary literature, and excerpts from frolktales and oral traditions collected between 1992 and 2005 to implicate global capitalism in a smart analysis of the shift from slavery to contemporary fosterage for Cameroon children. We saw in this article an exemplification of an ethnohistoric and ethnographic approach to interpreting oral traditions.
THE 2011 HELEN HORNBECK TANNER PRIZE goes to Ben Leeming, of The Rivers School for “The Poetics of Terror: A Nahuatl Sermon about Hell and Damnation from the Materials of Horacio Carochi.”