Ethnohistory News:

ASE 2009 Prizes

The 2009 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for the best book-length work in the field of ethnohistory published in 2008 was awarded to Karl Jacoby for Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (The Penguin Press). His kaleidoscopic view of the Camp Grant Massacre of 1871 convincingly demonstrates how ethnohistorical methods and perspectives may challenge conventional narratives. This is an intellectually and emotionally mature work, elegant in this narrative strategy and satisfying in its rendering. Deeply researched an based upon an impressive range of archives and sources, the book makes an original and important argument about borderland violence in a formative period. More than that, though, Jacoby does the best of what Ethnohistory seeks--to recover and highlight alterity, and specifically other modes of historical consciousness. By weaving intersecting narrative for O’odham, Vecinos, Americans, Nnee, Jaoby accomplishes several things at once: he highlights the complicated workings of memory in relationship to violence; he demonstrates the “fraught relationship between storytelling and historical evaluation” and, finally, he demonstrates the power of this kind of transdiciplinary work to combine deep empiricism with trenchant theoretical critique.

The Robert F. Heizer Award for the best article-length work in the field of Ethnohistory published in 2008 was won by Karen Richman. In “Innocent Imitations? Authenticity and Mimesis in Haitian Vodou Art, Tourism, and Anthropology,” (Ethnohistory, Spring 2008), Karen Richman skillfully contextualizes a scandal in Chicago, where elementary school children created artistic copies of vodou ritual objects after visiting an exhibit at the Field Museum in 1997. Some parents objected strongly, arguing that their children had produced false idols with mimetic powers. From this contemporary case, Richman goes on to demonstrate how complex processes of mimesis also evolved, in ongoing conditions of unequal and exploitative relations, to shape tourism, commodify vodou culture, and provide the basis for a national origin myth in Haiti. Beginning in the 1940s, she explains, “Haitian art was inspired by a market for Americans ‘looking for Strange’. . . . The artists complied by using creative mimeses of what they thought the North Americans wanted to see. The North Americans consumed the objects, mistaking them for the real thing” (p. 222). Richman carefully blends fieldwork that includes participant-observation and interviews with media coverage, travel memoirs, and academic scholarship to achieve the extraordinary interdisciplinary range to which ethnohistorians aspire.

Heizer Honorable Mention

In her article, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana” (The William and Mary Quarterly, April 2008), Kathleen DuVal provides a thorough examination of the ways in which métissage in colonial Louisiana functioned differently than in other areas of French America, where intermarriage commonly facilitated economic, diplomatic, and cultural relations. Based on her extensive research in a variety of historical and ethnographic sources, DuVal argues that the diversity of Indian peoples throughout colonial Louisiana translated into varying rationales regarding marriage choices and the desirability of marriage with foreigners. These differences derived largely from the degree of influence and prosperity of particular indigenous communities, as well as from distinctions in the status of women within them. She shows that in French Louisiana, “local Indians largely set the terms by which economic, social, and sexual interactions with Europeans took place.” At the same time, the multifaceted picture she paints also reveals barriers to the agency of women.

The Helen Hornbeck Tanner Award is given to the outstanding graduate student paper given at the meeting. In 2008 the award goes to Heather Flynn Roller for her paper, "In Search of Gente Nova; the Resettlement Process in the Portuguese Amazon. ”

Flynn Roller revisits older understandings of the process by which Portuguese colonists in Amazonia in the second half of the 18th century enticed Native peoples living beyond colonial control to relocate within colonial boundaries and under Portuguese colonial control. Specifically, she argues that so-called "colonial Indians," those Native peoples already living within the colony participated actively in the recruitment of additional Native people. As we might expect, given that we are ethnohistorians, they did so for their own varied reasons, including reuniting families, building ethnic majorities, and gaining personal prestige.

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