The CHA is proud to announce that this year's winners of the Clio Prize - The Prairies are Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen, for their book Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2009). The Clio prizes are awared to to meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions by individuals or organizations to regional history.  

This co-authored book breaks new ground, intertwining immigrant and ethnicity studies with those of place, and urban prairie places in particular, to offer a revised conceptualization of the prairie west. Organized chronologically, it emphasizes continuity and change though time, and links those circumstances to larger economic, cultural, social, and political shifts on regional, national, and even international scales.  In this way, Friesen and Loewen show how immigrants to prairie cities negotiated their ethnic identities when faced with the dual features of nativism and community building.  

Friesen and Loewen explore a shift in cultural attitudes over the course of the twentieth century, partly due to changes in immigration policies, and the aftermath of international conflicts, but also due to changes in the internal rhythms of the cities themselves. Religious communities developed and anchored ethnic identities. Advancements in transportation and communication brought further changes to the layering of identities as individuals and families developed new “mental maps” locating their place of origin as well as their new communities in ways that allowed them to communicate with or even visit both with relative ease. After Diefenbaker, the unhyphenated Canadian became a mythical figure of the west, but as these authors show, high political policies were often out of sync with actions at the local level. Folk festivals flourished in the latter half of the century, and created caricatures of ethnic customs but also retained significant, if romanticized, links with “old county” traditions from a particular moment in time.

This book is important on at least two significant levels. First, it draws together recent literature that has sometimes seemed an overly disparate and eclectic set of community or ethnic studies. In doing so, these authors fashion a more complete and comprehensive picture of a complex process of prairie urban community formation involving familiar themes of accommodation and resistance, along with less familiar themes of inter-ethnic family dynamics and intra-ethnic conflict on the urban prairie. Second, the authors focus their analysis sharply on the often overlooked urban prairie experience, identifying the region’s unique characteristics vis á vis other regions, as well as contextualizing the immigrant experience in this under-represented set of communities in the prairie west.