2022
Latest Winners
The Clio Prizes
2020
Atlantic Region
Bonnie Morgan. Ordinary Saints: Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
Ordinary Saints is a richly detailed study of lived religiosity among working-class Anglican women in the parishes of Foxtrap and Hopewell in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Using an impressive array of primary material — including private diaries, published journals, newspapers, literary works, church periodicals, census data, heretofore unexamined organizational minutes, and interviews — Morgan explores how working women lived, interpreted, reinterpreted, and expressed religiosity in their daily lives as they coped with, resisted, and adapted to a changing social world. Through a careful reading of these materials and a keen anthropological focus on how rituals, folklore, symbolism, the politics of space, and material culture both intersect and stand in a mutually constitutive relationship with broad political and economic transformations, Morgan was able to move away from the tradition emphasis in religious history on clerical elites and institutions. Crisply written and carefully argued, Ordinary Saints constitutes a major contribution to Newfoundland studies, to women’s studies, and to a wider and more densely peopled rethinking of the history of religion.
Québec
Marie-Eve Ouellet. Le métier d’intendant en France et en Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle. Septentrion, 2018.
Marie-Eve Ouellet’s book is original and innovative. It offers a detailed analysis of the workings of the state in the era of New France. Three complementary factors make this work meritorious. First, the comparative approach adopted by the author identifies the similarities and particularities of the intendant’s function in New France in comparison with two other regions of the French kingdom, namely Brittany and Touraine, while not excluding the possibility of including other examples from time to time. Second, the strength of the book lies in its detailed analysis of administrative processes, demonstrating the role of stewardship as a governance practice and its consequences on the vastness of the territory of New France. Finally, the variety and quantity of original sources are impressive, not to mention the rich iconography, presenting various documents written by intendants and other institutions of the kingdom, which helps to humanize this practice of governance.
Ontario
Carl Benn (ed). A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812. University of Toronto Press, 2019.
In this important work, Carl Benn has marshalled a remarkable amount of meticulous research to bring Teyoninhokarawen’s (John Norton) unique and insightful account of the War of 1812 to a new and larger audience. In a kind of alchemical process, this volume transforms Norton’s first-person reflections into a co-authored historical narrative, in which Benn provides the rich contextual detail that breathes life into Norton’s lengthy memoir. Only rarely have the words of Indigenous leaders like Teyoninhokarawen come down to us unsullied by settler translations and interruptions. This book makes a highly notable contribution to historical scholarship by preserving Norton’s interpretation of events and able defence of Haudenosaunee interests, while also integrating an impressive range of new primary source material. This is a must read for students and scholars interested in the intertwining colonial, military, social, and political histories of the region in this period.
The Prairies
Esyllt W. Jones. Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada. ARP Books, 2019.
In Radical Medicine: The International Origins of Socialized Health Care in Canada, Esyllt W. Jones uncovers the global roots of Canadian medicare. Smart, engaging, and compellingly written, Radical Medicine is a model of transnational history. Moving beyond the heroic narrative focused primarily on Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas, Jones sheds new light on the adoption of socialized health care in Saskatchewan. She illustrates how socialist ideas and innovations in medical care and public health emanating from the early Soviet Union, interwar Britain, and the New Deal-era United States shaped the approach of Douglas’s CCF government. Based on wide-ranging archival research, the book details transnational connections among physicians, public health professionals, and political leaders. Jones highlights the contributions of those who have not previously received widespread recognition, such as female Jewish physician and CCF politician Mindel Cherniack Sheps. The transnational perspective allows Jones to place Saskatchewan’s singular contribution to health care in Canada in a rich and deeply nuanced context. With Radical Medicine, Esyllt W. Jones has made an important contribution to Prairie history, the history of medicine and public health, and Canadian history in general. Radical Medicine also provides a timely, engaged, and passionate intervention into debates around social inequality and health care that have profound contemporary relevance, as socialized medical care continues to face challenges and pressures on multiple fronts.
Lifetime Achievement
Bill Waiser
The Clio Prize Committee for the Prairies is pleased to honour Dr. Bill Waiser with a Lifetime Achievement Award. A Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Waiser has made outstanding contributions to the history of Saskatchewan. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than seventeen books, including A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905 (2016), recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction as well as the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction, and Saskatchewan: A New History (2005), awarded the Clio Prize for the Prairies in 2006. Throughout his career Professor Waiser has worked to communicate Saskatchewan history to a wide audience. He has given more than 250 public presentations, and is a regular contributor to television, radio, and print media. Between 1999 and 2001 he served as researcher and host for an award-winning CBC Saskatchewan history series called “Looking Back.” In 2018 Professor Waiser’s contributions to Canadian history and popular history were recognized with the Royal Society of Canada’s J.B. Tyrrell Medal and the Pierre Berton Award, the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media. Professor Waiser is a member of the Order of Canada (2017), a recipient of the Saskatchewan Order of Merit (2006), a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2007), and was awarded the Saskatchewan Centennial Medal (2005). Bill Waiser truly is Saskatchewan’s historian, and his works have created a rich legacy for students of the province’s history.
British Columbia
Wendy Wickwire, At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. University of British Columbia Press, 2019.
Most historians of British Columbia know something of James Teit and perhaps a little of the debt owed him by scholars, Indigenous rights advocates, and whole communities. So much of Teit’s life and contribution, however, has remained obscured. Partly this is due to Teit himself, a man who never sought the spotlight and was hugely content with his humble place in the Nlaka’pamux world. This superbly researched and elegantly presented study eases Teit out of the shadows. It is a history and a biography and it is also a study of the academy and how it is possible to do great intellectual things beyond its boundaries. Wickwire touches on many themes, including anthropology, trans-national identities, the southern Interior, Indigenous relations with the Canadian state, the processes of colonialism, and locale running up against several kinds of imperial. At the Bridge is a landmark work that, like Teit himself, serves numerous communities and contributes to our understanding of British Columbia in many ways.
The North
Karen Routledge. Do You See Ice? Inuit and Americans at Home and Away. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Karen Routledge’s Do You See Ice? is an innovative, empathetic reimagining of the history of social relations, colonial interactions, and environmental change in northern and eastern North America. Anchoring her analysis to ideas of home, Routledge skillfully demonstrates how Inuit and American whalers between 1850 and 1920 experienced each other’s homes as strange and unfamiliar, and how they sought to feel at home in foreign places within and beyond the Arctic. She presents Inuit and Qallunaat experiences as simultaneously entangled and distinct, weaving a compelling narrative of emotion, encounter, and environmental observation. Her book deftly illuminates the historical and ongoing consequences of southerners’ inability to understand the Arctic as a homeland. It is a morally spirited, elegantly written, and vital contribution to the history of the North—and the South.