Bruce Curtis, Wendy Dathan, Dan Malleck, Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Leslie A. Robertson, Patricia Roy, Wiliam C. Wicken

Atlantic
Wiliam C. Wicken. The colonization of Mi’kmaw memory and history, 1794-1928 : The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy. (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
In this engaging and inventive study, Wicken explores the “living tradition” of a treaty relationship across some 200 years. His narrative hook is a 1928 appeal of the conviction of Gabriel Sylliboy, Grand Chief of the Mi’kmaq, for violating Nova Scotia’s game laws. Wicken illustrates the way that Sylliboy and five other Mi’kmaw witnesses “remembered” the 1752 treaty between their ancestors and the British Crown, based on “collected” memories from earlier generations. The book is an interrogation of the relationship between shifting Mi’kmaw experiences within colonialism and the gradual modification of collective memory over time.

Quebec
Bruce Curtis. Ruling By Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
Ruling by Schooling Quebec provides a rich and detailed account of colonial politics from 1760 to 1841 by following repeated attempts to school the people. This first book since the 1950s to investigate an unusually complex period in Quebec’s educational history extends the sophisticated method used in author Bruce Curtis’s double-award-winning Politics of Population.
Drawing on a mass of archival material, Curtis documents educational conditions on the ground, but also shows how imperial attempts to govern a tumultuous colony propelled the early development of Canadian social science. He provides a revisionist account of the pioneering investigations of Lord Gosford and Lord Durham.

Ontario
Dan Malleck. Try to Control Yourself: The Regulation of Public Drinking in Post-Prohibition Ontario, 1927-44. (University of British Columbia Press, 2012)
This book examines the ways in which the public consumption of alcoholic beverage became regulated by the state in the years between the end of Prohibition in 1927, when the Province created the iconic and powerful Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), and 1944, when new legislation altered and divided the regulation apparatus of liquor distribution and sales in Ontario. The book is informed by social theory, but as good history should, it allows its rich empirical evidence to speak loudest. The best compliment that can be paid to any scholarly history is true of this one: it is convincing.

The Prairies
Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.
Hunters, Horses and Government Men is a meticulously researched, carefully argued, and subtle account of the relationship between Aboriginal people and the law on the Plains at a time when the new Canadian state sought to assert its colonial power over the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Shelley A.M. Gavigan’s study historicizes and complicates current assumptions about the criminalization of Aboriginal peoples. Based upon close study of criminal cases in the region from 1870 – 1905, the book draws important distinctions between the workings of the criminal law, and what Gavigan refers to as the “Indianization” of Aboriginal peoples subject to the Indian Act (1876).

British-Columbia
Leslie A. Robertson, with the Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan, Standing Up with Ga’axsta’las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012).
This groundbreaking book deploys the toolkits of both anthropologists and historians to tell the story of a complex and controversial person – Ga’axsta’las, or Jane Constance Cook – at a difficult moment in the history of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The book takes the reader into the heart of Cook’s historical moment when her opposition to the potlatch and her deep Christianity led her to be dismissed by many as a sell-out to colonialism. The result is a book that sets a new standard of sophistication, challenging historians to work harder to move past the simple colonial frames in which BC history is still often told.

Lifetime Achievement Award
Patricia Roy
The BC Clio Prize Committee is very pleased to award Dr. Patricia Roy a 2013 Clio “Lifetime Achievement” Award in recognition of her distinguished career as a leading historian of British Columbia. Dr. Roy’s studies of the political history of the province, in particular, her analyses of the anxiety about race in the context of colonialism, are mainstays of the region’s historiography. Her breadth and insight are evident in her long list of publications. We consider her extremely deserving of a Clio Lifetime Achievement Award, and wish to thank her for all that she has taught us about her home province.

The North
Wendy Dathan, The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977. (University of Calgary Press, 2012)

The Reindeer Botanist is a remarkable account of the botanical career of Alf Erling Porsild, spanning not only the Yukon and the Northwest Territories but also Alaska and Greenland. Porsild is perhaps best known for his involvement in northern reindeer projects, but his work as the Curator of Botany at the National Museum of Canada, and his long botanical career and northern field experience made him a key figure in twentieth-century northern science. This is the first close biographical treatment of this important figure, his life, and the contexts (northern and southern) in which he worked.
A Canadian history, within a circumpolar context, Dathan’s book represents many years of comprehensive and painstaking research drawing on Porsild’s journals and unpublished letters, as well as his published work. The careful attention to all episodes in his life, including Arctic travel (and the experience of going overland), diplomacy (especially in wartime), science (such as debates about plant biogeography), and a striking, public feud with Farley Mowat, will ensure that this work makes a significant contribution to the history of northern science and environmental history.  It will stand both as an invaluable reference and as a compelling narrative of Porsild and his time in the Arctic, in Ottawa, and in the international world of botany. Dathan’s sensitivity and effort has produced a personal history of Canadian botany, by a botanist, but also a history of an extraordinary life.