Historian Wins Two National Prizes for Book on Native American History
A new book from a U of A doctoral alumnus and lecturer in history was recently recognized with two prestigious national prizes. Justin Gage, who received a Ph.D. from the Department of History in 2015, received the honors for his first book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance, which was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Through a juried review process, Gage’s work was named the Outstanding Western Book of 2021 by the Center for the Study of the American West. The center, which is based on the campus of West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, has awarded this prize over the last three years as part of its mission “to promote the study of the American West both as a region culturally unique and as a product of broad historical forces.” As part of the prize ceremony, Gage was invited to deliver a lecture at the center at the end of the Fall 2021 semester.
A few weeks later, the book also won the 2021 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph, awarded by the boards of the Native American Literature Symposium and the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. The award is given in memory of the late anthropologist Beatrice Medicine (1923-2005), who made significant contributions to the study of Indigenous languages and cultures.
We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us uncovers the ways in which knowledge of such practices as the Ghost Dance spread through an intertribal network that informed attempts to preserve Indigenous cultures and resist U.S. authorities in the late 19th century. The book draws upon hundreds of previously unexplored letters by and about the members of dozens of Native American tribes across the American West. According to a recent review in The Journal of American History, the result is “a major achievement … worthy of serious attention from scholars of Native American history, Indigenous studies, colonialism and colonial resistance, and American history more generally.” The book is based on research Gage conducted for this doctoral dissertation under the direction of professors Elliott West and Beth Schweiger during his time at the U of A.
Gage is currently working remotely as a visiting researcher of North American studies at the University of Helsinki and a postdoctoral fellow with the Kone Foundation in Finland, where he is using his expertise on network analysis to study the history of Finnish migration to North America. At the same time, he is serving as a lecturer in the Department of History at the U of A, where he is teaching the history of the American West and introducing new courses on digital history. Based on his scholarship, he is also leading an initiative to integrate historical coursework into the university’s interdisciplinary Data Science Program.
