Congratulations to Dr. Victor P. Lytwyn and Dr. Dean M. Jacobs! Their article “Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered” in Ontario History’s Autumn 2020 issue has won the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) 2021 Indigenous History Best Article Prize. Dr. Jacobs is a former OHS Board Director, and was the first Indigenous Ontario History Guest Editor, for the journal’s Spring 2000 special issue, Continuity and the Unbroken Chain: Issues in the Aboriginal History of Ontario.
The CHA’s award citation reads, “In ‘Naagan ge bezhig emkwaan: A Dish with One Spoon Reconsidered’ Victor P. Lytwyn and Dean M. Jacobs reveal how land acknowledgements premised on faulty historical understandings of Indigenous land relationships serve to undermine contemporary Indigenous land rights and sovereignty. Rigorously sourced and expansive in historical scope, this article contributes both to Anishinaabe political and diplomatic histories, as well as to vital contemporary questions around the potentially negative implications of land acknowledgements. The authors provide a thoroughly researched example of the importance of understanding the grounded specificities of Indigenous treaties as international agreements that regulate and enact sovereign decision-making over territory, both historically and in the present. In this way, the award-winning article affirms the historical importance and long-standing realities of Indigenous governance and ways of relating to the land as well as other nations.”
This prize-winning Ontario History article, in the Special Issue: Ontario’s Environmental History, is now available open access for all to read on the Érudit platform at: doi.org/10.7202/1072237ar. If you would like to purchase a printed copy of this Special Issue ($25 plus 5% tax and postage), please contact the OHS office at ohs@ontariohistoricalsociety.ca or call 416-226-9011.