Congratulations to these 2024 prize winners
Douglass Adair Memorial Award
Mélanie Lamotte
“Beyond the Atlantic: Unifying Racial Policies across the Early French Empire”
January 2024
In “Beyond the Atlantic: Unifying Racial Policies across the Early French Empire,” historian Mélanie Lamotte demonstrates that French imperial administrators developed a coherent set of racial intermarriage policies across the French empire in the early eighteenth century, including both its Indian Ocean and its Atlantic contexts. Tracing the intertwining development of such policies and their implantation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lamotte argues persuasively that developments in the Indian Ocean informed trajectories in both the Caribbean and Louisiana as the crown moved towards legal standardization. Collectively, these racialized policies facilitated social and political hierarchies across the empire. A creatively designed digital timeline of the work provides vivid illustration of its arguments, on that is accessible to both students and scholars. The article’s sophisticated combination of deep archival research and wide-ranging theoretical apparatus, as well as its graceful prose, makes it a model of scholarship on the early modern world.
WMQ New Voices Award
Leila K. Blackbird
“‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803”
July 2023
Leila K. Blackbird examines the degree to which the raising of the Spanish flag in Louisiana in 1769 and the implementation of Spanish law in the colony actually led to the outlawing of Indigenous slavery as historians have widely assumed. Blackbird finds evidence of the persistence of Indian slavery in Louisiana and argues that “changing notions of race and legal personhood hid enslaved Native Americans within a socioracial order that negated their existence.” By unearthing Spanish records that continued to show French-obtained Indian slaves as property, Blackbird demonstrates that the manumission of enslaved Indians in Spanish Louisiana was the exception rather than the rule. Further, into the 18th century and the American period, the Native identity of the enslaved was often erased or destroyed in what amounted to a “paper genocide,” and the children of those with Native ancestry were often assigned identities that suggested African ancestry. In Blackbird’s words, in Spanish Louisiana, despite Spanish proclamations otherwise, “administrators and elites maintained the institution of Indian slavery after its supposed prohibition either by disregarding Spanish law outright or by circumventing it, often through the simple expedient of changing the identity of the enslaved.” Tellingly, these enslavements and erasures, Blackbird writes, matter today as they uphold a “settler colonial present” in which “most Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people from Louisiana, including many Creoles, either have been detribalized or belong to nations that have been denied federal recognition.”
Lester J. Cappon Award
Julia A. King, Scott M. Strickland, and G. Anne Richardson
“Rappahannock Oral Tradition, John Smith’s Map of Virginia, and Political Authority in the Algonquian Chesapeake”
January 2023
King, Strickland, and Richardson, in “Rappahannock Oral Tradition,” bring new methods and an appreciation of Native oral traditions to their revisionist interpretation of Native settlement geography and political power in the 17th-century Algonquian Chesapeake. For centuries, John Smith’s map and account of his 1608 trip along the Rappahannock River have shaped scholarly and popular understandings of where Natives lived along the river and how they related to one another. Smith’s map suggests that the Rappahannock lived almost entirely along the north bank of the Rappahannock while the south bank is shown as devoid of settlements. From this mapping academics have concluded that the Powhatans were all powerful. As King, Strickland, and Richardson write, “Fearing the Powhatans’ aggressive reach, so the argument goes, the Rappahannock nations huddled for safety on the river’s north shore.” Yet, as the trio of authors show, Native oral tradition—long dismissed by academic scholars—suggests a more complicated story, one in which the “Powhatans’ political reach may have been considerably more uneven than many historical interpretations would suggest.” This article embraces that Native oral history and, coupled with research that emerged out of a National Park Service collaborative project, demonstrates that the Rappahannock’s “sophisticated understanding of environmental factors” helps us understand why they lived on the north bank of the river. “Put simply, level sandy loam soils, marshes, and access to waterways occur in greater frequency and in closer association on the north bank of the Rappahannock River than they do on the south bank, making the north bank much more desirable for seasonally driven larger settlements, including the towns seen and mapped by Smith in the summer of 1608.” Further, a spatial viewshed analysis revealed that all of these sites were located in ways that incorporated “spiritually and historically important landscapes into the everyday Indigenous world.” “Rappahannock Oral Tradition” not only revises our understanding of the 17th century Chesapeake but it powerfully reaffirms the right of Indigenous communities to narrate their own histories.