Stubbendieck Book Prize

Stubbendieck Book Prize Mila Saskova-Pierce We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize for 2015 is Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn. The Stubbendieck Prize, with an enhanced cash award, continues the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize which the Center for Great Plains Studies has awarded annually since 2005. It was difficult for the committee to choose. More than twenty excellent books competed for the prize, but Elizabeth Fenn’s book had a combination of qualities that made it stand out. And not only for us: shortly after the selection committee chose Encounters at the Heart of the World, it learned that the Pulitzer Prize in the nonfiction category went to Elizabeth Fenn as well. The committee is glad that both prizes recognize the quality of the book and its contribution to the scholarship of US history. The well-researched book creatively combines historical and archeological documentation with oral history. Although an academic publication, it is also eminently readable, for both the specialist and the amateur Great Plains historian. In an engaging format, it documents the central part the Mandan nation played in the history of the Great Plains. Mentions of the Mandans are present early in the Great Plains historical narrative, both US and Canadian, and are featured in many famous explorers’ accounts, including Lewis and Clark, who accepted Mandan hospitality during the 1804–5 winter. Thanks to Swiss artist Karl Bodmer’s paintings from Prince Maximilian’s North American travels in 1834, portraits of Mandan chiefs came to represent the iconic Great Plains Indians for a century and a half. Elizabeth Fenn, however, gives new historical dimension to these and other pictorial and textual representations. The author narrates the history of the Mandans from many perspectives, including the Mandans themselves. Though the reader knows about the devastating smallpox outbreak of 1837 from the outset, the book is a sort of mystery, pulling the reader into the plot of a reversed detective story. We know the outcome, and are learning about the historical events that led to it. At many points, Fenn offers the possibility of a different path, such as available inoculations that could have altered the tragedy that befell the Mandan civilization. The reader learns step by step how it happened that more than 12,000 Mandans before the encounter with Europeans were reduced to less than 300 by the middle of the [End Page iii] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page iv] nineteenth century. Today the twenty-first-century Mandans are a federally recognized tribe with several hundred members. Ultimately, the book demonstrates the fragility of any culture in the face of military conquest and social engineering. Fenn’s work rests on thorough research of the documents left by travelers who met the Mandan nation after the Spanish arrival to North America. Woven into them are archeological finds, Mandan oral history, pictorial evidence, and the history of neighboring tribes. These accounts of Mandan enemies and trading partners cover chiefs, alliances, agriculture, social life, trade, and many other factors that together describe the central role Mandan villages as major corn producers played in the Plains economy and in the survival of their neighbors. The book’s narrative is peopled by historical figures who encountered and often befriended the Mandans. The many excerpts from their diaries, notes, or correspondence with contemporaries allow them to speak, depending on their origin, with a French twist, or colloquial or regional English, and with blissful ignorance of spelling rules. These historical narrators are fleshed out by wider personal and historical context and are personalized with tidbits of individual history, before and after they appear on the scene. The reader experiences a sense of direct communication with them. Fenn supplements the primary sources with descriptions of Mandan life before and after the arrival of horses, European settlers, sicknesses, rats, and armies. The complexity of the cultural practices and rituals, intertribal as well as intratribal, supported centuries of comfortable life. This makes the unraveling of their economy within one generation more shocking. The book integrates descriptions of the caste system, human...

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