The University of Arizona Press
April 4, 2019
Margaret M. Bruchac and her book Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists received the prestigious Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. The book is the 11th winner of the award, which honors books in Indigenous studies.
Savage Kin restructures readers’ views of relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Jesse Cornplanter, and George Hunt, and anthropologists, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas. Like other texts focused on this era, it features anthropological luminaries credited with saving material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, it highlights the intellectual contributions of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
The book “distinguished itself among an impressive field of Indigenous scholars nominated for this year’s award,” said Labriola Book Award Selection Committee Chair David Martínez.
Established in 2008, the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award celebrates books that focus on topics and issues that are pertinent to Indigenous peoples and nations. Of particular interest are those works written by Indigenous scholars or in which Indigenous persons played a significant role in the creation of the nominated work.
This is the second time a University of Arizona Press title has been honored with the award. In 2012, Daniel Herman was awarded for his work Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making, which examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars.
