2020 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Winner: Lakota America by Pekka Hämäläinen

Every year since 2005, the Center for Great Plains Studies has awarded a prize (renamed the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize in 2015) for the previous year's best book about the Great Plains. A committee of Center Fellows is appointed by staff to review the nominations, identify finalists, and select the winning book. Early in 2020, the committee began reviewing over 30 nominated books, and after several months of intensive reading, narrowed the list to three finalists.

We are pleased to announce that Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America is the winner of the 2020 Stubbendieck Prize. We congratulate Pekka Hämäläinen. We also wish to extend our congratulations to the other finalists for their fine scholarship.

The finalists were Denise K. Lajimodiere's Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Boarding School Survivors (North Dakota State University Press); Nick Estes's Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso Books); and Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (Yale University Press). Each of these exceptional books makes significant contributions to our understanding of the Plains Indians past and present, and each will be widely read, appreciated, and critiqued by diverse audiences.

Hämäläinen's Lakota America is an elegantly written, exhaustively researched, and thoroughly documented account of the Lakota people. It recounts the story of an Indigenous empire in the heart of the continent. Hämäläinen offers a sweeping overview of the Lakotas from their Woodland origins in Minnesota to their expansion into the Great Plains and Black Hills. He demonstrates how Lakotas forged a mobile "kinetic empire" on the Plains grasslands. Hämäläinen's intent is to make the Lakotas unfamiliar to readers. He deflects attention away from the late 19th-century Lakotas that popular culture knows best and sets the reader on a 400-year journey dating back to the 1600s. Grounding his work in Lakota winter counts and supporting those with an array of French, Spanish, and American primary sources, Hämäläinen relates the components of this empire in Indigenous terms, explaining how different Lakota oyátes built a web of kinship relations and alliances that reached across the interior grasslands. The core of Hämäläinen's argument is that the Lakotas routinely adapted to address the dramatic changes wrought by European and American colonialism. Using the Lakota trickster Iktomi as a comparison, he shows how Lakotas continually modified and redirected their power, yielding a dynamic history of Indigenous "shapeshifting" in the 18th and 19th centuries. This story culminates in the 1860s and 1870s, when the United States confronted an imposing equestrian empire that was still expanding its own territory, incorporating new technologies such as the gun, and extending commercial ties and alliances across the Great Plains. Yet soon after their defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Hämäläinen concludes, Americans began to erase the evidence of Lakota power from the nation's past. By retrieving that history, Lakota America fundamentally changes our view of the Great Plains and its people.

As with any groundbreaking scholarship, critics might disagree with some of Hämäläinen's terminology, methodology, use of sources, and conclusions. Debate is healthy, and it is why scholars can still tackle frequently covered historical topics, themes, and people in history. Lakota America's magisterial coverage of the Lakota people will serve as a springboard for current and future scholars to challenge or support Hämäläinen's bold and sweeping story of the rise of the Lakota nation.

In the closing sentences of Lakota America, Hämäläinen captures the essence of what his book attempts to accomplish. It will leave the reader with a lot to consider.

Lakotas will endure because they are Iktomi's people, supple, accommodating, and absolutely certain of their essence even when becoming something new. There will be other...