Reinhardt wins Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize

Lincoln, Neb., May 12th, 2008 —

"Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee" by Akim D. Reinhardt is this year's winner of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize from the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

James Stubbendieck, director of the center, made the announcement May 7 at the center's annual meeting. "Our judges chose Reinhardt's book as the best representation of nonfiction books published in 2007," said Stubbendieck.

"Jim Stubbendieck called me at my office. It was the first I found out about the award nomination, so instead of having the more typical pins and needles experience, it all just kind of hit me at once," said Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Towson University in Maryland. "Coincidentally, I was on my way to the airport to catch a flight to Nebraska, so it seemed very much like the threads of fate were weaving around me, and I'm not a person who gives much credence to fate; still it was a wonderful feeling of everything coming together.

"For the book itself, the prize is a really big deal. It may prolong the life of the book, help move it into paperback, and make it more accessible to a wider audience beyond academia. Academicians often struggle to have their research, findings, and ideas move beyond the ivory tower. This award suggests that wider exposure is possible for a book like this, even though it's from a small university press."

Reinhardt gathered most of his research material from 1998-2003 while working on his dissertation at UNL, much of it from the Pine Ridge Reservation at the Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, S.D., which holds the reservation's official archive. There he found tribal council documents, old reservation newspapers, and letters from Oglala people to government officials.

"I also conducted some interviews with Pine Ridge residents," Reinhardt said. "Another vital resource was the American Indian Research Project at the University of South Dakota. It's a big oral history repository, containing hundreds of interviews that have been conducted with Indian people going back to the 1960s."

Reinhardt said it was important for him to establish a relationship to the Native American community from the very beginning of his research. Nearly three generations of native intellectuals, from Vine Deloria to Susan Miller, have stressed the importance of scholars recognizing that their work on Indian peoples is important to Indian peoples, and that those histories, cultures, and societies shouldn't be used as a natural resource, simply mined and exploited for the benefit of academics whose careers profit from such ventures.

"So in working on Ruling Pine Ridge, I was very conscious of the idea that I was borrowing something from the Oglala people: the records of their history," Reinhardt said. "The primary purpose of my work was to offer them further insights into their history. That's one of the reasons why I'm donating copies of the book to Oglala Lakota College. I feel very strongly that no one on Pine Ridge should ever have to pay money to read this book."

Reinhardt will receive a cash prize of $2,000 and will travel to UNL this fall to present a lecture on the topic of the book. "Ruling Pine Ridge" was published by Texas Tech University Press.

Judges for the book prize were Melissa Homestead, Mark Burbach and Kenneth Winkle, all UNL faculty members. "The book was both theoretically sophisticated in its analysis of the relationship between the U.S. government and the Oglala Sioux as 'indirect colonialism' and remarkably clear and accessible in advancing this argument," Homestead said. "The author also advanced his analysis through engaging portraits of real people on Pine Ridge Reservation, both well-known leaders and ordinary people, facing a complex bureaucratic system and figuring out how to go about living their lives."

The Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize was created to emphasize the interdisciplinary importance of the Great Plains in today's publishing and educational market. Only first-edition, full-length, nonfiction books published in 2007 were evaluated for the award. The other finalists were "Dark Storm: Moving West" by Barbara Belyea (University of Calgary Press); "Law and Order in Buffalo Bill's Country" by Mark R. Ellis (University of Nebraska Press); "Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg" by Esyllt W. Jones (University of Toronto Press); and "Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey from Russia to Canada" by Arthur Kroeger (University of Alberta Press).

The Center for Great Plains Studies is an interdisciplinary, intercollegiate, regional research and teaching program chartered in 1976 by the University of Nebraska Board of Regents. Its mission is to promote a greater understanding of the people, culture, history, and environment of the Great Plains through a variety of research, teaching, and outreach programs. For more information, contact the center at (402) 472-3082 or visit www.unl.edu/plains