Winner: Crystal Gail Fraser, By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, (University of Manitoba Press, 2024)
By Strength We Are Still Here offers a profound examination of the history and ongoing legacies of colonial schooling in the North. Through careful historical analysis and deeply grounded community testimony, Fraser offers a critical lens on the Indian Residential School system, showing how it disrupted relationships to land, culture, and kinship, yet also how strength and continuity persisted. The work demonstrates a rare balance between scholarly rigor and empathetic storytelling, weaving archival research and oral history with lived experience to illuminate the complex intersections of education, colonial policy, and Indigenous survival. Elegantly written this book advances Canadian Studies by revealing the sociopolitical structures that shaped life in the North, while leaving space for Indigenous Survivors and communities to speak powerfully for themselves. It is both a sensitive critique of colonial governance and a testament to resilience, making it a landmark contribution to the field.
Honourable mention: Cheryl Thompson, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2025)
This book is a richly interdisciplinary and original historical study of blackface minstrelsy in 19thcentury Canada. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Thompson deftly weaves international theatre, dance and music performance histories together with histories of slavery and emancipation to show how representations of Blackness circulated in particular ways in the Canadian context after the War of 1812. Sifting through records of almost a century of popular arts in the emerging state of Canada, Thompson attends to the racial complexity of cultural practices, including both white and Black people performing Black comic characters, the rise of Jubilee gospel groups, the emergence of vaudevillian burlesques, and the fraught place of Black opera singers. Canada and the Blackface Atlantic interprets the ways in which these live entertainments, and the printed matter which enframed them, were staging grounds for highly divergent views of Black life in both slavery and emancipation. Thompson clarifies what was unique about the performance of Blackness in the Canadian context in ways that help readers comprehend the role of the arts in the long history of anti- Black racism specific to this country.
The CSN warmly thanks the committee members for this prize.