Dr. Marianne Ignace and Chief Ronald E. Ignace have won the $1,000 Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia for their book A Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 re Stsq’ey’s-kucw. The prize is co-supported by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society.

Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, the book is a model of collaborative approaches to Indigenous history. Drawing on Aboriginal sources and the work of outside experts, it masterfully integrates oral histories and ‘western’ scholarship.

“Our book represents more than thirty years of research about 10,000 years of Secwépemc existence on our land in the Interior of British Columbia,” says Dr. Ignace, “We set our elders’ stories in dialogue with archival sources from outsiders who came to our land, and with multidisciplinary information from earth science, linguistics, archaeology, ecology and geography, weaving together an account of how the Secwépemc came to be as nation through the emergence of our Indigenous laws, and through resilience in the face of colonization.”

“We are thrilled to be honouring a book that synthesizes methods of characterizing Indigenous societies in an exemplary way,” says Susan E. Parker, UBC’s University Librarian. “And we’re so pleased to be recognizing authors from British Columbia.”

Dr. Marianne Boelscher Ignace a is professor of linguistics and First Nations studies at Simon Fraser University. Chief Ronald E. Ignace is a Secwépemc historian, storyteller, and politician, and adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University.

The book is available through the UBC Library Collection and available at the UBC Bookstore for purchase.

Shortlisted titles for the prize include:

Kwädąy Dän Ts’ìnchį: Teachings from Long Ago Person Found, Richard J. Hebda, Sheila Greer, and Alexander Mackie, eds (Royal BC Museum Press)

and

Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by Jonathan Peyton (UBC Press)

About the Prize

The Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Book on British Columbia, sponsored by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society, recognizes the best scholarly book published by a Canadian author on a B.C. subject. The book prize was established in memory of Basil Stuart-Stubbs, a bibliophile, scholar and librarian who passed away in 2012. Stuart-Stubbs’s many accomplishments included serving as the University Librarian at UBC Library and as the Director of UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. Stuart-Stubbs had a leadership role in many national and regional library and publishing activities. During his exceptional career, he took particular interest in the production and distribution of Canadian books, and was associated with several initiatives beneficial to authors and their readers, and to Canadian publishing.