Jane Dinwoodie Receives 2022 Binkley-Stephenson Award from the Organization of American Historians

The Binkley-Stephenson Award is given annually for the best article that appeared in the Journal of American History during the preceding calendar year. The Award was announced during the OAH’s 2022 Conference on American History.

Dinwoodie’s article, “Evading Indian Removal in the American South” (June 2021), excels in broadening our historical understanding of Indian removal in the early nineteenth century beyond the master narrative of Native Nations’ forced relocation to the West.

Jane Dinwoodie’s beautifully written article examines the histories of the thousands of Indigenous people in the South who employed the strategy of evasion— the process of eschewing relocation, assimilation, and colonial control by moving to undesirable and isolated locations near their ancestral homelands. Evasion, she argues, allowed Native communities and sovereignties to rebuild and create their own definitions of power and persistence, away from the destructive and violent reach of white Americans. Evaders were so effective that it is difficult to locate them in the archives—and yet Dinwoodie masterfully finds them. Casting a wide net, she reviewed Indigenous and government records, as well as white travelers’ accounts, ethnological observations, and archaeological sources, to unearth fragmented stories of evasion throughout the South. Weaving these stories together, Dinwoodie takes seriously rejection as a form of Indigenous resistance and survival and offers invaluable insight into the forced displacement, or more accurately the nonremoval, of Native peoples and the southern communities they nurtured thereafter.

For the full list of OAH 2022 award and prize recipients, please visit the OAH website.

Congratulations again to Jane for this wonderful achievement!