Crystal Fraser wins John Bullen Prize

Congratulations to Dr. Crystal Fraser, who has won the John Bullen Prize from the Canadian Historical Association, awarded to “the outstanding Ph.D. thesis on a historical topic submitted in a Canadian university.” Dr. Fraser is a Gwichyà Gwich’in scholar who defended her dissertation in our department in September 2019. She is currently an assistant professor in History and Classics and the Faculty of Native Studies at U of A.

Dr. Fraser's dissertation is entitled “T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh (By Strength, We Are Still Here): Indigenous Northerners Confronting Hierarchies of Power at Day and Residential Schools in Nanhkak Thak (the Inuvik Region, Northwest Territories), 1959–1982.” In it she "draws on the Dinjii Zhuh philosophical concepts of t’aih, vit’aih, and guut’àii (individual and collective fortitude) to illuminate how Indigenous Northern families and communities negotiated, with intense and profuse strength, the carceral educational systems of the colonial Canadian state. All future historians of Canada will have to grapple with how this methodologically germinal microhistory utilizes oral, documentary, visual, material, and other sources alongside Indigenous and Western theory to tell the immersive story of the Grollier and Stringer Hall Residential Schools."

Link to the CHA citation:2020 CHA Prize Winners