Congratulations to Holly Miowak Guise whose book Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II was awarded three prizes from the Western History Association: the 2025 Robert G. Athearn Award for best book on the twentieth-century West, the 2025 John C. Ewers Award for best book on North American Indian Ethnohistory, and the 2025 Robert M. Utley Prize for best book on the military history of the frontier and western North America.
“The author’s extensive collection and use of oral history in collaboration with Indigenous elders models the discipline’s best practices for working with communities everywhere.”
Robert G. Athearn Award Committee
Alaska Native Resilience shares the experiences of Indigenous peoples from across Alaska to reveal long-overlooked demonstrations of Native opposition to colonialism. Guise (Iñupiaq) draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War.
“It was really important to me to work with Alaska Native elders, to share their stories and also to write the history the way they want to tell the story,” Guise shared in an interview with Indian Country Today. “What I wanted to also capture with the book is this component of intergenerationality and how there’s something very restorative [about] being able to teach the younger generations about your own history.”
“The author’s extensive collection and use of oral history in collaboration with Indigenous elders models the discipline’s best practices for working with communities everywhere,” praised the Robert G. Athearn Award Committee. The John C. Ewers Committee remarked, “We appreciated Guise’s careful and extensive use of both oral interviews conducted over fourteen years, and traditional archival research in over a dozen archives. . . . Throughout, Guise centers family and kinship relations, and the role of women in ways that are both grounded in the sources but also show important strategies to counteract the devastating federal policies enacted against Alaska Natives.”
Alaska Native Resilience was previously a finalist for the 2025 Shapiro Book Prize, sponsored by the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington, recognizing the significant use of original documentary research in the monograph.
