Claire Thomson, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Alberta, has been awarded the 2018 J.H. Stewart Reid Memorial Fellowship. The fellowship, established by CAUT, recognizes and funds a graduate student from a Canadian university that has demonstrated academic excellence.
Claire holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Saskatchewan. She is the recipient of many awards, including the SSHRC M.A. Joseph-Armand Bombardier scholarship and a Fulbright scholarship, and has delivered a number of presentations at international conferences.
Her research examines the connections of Lakota people between her home community of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan and American Lakota reservation communities between 1880 and 1930. She is particularly focused on utilizing a Lakota worldview framework of Lakota Tamakoče [Ta-ma-ko-chey] (Lakota Country) to situate Lakota relationships and place in this history. Her dissertation will investigate how Lakota people drew on their own relationships and understandings to defy the 49th parallel and navigate constraining Indian policies within Lakota Tamakoče.
Claire spends a lot of her time on the road between her home in the Wood Mountain hills and South Dakota, researching, writing, interviewing elders, and riding her horses when she can.