Benjamin Hoy wins Governor General’s History Award

Dr. Benjamin Hoy (PhD), an associate professor in the University of Saskatchewan (USask) Department of History, is the winner of the 2022 Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research.

Hoy is being recognized for his 2021 book A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. The Governor General’s History awards are Canada’s most prestigious history prizes.

A Line of Blood and Dirt examines 150 years of history surrounding the creation of the Canada-U.S. border as a physical, political and cultural reality.

“Like many, I had always thought of the Canada-U.S. border as a peaceful place that mostly affected those who lived directly in its shadow. As I began to look more closely, I began to uncover the enormous violence that goes into creating and maintaining a border,” said Hoy in an interview before the book’s launch in February 2021.

A Line of Blood and Dirt explores the methods that governments found to exert control and “project fear” across the border, including cross-border kidnappings.

In its announcement of the 2022 Governor General’s History Awards, Canada’s National History Society described the book as “a powerful and timely engagement between past and present, and one that will shape how we understand international and diplomatic history, environmental history, Indigenous history, and immigration history.”

Published by Oxford University Press, A Line of Blood and Dirt previously received the Best Book in Political History Prize and the Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize from the Canadian Historical Association.

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