U of A Historian Justin Gage Wins Smithsonian Book Award

Justin Gage, assistant professor of history, was awarded the Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s Professional Scholarship Prize for his book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance. The biennial prize recognizes the best scholarship on the history of the American postal system.

This is the third national award for Gage’s book, which studies how Native Americans resisted U.S. colonialism in the late 19th century by spreading ideas and information, despite their confinement on reservations. Susan Smith, the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the National Postal Museum, noted that Gage’s work “offers an important corrective to common narratives about the agency of Native communities and a fascinating expansion of our understandings of the crucial position and role of the postal system in American history.”

We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us describes the vast intertribal networks of communication built by western Native Americans in the 1870s and 1880s, which were threaded together by intertribal correspondence sent via the postal system and through intertribal visiting.

This effort facilitated the dissemination of important ideas on a continental scale, even as many of those ideas were being suppressed by the U.S. government, including religious knowledge and practices like the Ghost Dance. The book draws upon hundreds of previously unexplored letters written by members of dozens of Native American tribes across the American West.

According to a review in The Journal of American History, the result is “a major achievement … worthy of serious attention from scholars of Native American history, Indigenous studies, colonialism and colonial resistance, and American history more generally.”

Gage’s book has also won the Center for the Study of the American West’s Outstanding Western Book Award and the Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. You can learn much more about the history behind the book at nativeamericannetworks.com.

Gage teaches classes at the U of A on Native American history, the American West and digital history. He has three degrees from the U of A, including his Ph.D. in 2015. After time as a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki and an assistant professor at the University of Florida, Gage returned to the U of A in fall 2023 as an assistant professor. He was also recently awarded a Fulbright College Summer Research Stipend and the Department of History’s Mitch Singleton Travel Award to help fund research for his second book, tentatively titled Writing to Resist: Native Activism through Correspondence, 1870-1900.

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.

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