Lifetime Achievement Award for Fred Hoxie

I was delighted to hear that Frederick Hoxie -my mentor, co-adviser, and dissertation director -has been selected to receive the American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western History Association's conference in Denver on Oct. 7, 2012.

Hoxie is the Swanlund Professor of History and Law at the University of Illinois. He is a rigorous editor, an excellent writer, and a consummate scholar.

About twenty years ago, I was an unpublished author who had never been to college -I was in my mid-20s, supporting a family by cleaning floors. I was very excited about the new Time-Life American Indian series, and one of the few purchases I was able to make with my very limited disposable income was the new volume of that series, mailed to my house monthly to be devoured at once. I never could have imagined at that point that fifteen years later the general editor of that collection would be my friend and mentor.

I tried to sum up Fred's accomplishments for this blog entry, and decided that the best approach would just be to simply quote from his page at the University of Illinois website:


An American historian who specializes in Native American history, Professor Frederick E. Hoxie is Swanlund Professor of History and professor of law at UIUC. His undergraduate courses include a two-semester survey course on the history of Native Americans, upper level courses in American Indian law, "Natives and Newcomers" (a comparative look at indigenous peoples and European expansion), and other special topics. He regularly offers graduate seminars in Native American history and ethnohistorical approaches to the past. He also teaches undergraduate survey courses in U.S. history.

Dr. Hoxie came to Illinois in 1998 from the Newberry Library, a private research library in Chicago, where he had served as vice president for research and education. At the Newberry, he developed programs for scholars, students and teachers that promoted the study of the Native American past and administered an internationally-acclaimed research and fellowship program for scholars in all fields.

He also oversaw the Library's exhibits and programs for the general public. These programs were supported by a variety of foundations and government agencies, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dr. Hoxie received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1969 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1977. He is the recipient of honorary degrees from Amherst College (1994) and Long Island University (2000). He taught at Antioch College from 1977 to 1983, and from 1986 to 1998 was an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University. His publications include A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the American Indians, 1880-1920 (1984), The Crows (1989), Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935 (1995), The Encyclopedia of North American Indians (1996), and Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices From the Progressive Era (2001). In 2006 Houghton Mifflin, Co., published a Native American history text co-authored by Professor Hoxie, R. David Edmunds, and Neal Salisbury entitled, The People: A History of Native America.

Professor Hoxie has served as a consultant and expert witness to the U. S. Department of Justice, the U. S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux Tribes and Little Big Horn College.

He is general editor of The American Indians, a 23-volume series of books published by Time-Life that has sold over two million copies, and series editor (with Neal Salisbury) for Cambridge Studies in American Indian History, published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Hoxie was a founding trustee of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and has served on the boards of the Illinois Humanities Council and the Organization of American Historians. He is the former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.



Congratulations on a very well deserved honor.