It is with great pleasure that I join with Orsi Prize Committee members José M. Alamillo, Frank P. Barajas, and Terri A. Castaneda in announcing the winner of our Richard J. Orsi Prize for the best essay published in California History in 2025:Kathleen C. Whiteley, “In the Grand Scheme of Things: California Indians and California Land Claims, 1920–1945, California History 102, no. 2 (Summer 2025): 3–21, https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2025.102.2.3.The RJO Prize Committee was impressed by the number of worthy research articles California History published in 2025 but found Kathleen C. Whiteley’s article to be exceptional for both its scholarly contribution and its literary quality.Quoting the committee: “Whiteley’s article surveys the ceaseless efforts of White interlopers to reap material benefits from the California Indian struggle to achieve justice for their stolen ancestral lands and tracks the formation of intertribal alliances mobilized to counteract the influence and threat of these avaricious outsiders.”California Indian prospects for redress following the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the treaties of 1851 and 1852 gained significant momentum in the early twentieth century when the California Indians Jurisdictional Act (CIJA) was passed, enabling California tribes to bring suit in the U.S. Court of Claims. As Whiteley explains, “even before CIJA’s passage, opportunists were waiting in the wings to milk personal rewards.” California Indians quickly found themselves the target of shifty characters and grand—though fraudulent—schemes. Foremost among the former was Rev. Frederick G. Collett. Like the organization he founded, the Indian Board of Co-Operation (later reorganized as the Indians of California, Inc.), F. G. Collett is familiar to scholars of California Indian land claims. “Who knew,” the committee asks, that “there was so much more to know about this man and his machinations?”Whiteley mines tribal archives and federal records to divulge Collett’s insidious, behind-the-scenes presence. “Keeping a constant eye on Collett and a host of other grifters who wormed their way into the CIJA proceedings on the home front and in Washington, DC, siphoned precious energy from California Indian leaders” but the need for vigilance “also fostered the formation of critical intertribal alliances.” Whiteley draws direct lines between CIJA land-claims interference and the mobilization of California Indians up and down the state and across tribal lines. The author marshals a significant scope of archival evidence to unveil the grifters and link them to the emergence of early twentieth-century organizations like the California Indian Rights Association and the California Indian Brotherhood. Among her sources are archives yet to be fully tapped by scholars of California Indian history, such as the Michael and Margaret B. Harrison Western Research Center Collection at the University of California, Davis. Other critical evidence derives from her dedicated sleuthing in state and federal records scattered from San Bruno, California, to Washington, DC.Turning to the literary qualities of the essay, the committee commends Whiteley for the article’s superb narrative flow and lively prose. “She captured our attention with the opening vignette, but it was the clarity of argument and occasional touch of humor that kept us reading to the end. Her facility for language and storytelling is evident.”Congratulations, Kathleen!The committee gives honorable mention to Preston McBride, an assistant professor at Pomona College, who wrote “‘No T.B. has ever been cured by white man’: Student Health, Reported and Unreported Outbreaks, and Sequelae at Sherman Institute, 1902–1934,” California History 102, no. 4 (Winter 2025): 2–57, https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2025.102.4.2. McBride produced “a deeply researched article on Native American student deaths at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, a federal Indian boarding school long plagued by disease outbreaks, chronic overcrowding, insufficient funding, malnutrition, and inadequate medical care…. McBride affirms that Sherman, like many on- and off-reservation American Indian boarding schools, was a hotspot for tuberculosis and, in effect, a lethal institution.” His contribution “is especially important because he not only proves lethality at Sherman through extensive, difficult-to-locate documentation” that demonstrates “the systematic underreporting of tuberculosis,” he also explains why “mortality rates were so disproportionately high. He does so meticulously by tracing the collision of poor institutional resources with comorbidities and long-term health sequaelae that shaped the lived realities of Native students.”Both California History articles mark significant contributions to multiple fields of history, from critical Native American studies to histories of California, the United States, and the American West.I gladly claim the honor of naming our 2025 “best article” winner, but this selection reflects the dedication, generosity, and scholarship of our 2025 Orsi Prize committee, whose impressive biographies follow.
Mary Ann Irwin (Thu,) studied this question.