Associate Professor Jennifer Bonnell, from the Department of History, won two awards for her book, Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia (Royal BC Museum, 2023).
The British Columbia Historical Federation (BCHF) awarded Bonnell with the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. The award, that includes a $2,500 prize, is the largest for historical writing in BC. Bonnell also won the Canadian Historical Association’s 2024 Clio Prize for the best book on regional history.
In addition to winning two Canadian book awards, Stewards of Splendour has also been recognized as a finalist in the BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, as well as in two publication prizes (Authored book; and Biography and History of Wildlife Management) from the US-based organization of conservation professionals, The Wildlife Society.
Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia examines the history of wildlife conservation in British Columbia from the period of pre-contact Indigenous stewardship until the present. Commissioned by the BC Wildlife and Habitat Branch, the book explores the ways that Indigenous communities, scientists, hunter-conservationists and naturalists contributed to and contested wildlife management practices in Canada’s western-most province. As industrial logging, mining and infrastructure development intensified through the twentieth century, rising scientific understanding and public appreciation for fish and wildlife, together with the gradual reclamation of land and management authority by First Nations, shaped efforts to protect fish and wildlife in Canada’s most biodiverse province.
“The project enabled me to reconnect with my home province and the wildlife field work I had conducted there as an undergraduate student in the 1990s. I had the opportunity to visit parts of the province I had never been to and to interview over 80 people involved in wildlife work—biologists, Indigenous leaders, hunters and anglers, naturalists and conservation leaders. The project, and the reception the book has received, has been a gift. I learned so much,” says Bonnell.
Jennifer Bonnell is a historian of public memory and environmental change in nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada. She is the author or co-editor of four books, including Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia, published in 2023 by the Royal BC Museum, and Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014 (second edition released in 2024). Her current book project, Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Honeybees, Environmental Change, and Beekeeper Advocacy in the Great Lakes Region, will be published by the University of Washington Press’s Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series.
A big congratulations goes to Professor Bonnell for this achievement.