The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced finalists for the 2024 ACLS Open Access Book Prizes and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Awards.
As I Remember It: Teachings (ʔəms tɑʔɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder, by Elsie Paul with Davis McKenzie, Paige Raibmon and Harmony Johnson, is one of the five finalists in the history, multimodal, born-digital category.
A Tla'amin elder, Paul spent most of her childhood on the Northern Sunshine Coast in her grandparents’ ancestral territory of Tla'amin.
"In As I Remember It, [Paul] shares this traditional knowledge with a new generation in an engaging style and innovative format," stated RavenSpace, a platform for digital publishing in Indigenous studies, in partnership with UBC press. "With this immersive online publication, readers can learn about the Tla'amin language, listen to Elsie tell her stories, and watch short animations of legends and events. They can navigate by theme – Colonialism, Community, Territory, Wellness – explore the contents through interactive maps, browse the audio and visual galleries or make use of the instructional materials designed for teachers and students."
Paul is one of the last mother-tongue speakers of the Tla'amin language and the recipient of the Canadian Historical Association’s Lifetime Achievement award. McKenzie is Paul’s grandson and works as a professional communicator.
Paige Raibmon is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, and Harmony Johnson is Paul's granddaughter.
According to ACLS, the finalists, five history titles and five multimodal works, were selected by a distinguished panel of scholars, librarians, digital humanities experts and accessibility specialists. The prizes recognize and reward the authors and publishers of exceptional, innovative and open humanities books published from 2017 to 2022.
In the initial competition, one open access monograph in each category will receive dual awards, according to the release. Authors receive the $20,000 ACLS Open Access Book Prize, and publishers of the winning titles receive the $30,000 Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award to support forthcoming books that would not otherwise be published open access.
The prizes, among the largest for scholarly books, will be presented in May 2024 at the ACLS Annual Meeting.
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