Mike Borsk, PhD candidate, has recieved two awards for his article, 鈥淐onveyance to Kin: Property, Preemption, and Indigenous Nations in North America, 1763-1822,鈥 William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 1 (January 2023): 87-124.
He received the 2024 Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. This prize is awarded annually for published work in Canadian legal history written by a student.
Mike also received the 2024 Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize by the Canadian Historical Association. This prize is awarded to the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal. The CHA had this to say about his article: "In a masterfully contextualized legal history, Michael Borsk presents a puzzle about the making of property rights after the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The proclamation supposedly enshrined the right of preemption as the crown鈥檚 sole right to make Indigenous land into marketable property. But colonial officials worked within the reality that Indigenous laws also made property. Unlike earlier dismissive discussions of 鈥淚ndian deed games,鈥 Borsk takes seriously that land conveyances were drawn up by Indigenous people, using settlers鈥 legal tools, to confer specific Indigenous property rights on settler men, their Indigenous wives, and their children. In this subtle, expert, and impressively researched account, Borsk reaches across colonial boundaries with care to reveal how differences in kin obligations among Indigenous communities and between crown and (post-revolutionary) federal officials produced different answers in different places to the foundational question, 鈥淲hose laws make property?鈥 which Borsk shows cannot be answered without Indigenous family history."
Congratulations Mike!
