Lindsey Bannister, a PhD candidate in English, received a Graduate International Research Travel Award (GIRTA) to further her research in Ontario and Alberta. Her report: 

The Graduate International Travel Award has enriched my research process considerably. Because of the award, I was able to spend an extensive amount of time combing through archival collections across Canada, specifically McMaster University’s Archives (Hamilton, ON) and Research Collections, the University of Calgary Archives, and the Glenbow Museum Archives (Calgary, AB).

My dissertation concerns the lives and writings of two early Twentieth Century Canadian authors who were regarded as racial imposters: Buffalo Child Long Lance and Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton). Long Lance was a mixed race Indigenous man (Cherokee and Lumbee) from the Eastern United States. In the early 1920s, he moved to Calgary where he claimed to be the Chief of the Kainai (Blood) Nation. Onoto Watanna was a Chinese/British-Canadian writer who assumed a Japanese persona. Like Long Lance, Onoto Watanna wrote novels and produced other textual works while living in Calgary during the 1920s. While many critics have written about Long Lance and Onoto Watanna in isolation, my project seeks to link these writers and to flesh out their shared connection with Southern Alberta.

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