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2009
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Tom McGuane
With precision, outrageous humor, and clear-eyed candor, you have given us today's true West, with your disdain of greed and pomposity, your everlasting love of a good stream, a fine horse, and a plain sweep of land, and your passion for simple, productive work, all of which causes you to call cowboys "drunken, wife-beating, snoose-chewing geeks" while winning them over and a great many westerners with your honest high regard for ranch hands and others who do things carefully and right, thereby showing respect for a big-sky place that may yet save itself through honoring its best traditions.
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2008
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Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
You have always placed such value on the upbringing you gained on the family ranch, the Lazy B, in the high desert and low-sandstone-canyon terrain on the upper Gila River in Arizona near the New Mexico line, a spread that you and your brother, in your joint memoir, called "a place of all-encompassing silence," a place that gave you a value system that was "simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity;" much later, your wisdom and resourcefulness, always grounded in the law, made you the pivotal figure on the highest court and in the western cases you notably applied your intellect, deep-dyed knowledge of the region, and unparalleled sense of practicality and fairness to resolve matters of grazing, Indians, mining, state authority on federal lands, and water, always the water.
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2007
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Ivan Doig
In a time when the American West cried out for definition and explanation, you responded with full and vibrant portraits of the northern tier, your Montana homeland and adopted Northwest, from cow and alfalfa country to the "stonecliff skyline" of the Rocky Mountain Front to stormy seas, always anchored in compelling and authentic westerners; your work, ever opening up new territory, grew into an exploration of a full century of the western experience; and the people, ever ready for another journey with you, grounded in the West but universal in reach, have responded to each new book by heeding the adventuresome and irresistible call of your spirited Mariah Montana: "Pack your socks and come along with me on this."
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2006
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John E. Echohawk
With your quiet strength, impeccable integrity, and great stature, you have become the indispensable voice for Indian Country, leading the Native American Rights Fund, an essential force for Native Justice, and negotiating at the highest level of federal and state governments, ever open to new ideas and ever unyielding to encroachments on the tribal sovereignty to which you have given your all.
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Billy Frank, Jr.
For more than a half century, first as warrior then as diplomat, you have enriched society in the Pacific Northwest and America with your big spirit and your inspiring message, at once fierce and loving, of separate sovereign peoples living in civility and joining together in the sacred cause of sustaining the land that you revere and the rivers that run in your veins.
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2005
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Terry Tempest Williams
You are the most authentic and influential voice for the American Southwest, exposing injustice, poisons, and heedlessness; teaching true of the creatures, the formations, and the peoples; and caressing with your words the wild, sacred sidecanyons, mesas, and slickrock landscapes you love so passionately and so well.
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2003
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John Nichols
You have celebrated and absorbed the American Southwest, with its dramatic skies and sacred landscapes, and its traditional Hispanic and Indian cultures; and you have spoken frankly of its tragedy and greed. Through your to-the-bone honesty, ribald humor, and lifelong commitment to the common people, you have written masterpieces not just for Northern New Mexico, but also for the world.
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2002
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Vine Deloria, Jr.
Always grounded in the stories told by the plains and ridges of your Sioux homeland, and guided by your vision of a vibrant tribal sovereignty, you have become a hero for the ages in Indian Country and far beyond. You have changed the West and the world through your activism during the Termination Crisis, your spirited leadership ever since, your vast and influential writings, and your encompassing mind and matchless courage.
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2001
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Rudolfo Anaya
From your beloved New Mexico, you have bestowed upon the world your gift of Chicano literature, in which the landscape of the Southwest lives and breathes. Your novels, plays, short stories, children's books, and essays celebrate human dignity, cross-cultural respect, and the preservation of the wisdom of those who have come before us. You have made the name “Anaya” a synonym for “power,” “magic,” and “spirit.”
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1999
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T.H. Watkins
Thank you ever for taking your vivid pen, inspired camera, and robust spirit into the West's wild landscapes that you loved so, and for depicting them in ways that will endure as long as the caribou terrain of Alaska, the peaks and peneplains of Montana, and the sacred redrock country of Southern Utah.
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1998
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Paul Schullery
As America's foremost citizen of the National Parks, you work deftly in the medium of memory to honor both nature and human nature. Your honesty and humility refresh the cause of natural preservation and reacquaint us with wonder, while your writing replenishes the West's rivers with hope.
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1997
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Daniel Kemmis
As Speaker of the House, Mayor, and celebrated author, you have articulated and put to work a uniquely western brand of community-based politics that embodies your own character: plain yet elegant, practical yet philosophical, open-minded yet rooted deep in rich Montana soil.
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Reginald Saner
Your poems and essays redistribute the fortune of your outdoor life and establish you as the region's most attentive biographer of wind, water, rock, time, and light -- always the light. As you have journeyed through the West, an Illinois child transformed by mountains and by the dawn, your walking, watching, and writing have converged on radiance.
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1996
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Eleanor M. Gehres
On the road that runs between the past and the present, you have guided thousands. Through your good work, the Westerners of the past live on in our memories, and the Westerners of the present find their bearings in time. From your extraordinary commitment to history, the Denver Public Library gains its preeminence as a research center, and the American West receives its heritage.
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David Lavender
During your illustrious career, you have told us of the whole American West, from the Great Plains to the California Coast and from Blackfeet Country in Montana to your beloved Colorado San Juans, chronicling both the triumphs and the plunder and ultimately lodging your faith in the wondrous landscape and resourceful Westerners you have written of with such bedrock authenticity and literary might.
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1995
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Alvin Josephy
Over the course of your diverse and distinguished career, you have at once unerringly set the record straight and expressed your high respect for Indian societies, your belief in civility toward all peoples, and your lasting love of the land, especially the redrock Southwest and your beloved Wallowas of northeastern Oregon, where the memory of Chief Joseph still lives.
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Juane Quick-To-See Smith
Because of your luminous talent, because your Shoshone-Flathead heritage granted you the eyes of your people, because you can fathom the vision of Anglo painters, and because of your tireless advocacy for Indian artists, you have become the painter and translator through whose extraordinary eyes each people may view the soul of the other.
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1991
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N. Scott Momaday
You have provided us with a unique vision of the American West, the beauty of its land and its creatures of every kind. Through fiction, biography, poetry and visual arts, your work has helped us find our place in the Western landscape. We are grateful for your presence in our lives as teacher, guide, and consummate artist.
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1990
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William Hornby
You have elevated, educated, and challenged Westerners through your thrice-weekly "column of the West," your love of regional love, your championing of historic preservation, your attention to global issues, and your deep-held belief that vibrant events in the cities, as well as in your beloved Montana birthplace, will help define the future of the West.
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Ed Marston
You have become a beloved and revered spokesperson for the rural West through your extraordinary newspaper, High Country News, your principled, hard-hitting views on public policy, your compassionate but precise depictions of the people and places of the West, and your personal humility and dignity.
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