Phillips Student Receives Western History Association Conference Scholarship

Pictured are Angelika Joseph, honoree; Dr. Maria E. Montoya, President of the WHA; Rev. Joshua Shawnee, honoree.

Phillips Theological Seminary student the Rev. Joshua Shawnee was awarded one of two Indian Student Conference Scholarships by the Western History Association.

The highly competitive honor provides financial assistance to Native American students wanting to attend the association’s conference.

“It is a great honor to have a Phillips student win this award,” said Dr. Lisa Barnett, assistant professor of American religious history, a member of the Western Historical Association. “As far as I know, this is the first time Phillips has had a student receive this award.”

Shawnee is a student in the Master of Theological Studies program and currently serves as Pastor of the Parish Church of St. Jerome in Tulsa, Okla.

“The WHA conference was a remarkable opportunity to interact and engage with an impressive array of historians and to learn more about the research of other tribal scholars doing innovative, important work in service to their communities,” said Shawnee.

Fr. Joshua comes from the Shawnee and Delaware peoples and is an enrolled member of the Shawnee Tribe. His primary research interest is the indigenous experience of Christianization and colonization and the suppression and reemergence of Two Spirit identities in North America.

More than 500 people attended the WHA conference last month in Portland, Oregon, the first in-person post-pandemic gathering for the association. The other Indian Student Conference Scholarship honoree, Angelika Joseph, is a doctoral student at Princeton University.

The Western History Association was founded in 1961 by a group of professional and avocational historians bound by their belief in the American West as a place rich in history and deserving of further study, according to the association’s website.