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His own prize-winning book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, was an indictment of Macdonald’s treatment of Indigenous people.

“As a white scholar, I was able to take winning the prize in stride and just think of it as an ironic thing that my work, which exposed Macdonald’s inhumanity, won the Macdonald prize,” he said. “I can imagine a time when an Indigenous scholar wins the prize, and it’s going to be a slap in the face.”

The prize, which includes a $5,000 cheque provided by sponsor Manulife, was first awarded in 1977. It is given to “the non-fiction work of Canadian history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past.”

Christopher Dummitt, a history professor at Trent University and a member of the association, said the move to rename the prize is evidence of the “purity spiral” the historical profession has entered.

“We’re finding more and more people who were not perfect according to our contemporary standards, and we’re trying to make sure that we don’t celebrate or even honour any of those figures,” he said.

“Now that it has reached Canada’s first and probably most important prime minister, it suggests that it’s not going to end.”

The historians’ move follows a call last summer by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario to have Macdonald’s name removed from schools in the province in recognition of “his central role as an architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples . . . and the ways in which his namesake buildings can contribute to an unsafe space to learn and to work.”