Recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award Rodney Frey
May 29, Boise, ID –
The Idaho Humanities Council is pleased to announce that University of Idaho Professor Emeritus of Ethnography Rodney Frey will receive the 2023 Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award. IHC’s highest honor is awarded annually to recognize a high achievement that fosters greater understanding or appreciation of the humanities. Frey will be honored at a private reception later this summer in Moscow, Idaho.
“We are deeply honored to present Rodney Frey with the Idaho Humanities Council’s award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities,” said IHC Executive Director David Pettyjohn. “Those who nominated him all celebrated his strengths as a storyteller and colleague who has spent decades fostering a deeper understanding of Native American culture and experiences through collaboration and building trust within communities. His interdisciplinary approach with University of Idaho students, teachers and professors, and the general public over the years has had a considerable impact in Idaho.”
Frey has longstanding connections with numerous members of the Pacific Northwest Tribes and is quick to credit his various Indigenous hosts and mentors from the Crow, Coeur d’Alene, Little Shell Chippewa, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Wind River Shoshone tribes. “They nurtured and transformed [me], both professionally as well as personally,” said Frey. “They demonstrated the tremendous importance of traditional stories, of giving back to others, and of the power of empathy, the means that brings the cherished stories alive and that connects all peoples.”
Frey is a University of Idaho Professor Emeritus of Ethnography, having been a faculty member there since 1998. He also served as Director of the American Indian Studies Program and as Director of General Education. Frey served on the Idaho Humanities Council and is a member of its Inquiring Idaho speakers program. Currently, he is a Lay Chaplain at Gritman Medical Center in Moscow and active in the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Palouse. Among other honors Frey has received are: a Humanities Fellow; the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Service Award; Research Excellence Award; Distinguished Humanities Professorship Award; Teaching Excellence Award; and the Evans Handcart Book Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, for the memoir “Carry Forth the Stories” from Washington State University (WSU) Press, originally published in 2017.
In his decades of work, Frey’s collaborations have resulted in five books, numerous articles and book chapters, and several digital web modules. Topics of those publications include: a language arts curriculum, a natural resource damage assessment from years of mining pollution, a values-clarification workbook, the nature and power of storytelling and oral traditions, descriptive ethnography of traditional cultures, and a memoir. The memoir, “Carry Forth the Stories: A Journey into Indigenous Oral Traditions With Implications for Our Humanity,” is now in an Expanded Edition (WSU Press 2024).
The Council has presented its award for “Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities” annually since 1986. Previous recipients have included professors, historians, writers, scholars, Tribal elders, archivists, politicians, and Idaho Supreme Court justices. For more information about the Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award and Idaho Humanities Council including a full list of previous recipients, visit www.idahohumanities.org.
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The Idaho Humanities Council (IHC) is a non-profit organization serving as the state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The IHC is dedicated to serving Idaho citizens by promoting greater public awareness, appreciation, and understanding of the humanities. The Council accomplishes its mission by awarding grants to organizations statewide, and by working with organizations as partners to develop local humanities projects and programs, and by sponsoring its own Council-conducted programs. More information can be found at www.idahohumanities.org.