The Society for Socialist Studies is pleased to announce the winner of the 2026 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. As a tribute to the robust scholarship undertaken by its members and to recognize their publication achievements, the Society for Socialist Studies awards an annual book prize for significant contributions to socialist research in Canada. The award is named after the founder of Fernwood Books, Errol Sharpe, a leader in left scholarship since 1991, in recognition of his immense work in promoting scholarship on socialism and from a socialist perspective.
Cheryl Troupe’s Putting Down Roots: Métis Agency, Land Use, and Women’s Food Labour in a Qu’Appelle Valley Road Allowance Community (University of Manitoba Press, 2025) offers a recuperative history of Métis lifeways and modes of anti-colonial resistance. In particular, Troupe’s robust historical methodology shows the foundational role of Métis women’s labour in the social reproduction of their homes, communities, and nation. Likewise, by focusing in on the phenomenon of road allowance communities, Troupe shows the brilliance of Métis resistance in their ability to persist in their relations to their homelands by finding the interstitial spaces of un-enclosed land within the colonial property grid.
Her book is available here
Many on the left in Canada have become increasingly alerted to the importance of Métis history in both the context of anti-colonial resistance, such as at Red River and in the Northwest, or in the central role of 20th Century Métis leaders, such as James Brady, Malcolm Norris, or Howard Adams. While vital, this interest has tended to focus on the highly visible modes of resistance championed by Métis men, and often only when those forms of resistance are at their most legible to settler institutions. In Putting Down Roots, Troupe draws our attention to the forms of struggle that made the very conditions of possibility for Riel, Brady, Norris, or Adams, to the central role of women and of social reproduction. Similarly, while many socialists draw important lessons from 19th Century peasant struggles over estovers in the German Rhineland, Troupe’s work shows processes of enclosure carried out via Canadian colonization in the prairies and spotlights the centrality of Métis resistance. This is a book that rewards careful and considered readings, and stands to fundamentally reshape how we conceptualize the gendered, racial, and colonial terms of class struggle in our specific contexts.
We congratulate Cheryl Troupe for her significant contribution to liberatory scholarship!