2021 Prime of Life Achievement Award

Professor Emeritus William (Bill) Waiser, Department of History, College of Arts and Science, is a University of Saskatchewan alumnus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus who has won local, national, and international recognition as a teacher, graduate supervisor, Canadian researcher and popular historian, especially of Western and northern Canadian history.

He has been appointed to the Order of Canada, awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, named distinguished university professor, and granted a D.Litt. His early books often reflect his first career as Yukon Historian for the Canadian Parks Service. After joining USask in 1980 as a graduate student, he had a 30-year career (1984-2014) in the Department of History as professor, Director of the Graduate Program, and Department Head, before “retiring” to a full-time career as writer and speaker.

He has published 20 books as author, co-author, or co-editor, including a dozen single-authored volumes. For A World We Have Lost:  Saskatchewan Before 1905, he won the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. The Saskatchewan public has embraced him as provincial historian and media star through his CBC Saskatchewan television broadcasts—"Looking Back” 1999-2001; “Saskatchewan Centennial Stories” 2005; and his StarPhoenix column of historical anecdotes, reprinted in “History Matters,” a series of printed books in progress, 2018- . In 2018, Bill won the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media and the Royal Society of Canada’s Tyrrell Medal for outstanding work in Canadian History.

Bill has also given several hundred public lectures to schools and organizations on topics in Canadian history, including to USRA, most recently his October 23, 2019, preview of his revisionist biography of an Indigenous “renegade” killed by Mounties: In Search of Almighty Voice: Resistance and Reconciliation (2020). This book was launched at the One Arrow First Nation powwow in 2021, and this year the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild announced that Bill has been given the $10,000 Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence.