Ryan Booth wins Fulbright scholarship

Ryan Booth will soon have the rare opportunity to both study and make history at the same time.

This after the La Conner High alum, now a doctoral candidate at Washington State University, was selected earlier this month for a prestigious J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award.

Booth has been approved by the Fulbright Board to research comparisons between U.S. Native American soldiers and Indian auxiliaries of the British Raj from the mid-19th century to the onset of World War II.

Booth, who spent much of his youth on Swinomish Reservation, will travel to India for what he calls an “Indians to Indians” academic project.

“Although half a world away,” he explained to Fulbright Board members, “both the U.S. and British India shared a common experience in military history where subjugated peoples moved from being despised to becoming model warriors.”

As a Fulbright Scholar, Booth joins an elite fraternity. Its alumni include heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, university presidents, and leading journalists, artists, scientists, and teachers.

Among the Fulbright ranks are numerous Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients.

Many are in the history books that Booth has pored over since his teen years.

“Like most things I get involved in,” Booth told La Conner Weekly News, “I didn’t really understand what I’d gotten myself into. I just took a leap of faith. I had some idea that it was a prestigious award, but I had no idea how prestigious. One academic friend refers to it as the ‘Academic Oscar.’ Another friend refers to it as the ‘F bomb’ since it blows open opportunities that would’ve never existed before. My career trajectory just took a different turn as of March 8.”

That’s when Booth received confirmation his Fulbright application had been approved.

“It’s been a real thrill,” he said, “but I’m keenly aware that this award is not just for myself.”

Booth said his selection is part of a group effort, one shared by his family and the Swinomish and La Conner communities.

At Swinomish, where Booth moved at age 10 to live with his grandparents, he discovered a part of his heritage that he had not previously known in great detail.

At first, Booth recalled, he felt a bit of an outsider. In response he delved more deeply into his school work. Over time, as academic honors and student body offices came his way at La Conner schools, he felt his confidence grow.

The outsider became an insider.

Now Booth wants today’s local youth to reach their potential. He feels obliged, given his acceptance at Swinomish, to encourage tribal students to pursue higher education degrees.

“My success,” he said, “is their success.”

Following his 1995 graduation from La Conner High, Booth’s academic and professional career has taken him to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Dallas, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and now to Pullman, where much of his current research has focused on native scouts who served with the U.S. Army in the American West.

He has been exposed to a wide range of social, cultural and historical perspectives, having studied variously under Catholic Jesuits and Southern Methodists.

“In my scholarly life,” he said, “I learned to identify those on the fringes and draw them into the conversation by being sensitive to the stories of those who appear voiceless. As an historian, I constantly search for silenced narratives and themes hidden within the historical record – to bring them out of the shadows and into the light.”

Booth lauds the impact the Jesuits have had on his academic development.

“For the five years that I was with the Jesuits,” he said, “I was imbued with a deep sense of justice, care for others, intellectual rigor, and an openness to the world around us.”

He feels the Fulbright assignment in India is ideal given his present work at WSU.

“My research on an oft-ignored aspect of the American West,”

he explained, “has the potential to amplify these indigenous soldiers to their rightful place in world history through studying the many parallels between U.S. Native Americans and Indians in the British Raj.

“Being a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe and a Ph.D student in History,” added Booth, “I can merge the lived knowledge of indigenous peoples with academic research to show how they connect.