Last week, Liese was announced as the winner of the Bruce T. Fisher Award, which recognizes an outstanding Oklahoma history project that contributes to “broader public knowledge or expand[s] appreciation in any field of Oklahoma history.”
Throughout 2025, Liese dove deep into Lawton’s Westwin Elements nickel refinery and the local resistance in the neighboring Indigenous communities. Her three-part reporting series covered how the complex history of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservations in Southwest Oklahoma leaves limits on how those tribal nations can protect their lands today.
The project invited listeners to learn how tribal sovereignty functions when a reservation is ruled as disestablished. It explored the concept of checkerboarding in communities with mixed land ownership, revealing how federal officials went about limiting what Indigenous governments can do on lands promised to them in treaties…