Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Light On The Prairie: Solomon D. Butcher, Photographer Of Nebraska’S Pioneer Days By Nancy Plain, M. Melissa Wolfe

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1886, Custer County photographer Solomon Butcher conceived a plan to create a photographic history of the pioneer era of the county. Though his dream never made him the fortune he had hoped, it did result, in 1913, in the deposit of more than 3,000 glass-plate negatives with the Nebraska State Historical Society. It can be readily argued that in the century since this time, no other photographs have become as ubiquitous in histories of the American West. And yet, in comparison, very little has been written on these photographs explicitly or on their maker. Nancy Plain’s Light on the …

Review Of Nikkei In The Interior West: Japanese Immigrants And Community Building, 1882–1945 By Eric Walz, Jonathan Dresner

Great Plains Quarterly

Studies of Japanese immigration into North America generally focus on the larger Hawaiian and West Coast populations, but there is a small body of work on other areas, including New York, Texas, and the Canadian heartland. The core of Eric Walz’s book is a pioneering sourcerich examination of Japanese immigration and settlement experiences in the American West, including Nebraska, but excluding the coastal states and Midwest. As long as its focus stays on these sparsely distributed migrants, the book is an interesting addition to the literature, though not a final word. The decision to include Japanese historical and cultural context …

Review Of Island Of Bones: Essays By Joy Castro, Patricia Foster

Great Plains Quarterly

With the lyric vision of a poet, the dramatic tension of a novelist, and the meditative commentary of an essayist, Joy Castro has crafted a remarkable book of linked essays about the multiple border crossings of identity. In the book’s title essay, “Island of Bones,” the narrator ruptures the myths of the mainstream Cuban American narrative (her family immigrated not to Miami after Fidel Castro’s revolution but to Key West in the 1870s; worshiped not in Catholic cathedrals but in the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses; earned money not through investments but as “cleaners of other people’s houses, grocery …

Review Of Life’S Journey—Zuya: Oral Teachings From Rosebud By Albert White Hat Sr. Compiled And Edited By John Cunningham, Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly

Old-style, mainline anthropologists will probably not like this book. It is certainly not old-style anthropology. It is much, much more important than that. That White Hat fails to cite any of the pertinent literature on Lakotas is much beside the point; indeed, he indicates clearly that he does not much care for all of that literature as a means for finding meaning in Lakota life. White Hat is Siċangú Lakota and writes from deep within the Siċangú Lakota traditional knowledge. That is the importance of this book. Others have also written from within the Lakota world, even interpreters or so-called …

Review Of Prairie Silence: A Memoir By Melanie Hoffert., Kathleen Dixon

Great Plains Quarterly

Melanie Hoffert’s memoir on growing up gay in rural North Dakota is refreshingly devoid of the clichéd finger-wagging that marks much discourse on the subject. The denizens of Dakota are not depicted as abject bigots or people in need of diversity training. Hoffert’s reluctance to “come out” to family, friends, and former neighbors of her small town is something she ultimately pins on herself, or on something she calls “prairie silence.” At times this phenomenon seems salutary, part of the “natural” relation of people to profoundly open spaces; at times “prairie silence” seems to be an affliction depriving people of …

Ethnography Of One Family On A 1939 Blackfeet Indian Reservation Farm Project In Montana, Donald D. Pepion

Great Plains Quarterly

The General Allotment Act of 1887, or the Dawes Act as it came to be known, authorized the president of the United States to divide American Indian lands into private sections to be allotted to individual members of the tribes. The act was designed to move Indians from tribal ways into "mainstream" U.S. American life. According to Scherer,

the Dawes Act became one of the most far-reaching and, for Native Americans, disastrous pieces of Indian legislation ever passed by Congress. By the time the allotment process was stopped in 1934, the amount of Indianheld land in the United States …

Review Of Time’S Shadow: Remembering A Family Farm In Kansas By Arnold J. Bauer, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly

In Time’s Shadow, Arnold J. Bauer has chronicled his family’s small farm in Goshen Township, Clay County, Kansas. Like many farm memoirs chronicling the middle years of the twentieth century, its value and interest lie in its capturing a place and way of life far removed from our experiences in the twenty-first century.

Bauer effectively highlights the issue of distance and its significance to his childhood. His family’s farm in eastern Kansas was fifteen miles from Clay Center, a distance that seems laughably small from today’s perspective. In the years before World War II, however, that was a long …

Immigration To The Great Plains, 1865-1914 War, Politics, Technology, And Economic Development, Bruce Garver

Great Plains Quarterly

The advent and vast extent of immigration to the Great Plains states during the years 1865 to 1914 is perhaps best understood in light of the new international context that emerged during the 1860s in the aftermath of six large wars whose consequences included the enlargement of civil liberties, an acceleration of economic growth and technological innovation, the expansion of world markets, and the advent of mass immigration to the United States from east-central and southern Europe.1 Facilitating all of these changes was the achievement of widespread literacy through universal, free, compulsory, and state-funded elementary education in the United States, …

Review Of Between Languages And Cultures: Colonial And Postcolonial Readings Of Gabrielle Roy By Rosemary Chapman, Carol J. Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly

Canadian author Gabrielle Roy (1909-1983) is usually recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Although Bonheur d'occasion, the novel that launched her career in 1946, is set in Montreal, much of her subsequent work is set in the Prairies of her youth. Born in the small francophone town of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, she spoke French at home but was educated in English, since French had lost its status as an official language of the province. This linguistic and cultural duality is fraught with many tensions, as Rosemary Chapman demonstrates in her recent book.

Seeing Through The Eyes Of Maximilian And Bodmer: Review Of The North American Journals Of Prince Maximilian Of Wied, Volume I: May 1832-April 1833. Edited By Stephen S. Witte And Marsha V. Gallagher., Clay S. Jenkinson

Great Plains Quarterly

The German prince Maximilian of WiedNeuwied (1782-1867) traveled up the Missouri River in 1832-33 to study American Indian culture before it was fatally compromised by the encroachment of Euro-American civilization. Aware of the expansionist and industrial dynamics of the Jacksonian Era in the United States, Maximilian wanted to study what he regarded as the vanishing Indian while there was still time. The idea had come to him during his 1815-17 journey through Brazil. For the publication that followed, Reise nach Brasilien in den Jahren 1815 his 1817 (1820), Maximilian had provided his own illustrations. These were criticized, including by his …

Landscapes Of Removal And Resistance: Edwin James's Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Collaborations, Kyhl Lyndgaard

Great Plains Quarterly

The life of Edwin James (1797-1861) is bookended by the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803-6) and the Civil War (1861-65). James's work engaged key national concerns of western exploration, natural history, Native American relocation, and slavery. His principled stands for preservation of lands and animals in the Trans-Mississippi West and his opposition to Indian relocation should be celebrated today, yet his legacy does not fit neatly into established literary or historical categories. One reason for James's obscurity is his willingness to collaborate. Both of his major works, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823) and A …

The Methodists' Great 1869 Camp Meeting And Aboriginal Conservation Strategies In The North Saskatchewan River Valley, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly

George McDougall, chairman of the Methodist Missions to the Indians of the Northwest Territories, kept a large, black book in which he jotted sermon notes, references to classical and biblical literature and sometimes simply his itineraries by horseback from Victoria, the primary Methodist mission in the far British northwest. Under the "s" tab and labeled "Saskatchewan," he noted repeatedly in the 1860s the food crisis facing North Saskatchewan residents. In sum: ''A time of starvation. No buffalo."

In this article I analyze a buffalo hunt which occurred in 1869. That spring, many hundreds of Cree, Assiniboine, Stoney, and Metis hunters …

Cultural Survival And The Omaha Way Eunice Woodhull Stabler's Legacy Of Preservation On The Twentieth,Century Plains, Elaine M. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

In the summer of 2004 I pulled into the rock and gravel driveway of a small blue home in Walthill, Nebraska, a community in the northern part of the Omaha Indian reservation. Feeling nervous about the large and unavoidable sign reading "BEWARE OF DOG," I knocked on the screen door. I was welcomed with wild barking from inside before I heard a man's voice yell, "Rambo! Hush up! Rambo, get down!" Startled, I nearly dropped my books and tape recorder. The door swung open. I expected to be faced with a Doberman/German shepherd/ pit bull mix; instead, I looked down …

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …

Deadwood And The English Language, Brad Benz

Great Plains Quarterly

In "The New Language of the Old West," Deadwood's creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language:

Language-both obscene and complicated- was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people .... It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable, and there was a reason for that which had to do with the very fundamental quality of their behavior. They were raping the land. They weren't growing anything. They weren't respecting the cycles of nature. They …

Review Of Fort Randall On The Missouri, 1856-1892 By Jerome A. Greene & Fort Concho: A History And A Guide By James T. Matthews, Barton Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly

National Park Service historian Jerome A. Greene, a leading figure in western military historiography, here offers a comprehensive study of Fort Randall, which served as a bastion of U.S. Army presence in the Great Plains for thirty-eight years. Built in 1856, Fort Randall's garrison was expected to keep peace among Native Plains nations, prevent Indian-white conflicts, and monitor the burgeoning traffic on overland trails and the Missouri River. Located just above the Nebraska-South Dakota border, Fort Randall lay within two hundred miles of the Ponca, Santee, Yankton, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge reservations. Despite its proximity to these sometimes troubled reservations, …

Review Of Hidden In Plain Sight: Contributions Of Aboriginal Peoples To Canadian Identity And Culture, Volume L Edited By David R. Newhouse, Cora J. Voyageur, And Dan Beavon, Robin Brownlie

Great Plains Quarterly

Hidden in Plain Sight is a book with an unusual agenda: to discuss and publicize the many constructive, meaningful contributions that Aboriginal peoples have made to Canadian society. Aimed primarily at the general public, students, and Aboriginal people themselves, the book contains essays from treaty researchers, civil servants, lawyers, teachers, curators, artists, writers, undergraduate students, and academics. The book's impetus arose from its editors' frustration over the constant equation of Aboriginal people with pain, problems, and struggle. Widely absent from public discourse and academic writing, they felt, was attention to the strengths and capacity of Aboriginal peoples, their achievements in …

Review Essay: The Making Of Margaret Laurence's Epic Voice, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly

George Woodcock, international man of letters, once referred to Margaret Laurence as Canada's Tolstoy. To some the comparison seems far-fetched, out of scale, but for others it has substance. Certainly, both writers were from continental plains and were drawn to large events in their country's history; they wrote at length about the relations of the sexes, about injustice and the harsh impact of war, and about the plight of poor people. One could also note they both turned away from writing fiction in midcareer, feeling they had lost the gift, and instead addressed with moral authority the pressing issues of …

Book Review: Learning To Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience And American Indian Literature, Bruce E. Johansen

Great Plains Quarterly

In a twist on assimilation, many boarding-school students used the English language, a primary tool of colonization, to "talk back" to the system. As surely as the boarding-schools' inventors understood that language is the vessel of culture, none of them gave much thought to the ways in which Native Americans would use English to critique the schools into which many of them had been unwillingly enrolled.
Their writings, examined by Amelia Katanski, indicate that the boarding-school students were unwilling to surrender as victims. Learning English describes how Native American students in boarding schools often forged new identities, taking a degree …

Book Review: The Cherokee Nation: A History, James W. Parins

Great Plains Quarterly

This is an important book if only for the reason that it will make many reconsider what they think they know about the Cherokees. Their early history, like that of any people, is obscured in the dimness of the past. While some of the early story may be reconstructed through surviving myth and modern theory, much uncertainty clouds origins and early migration patterns. After white contact and the chronicles and accounts of traders, missionaries, and adventurers are written, the veil isn't entirely lifted. Many written records pose more questions than they answer. For example, when the British first came upon …

Which Place, What Story?: Cultural Discourses At The Border Of The Blackfeet Reservation And Glacier National Park, Donal Carbaugh, Lisa Rudnick

Great Plains Quarterly

Among every known people, places are named, and in every known place, stories are told. Yet as one place, Jerusalem, makes so abundantly clear, the meanings of the place and the variety of stories attached to it can derive from a variety of traditions and can lead in many different directions. Just as various pilgrims are drawn to some sacred places, so do all people, in all places, come to know the meanings of at least some places through names, with the stories about them capturing their deeper significance, from the sacred to the mundane. Yet for each such place, …

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly Spring 2006 Editorial Manner, Table of Contents, and Book Notes.

German Heritage And Culture In Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Reid's discussion of the formal properties of Erdrich's work helps explain the author's popular appeal. Mewing easily between urban and rural settings, between reservation culture and mainstream culture, Erdrich has been evoking the various sets of social and historical circumstances that define the lives of contemporary Native Americans in the Great Plains. In The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Erdrich turns her attention explicitly to her own part-German ancestry and fictionalizes it, thereby bringing a n element of both thematic and autobiographical relevance into prominence.

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …

Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …

Great Plains Native American Representations Along The Lewis And Clark Trail, Kevin S. Blake

Great Plains Quarterly

Memorializing history in the landscape reflects deep-seated cultural needs. This process not only pays homage to the actions, events, or persons deemed significant at a particular point in time, but it also offers a chance for the creators of the historic marker to write their version of history and to use an interpretive format that highlights their own understanding and values. Cultural geographer Kenneth Foote observes in a study of American memorials, "What is accepted as historical truth is often a narrative shaped and reshaped through time to fit the demands of contemporary society." The significance of selecting particular historical …

Book Review: Marriage, Violence, And The Nation In The American Literary West, Christine Bold

Great Plains Quarterly

"If the West tells us anything," says William Handley, "it is that stories have powerful consequences." This book reads western stories anew, not as familiar tales of individualism but as family dramas with newly thought-provoking consequences for the "nation's racial future." Handley argues that twentieth-century western literature is more preoccupied with marriage than with the frontier. Marriage serves as an analogy for US national unity while also exposing the uncontainable violence at the heart of nation-building. These stories demonstrate that, having destroyed the racial and ethnic "others" against whom the nation defined itself, "imperialism brings its guns home."

Review Of America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education And The Ownership Of English, 1860- 1900 By Ruth Spack, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

Ruth Spack's thoroughly researched study of English education in Indian boarding schools goes beyond historical investigation. Spack shows how the methodology of teaching English imposed American ideologies in Native students. Then she closely examines the primary writings of Indian students and teachers who had learned English in the boarding school system. The result is a fine linguistic and cultural analysis of the complicated transitions from Native languages to the second language of the book's title, English.

Much has been written about the assimilative mission of boarding schools. Their purpose, as stated by Richard H. Pratt, was to "Kill the Indian; …

The Cups Of Blood Are Emptied Pietism And Cultural Heritage In Two Danish Immigrant Schools On The Great Plains, John Mark Nielsen

Great Plains Quarterly

Following the American Civil War, the vast sweep of the Great Plains exerted a powerful force on the imagination of Americans and Northern European immigrants, resulting in a period of rapid settlement. Immigrant communities in particular attempted to establish institutions through which their language, beliefs and cultural heritage might be preserved. The history of these immigrant institutions mirrors the challenges immigrant communities faced in confronting not only the vicissitudes of climate and evolving economic conditions but also the pressures of assimilation.

Numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction explore the broader challenges of life in the Great Plains; none captures …

Piecing Together The Ponca Past Reconstructing Degiha Migrations To The Great Plains, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly

The twenty-first century presents opportunities, as well as limitations, for the American Indian Nations of the Great Plains. Opportunities include enhanced economic development activities (e.g., casino gambling, telecommunications, and high-tech industries) and innovative tribal programming such as language immersion programs made possible through enhanced self-governance initiatives. Limitations include familiar scripts that perpetually threaten tribal sovereignty and chronically underfunded annual appropriations for Native American health, housing, and social service programs.

The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, terminated in 1965 and restored to federally recognized status in 1990,¹ embraces these challenges by exploring the limits of self-governance, economic development opportunities, and cultural …