American Studies Commons^™

Review Of My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back To Kansas By Tracy Seeley., Sarah Smarsh

Great Plains Quarterly

Kansas-born playwright William Inge said, "It wasn't until I got to New York that I became a Kansan." For English professor Tracy Seeley, it was San Francisco that did the trick. For years she lived a life of pleasure there grading papers in hip coffee joints, cycling through the cool fog, reveling in the progressive political climate. Her nomadic Kansas childhood was behind her, even beneath her, she thought. Then, an emotional earthquake- triggered by a cancer diagnosis and the deaths of both parents, in quick succession forces a reckoning with mortality and sends her looking for home. But for …

Review Of Rich Indians: Native People And The Problem Of Wealth In American History By Alexandra Harmon, Kathleen Pickering Sherman

Great Plains Quarterly

Across American history, Native American tribes were impoverished through land and natural resource appropriations accomplished through a wide variety of well-documented political, military, and cultural means. Alexandra Harmon, in her book, provocatively titled Rich Indians, focuses on a handful of exceptions to this statistical pattern to explore American discourses about wealth accumulation by Native Americans. Armed with an impressive collection of primary sources, as well as literature from history and anthropology, Harmon also uncovers parallel discourses by Native Americans themselves about wealth accumulation among their own peoples. The result is a complex, multilayered, and fascinating melange of contradictory attitudes and …

Review Of Valentine T. Mcgillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent To The Sioux By Candy Moulton, Jason Pierce

Great Plains Quarterly

Valentine T. McGillycuddy is not famous, but he should be. His presence at many critical events in the 1870s and '80s compelled Candy Moulton to write this engaging biography. McGillycuddy worked as a doctor and surveyor on the Northern Boundary Survey and the 1875 Newton-Jenney Expedition into the Black Hills. He tended wounded soldiers as an army surgeon during the war with the Lakotas and Cheyennes in 1876 and served as an Indian agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1879-86. He brushed shoulders with such iconic western figures as Calamity Jane, William F. Cody, Marcus Reno, Red Cloud, and …

Review Of Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions In Theory, Politics, And Literature Edited By Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, And Scott Lauria Morgensen, Margaret Noori

Great Plains Quarterly

A colleague and I were asked recently to speak at the Midwest regional conference for LGBTQ and ally-identified college students. We teach an Indigenous language (Anishinaabemowin), one of us has lived in a same-sex relationship, both of us are allies, but the politics and theory of the community are daunting. As we looked across a sea of young faces, empowered by proximity, we saw hope and we said, "gego bigidnike aanji'igwa." This phrase, "don't let them change you," has long served us teaching about identity, freedom, and survival in Native communities and was perfect for the gathering of young LGBTQ …

Review Of Llano Estacada: An Island In The Sky Edited By Stephen Bogener And William Tydeman, George Lubick

Great Plains Quarterly

"Island in the Sky" aptly describes the Llano Estacado, the southern extension of the Great Plains that rises some 800 feet above the surrounding terrain in northwestern Texas and northeastern New Mexico. It is this expansive landscape that William Tydeman and Stephen Bogener have placed in the forefront of an excellent collection of essays and photographs that explore the connections between the region's geography and culture. The plateau's flat terrain-"horizontal yellow," as historian Dan Flores has described it-invariably defines the Llano, but Stephen Bogener reminds us also that "85 percent of what the human eye registers on the Llano Estacado …

Review Of Bird Cloud: A Memoir By Annie Proulx, Alex Hunt

Great Plains Quarterly

Annie Proulx's latest is nonfiction, recounting her attempt to inhabit a section of land in south-central Wyoming. While tough winters and unmaintained roads make year-round residence too difficult, Proulx glories in the wild isolation of a place that inspires her to research and write as well as to build fence and monitor eagles. Bird Cloud is a book that Proulx's regulars will find both enjoyable and revealing; however, its self-indulgence and lack of polish leave us with a feeling akin to Proulx's own house high in the mountain valley-it remains raw and isolated.

This is not entirely a negative. Proulx's …