History Commons^™

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 4 / Fall 2012

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Review Of Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse, The Plague Of Doves Edited By Deborah L. Madsen, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Important North American novels published since 1990, discussed in three parts, each containing three essays on a total of three key recent works: this is the formal straitjacket the publication format of the Continuum Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction imposes on its editors. Each of the nine contributors to this volume is committed to a particular theoretical approach, some so strongly that their essays momentarily turn into handbook articles on the theory in question beforealmost as an afterthought-coming back to Louise Erdrich's novels.

Review Of Norwegians And Swedes In The United States: Friends And Neighbors Edited By Philip J. Anderson And Dag Blanck, Betty A. Bergland

Great Plains Quarterly

Norwegians and Swedes is an international and interdisciplinary collection of essays representing recent scholarship on migration and emphasizing relationships between two groups of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants from Europe. Emerging from a 2007 conference, the book contains seventeen essays by active scholars in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States. Donna R. Gabaccia's thoughtful foreword helps frame the book and informs readers that twenty years ago Rudolph J. Vecoli called for an "interethnic perspective on American immigration history." This collection might be seen as the fruit of that vision. Emerging at! a time when immigration continues to vex the …

Review Of Indigenous Dance And Dancing Indian: Contested Representation In The Global Era By Matthew Krystal, Jacqueline Shea Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a thoughtful, helpful, somewhat unusually focused book that looks at K'iche Maya Traditional Dance in Guatemala, Native American Powwow (particularly in the Upper Midwest), Folkloric dance in the Chicago area, and at the University of Illinois's "Chief Illiniwek" dancing mascot from an anthropologically informed ethnographic perspective. The section on Maya dance comes from the author's dissertation research, while the sections on Indigenous dance and "playing Indian" in the Midwest are from fieldwork he has undertaken, postdissertation, while teaching at North Central College in Illinois. Krystal brings these diverse performance practices into dialogue with each other by looking at …

Review Of A Separate Country: Postcoloniality And American Indian Nations By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Nobody cares about American Indian studies more than Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and her latest book makes that clear. She calls for stronger departments and a dedicated methodology, and bemoans mere interdisciplinary programs, which force scholars to produce research that caters to traditional Western disciplines and promotes what she considers unsuitable intellectual frameworks. In particular, she decries postcolonial theory, favoring decolonization theory instead and the use of Indigeneity as a category of analysis. From that starting point, the author covers a range of important topics. A high point is the chapter discussing non-Indians who fraudulently assume Indian identity. Her overarching critique of …

Review Of Museum Pieces: Toward The Indigenization Of Canadian Museums By Ruth B. Phillips, Lee-Ann Martin

Great Plains Quarterly

The recent history of museums and Indigenous peoples has developed along diverging lines in Canada and the United States. In Canada, the controversy around The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, an exhibition organized for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, provided the impetus for the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples which, in turn, sparked subsequent debates surrounding museological policies and practices over the past twenty years. Ruth Phillips locates this exhibition as the point of departure for the "postcolonial project" that has informed subsequent museum reform in Canada.

Thoroughly articulated with characteristic rigor, Phillips's …

Review Of Toward A More Perfect Union: The Settlement Of Union Township, Clay County, Kansas By James R. Beck, Bruce R. Kahler

Great Plains Quarterly

James R. Beck laments the fact that he cannot tell us why the early settlers bought and sold land in Union Township. Although his microscopic land history can illuminate what land was acquired-as well as how, when, and by whom-he says only "social histories provide the flesh of human stories to the bones of deed and mortgage details that are recorded in dusty courthouse record books." I see no need for apology. Beck deserves our gratitude for sweeping away the dust and revealing the underlying structure of settlement in northcentral Kansas.

The chief subject here is the variety of means …

Review Of The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories Edited And With An Introduction By Lee Schweninger., Dee Garceau

Great Plains Quarterly

Although the term "pioneer" in the book title recalls Turner's West where white emigrants were the vanguard of civilization, Lee Schweninger places these narratives within the contexts of gendered and postcolonial scholarship. In a thoughtful introduction, Schweninger emphasizes the value of firsthand testimony from ordinary people, especially women, who lived outside circles of public leadership and power. Women's narratives provide insight into changing family and community relations; links between local, regional, and national economies; contests over land and resources; racial-ethnic identities and tensions; and how women made meaning out of their western experience.

In the winter of 1933-34, the Civil …

Review Of Murder, The Media, And The Politics Of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard And James Byrd Jr. By Jennifer Petersen, Thomas R. Dunn

Great Plains Quarterly

The 1998 murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. prompted strong emotions in the national debate over hate crimes. Yet while legal, literary, and critical readings of the murders have emerged, little attention has been devoted to these emotions and their role in the politics that followed. Jennifer Petersen remedies this deficiency, offering broader insights about politics, media, and the public sphere.

Drawing upon close readings of local and national media, Petersen tirelessly traces the complex affective webs that surround each case. In the first half of her book, Petersen describes the national media's characterization of Shepard as an …

Review Of Ned Wynkoop And The Lonely Road From Sand Creek By Louis Kraft, James T. Carroll

Great Plains Quarterly

This narrative opens in typical form for a biography portraying the life of a nineteenth- century frontiersman in the American West. Ned Wynkoop sought adventure on the American frontier, encountered various Native American cultures, engaged in resource speculation, attempted to enter territorial politics, and served with distinction in the Civil War. These common attributes, however, are only a small part of Wynkoop's historical significance. His worldview was completely transformed after prolonged contact with Native peoples and the events surrounding the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, in November 1864.

Ned Wynkoop arrived in Colorado Territory by a circuitous route in …

Review Of The Catherian Cathedral: Gothic Cathedral Iconography In Willa Cather's Fiction By Christine E. Kephart, Nicholas Birns

Great Plains Quarterly

Christine Kephart's book is published in a series dedicated to the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, one of the leading Cather scholars. It honors Skaggs's memory with an original, sprightly, and captivating illumination of the motif of the cathedral throughout Cather's writing. We all know about Death Comes to the Archbishop and, to a lesser extent, Shadows on the Rock with their overt engagement of New World Catholicism and the presence within them of churches, cathedrals, and bishops. But Kephart looks for the cathedral motif throughout Cather's oeuvre, beginning with her failed first novel, Alexander's Bridge, where Kephart sees the …

Review Of Plains Indian Art: The Pioneering Work Of John C. Ewers Edited By Jane Ewers Robinson, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly

John Canfield Ewers (1909-1997) authored two important books on Plains Indian art: Plains Indian Painting: A Description of an Aboriginal American Art (1939) and Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art from America's Heartland (1986). The present collection is the second of two volumes of short essays first published in journals and specialized catalogs. The first, Plains Indian History and Culture: Essays on Continuity and Change (1997), included a number of essays that looked to works of art as sources of primary historical information. This volume collects fifteen essays foregrounding works of art and matters of style, iconography, the historiography of …

Review Of The Grads Are Playing Tonight! The Story Of The Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club By M. Ann Hall, Carly Adams

Great Plains Quarterly

M. Ann Hall, author of The Girl and the Game (2002), one of the "must read" books on Canadian women's sport history, brings us this fascinating look at the Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club. Historians' fascination with the Edmonton Grads, perhaps the most well-known story in Canadian women's sport history, has resulted in numerous published articles over the last two decades and a 1987 National Film Board of Canada film, Shooting Stars. Yet this is the first comprehensive book about the club. In an extensively researched, accessible, yet detailed read, Hall reveals new insights into the team, the organization, the …

New Deal Leftists, Henry Wallace And "Gideon's Army," And The Progressive Party In Montana, 1937-1952, Hugh T. Lovin

Great Plains Quarterly

Many forces occupied America's sociopolitical terrain to the left of New Dealers who dominated U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's administration of the 1930s. Some fastened themselves temporarily to the New Dealers' coattails. Ideologically motivated, others touted their special panaceas for ending the Great Depression that had begun in 1929, and certain of the mainstream Democratic Party's expatriates added to this cacophony by pursuing their own agendas. Comprised principally of the Democratic Party's out-of-power people, another group wanted to restore Roosevelt's reforming to its 1933-34 height, change the federal government's thrust to the leftward in. certain particulars, and impose New Dealstyle reform …

Ligia Grischa Bylaws

Great Plains Quarterly

1. The Ligia Grischa fixes the period of its existence for 15 years.

2. In this society can only be accepted persons from 12 to 60 years, who show in their life a good behavior.

3. Every member must pay $5.00 on entering the "Ligia Grischa" and signing the statues. He must also pay 1 Taler every month and on the 5th of June 1875 another 10 Talers.

4. Every member who enters after the foundation of the "Ligia Grischa" is obliged to pay the same capital plus 5% more than the members who joined at the foundation of the …

From Mothers' Pensions To Aid To Dependent Children In The Great Plains The Course From Charity To Entitlement, R. Alton Lee

Great Plains Quarterly

The most important third-party movement in American history emerged out of the social and economic chaos brewing in the Great Plains in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The maelstrom, labeled Populism, contained a powerful, indeed a truly revolutionary message-that man was his brother's keeper. This concept proved to have consistent influence in America, dating from the Populists, through the Progressives and the New Deal depression era, to the Great Society of the 1960s. Henry Loucks of South Dakota, one-time president of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union and chairman of the Populist convention in Omaha in …

Review Of Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary -- Paintings And Works On Paper By Susie Kalil, Mark White

Great Plains Quarterly

Susie Kalil's Alexandre Hogue surveys the artist's paintings and drawings from his earliest works of the 1920s to his mature paintings from the 1980s. Hogue remains best known for the Erosion series he produced in the 19305 and has been marginalized unfairly as a Regionalist ever since. Kalil intends to change that categorization by repositioning Hogue as a visionary painter who explored fundamental relationships between humanity and nature through a sensitive understanding of place. She hopes to leave the reader with a sense of "Hogue's continuing attempt to give voice and form to some of his deepest feelings and intuitions." …

Review Of Re-Imagining Ukranian Canadians: History, Politics, And Identity Edited By Rhonda L. Hinther And Jim Mochoruk, Myroslaw Tateryn

Great Plains Quarterly

Hinther and Mochoruk offer the reader an interdisciplinary look at aspects of Canadian history through the prism of the Ukrainian Canadian experience. The volume includes contributions from an array of specialists: historians, literary critics, archivists, curators, geographers, and others. Consequently, the quality of the articles is wide-ranging, but overall the editors succeed in demonstrating that the immigrant experience is neither homogeneous nor adequately studied.

The editors' introduction is most helpful, succinctly describing the state of academic inquiry into the Ukrainian Canadian experience. The editors accurately describe the "mythology" of the prairie peasant-cum-dangerous foreigner. They present the evolution of scholarship from …

Review Of Grand Procession: Contemporary Artistic Visions Of American Indians: The Diker Collection At The Denver Art Museum By Lois Sherr Dubin, Jessica R. Metcalfe

Great Plains Quarterly

Life in miniature, history in vibrant hues, art on parade-this is what is presented in Grand Procession, a catalogue printed by the Denver Art Museum to accompany its recent exhibit of contemporary Native American dolls. Meant to serve as a celebration of this art form, the book makes clear that these figures are more than just playthings: they are sculptural "little people" meticulously clothed and accurately designed to depict Plains and Plateau ceremonial regalia.

Dolls have been created for centuries throughout North America, and exhibits such as the Heard Museum's 2010 More Than Child's Play have sought to elevate …

Review Of Sustaining The Cherokee Family: Kinship And The Allotment Of An Indigenous Nation By Rose Stremlau, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

Great Plains Quarterly

Cherokee families, Rose Stremlau states in her elegantly written book, were and remain "egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized." These characteristics, she argues, have provided stability through difficult times, as Cherokee families faced colonization, displacement and removal, the Civil War, and ultimately the allotment policy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries {although it is important to note that she also carries her analysis beyond the allotment era, into the mid-to-late twentieth century}. Using U.S. and Cherokee census data, Dawes Commission records, Guion Miller Commission applications, probate records, articles from the national Cherokee Advocate, and oral histories in the Doris Duke …

Review Of Seeing Red: A History Of Natives In Canadian Newspapers By Mark Cronlund Anderson And Carmen L. Robertson, Timonthy P. Foran

Great Plains Quarterly

In this intensely provocative book, University of Regina professors Anderson and Robertson contend that newspapers have played a central role in the Canadian colonial project through. their representation of Aboriginal peoples over the past 140 years. Despite having become less overtly racist in tone and terminology since the late nineteenth century, Canadian newspapers have nevertheless persisted in framing Aboriginal peoples within three essentialist tropes: depravity, innate inferiority, and a stubborn resistance to progress. These tropes have fed into the mainstream ideology underpinning colonial practices-the treaty system, residential schools, and ongoing assimilationist efforts-while simultaneously providing a foil against which mainstream Canada …

Ligia Grischa: A Successful Swiss Colony On The Dakota Territory Frontier, Todd Quinn, Karl Benedict, Jeff Dickey

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1877 a small group of Swiss immigrants from the Graubunden canton formed a cooperative with another Swiss group in Stillwater, Minnesota, to begin a colony in eastern South Dakota. These settlers founded the Badus Swiss colony on the open prairie in Lake County, Dakota Territory {later South Dakota}, based on cooperative rules written in Switzerland in 1424. This settlement was one of the last Swiss colonies created in the United States during the great nineteenth-century European migration, and one of the westernmost Swiss settlements in the United States.

There were two major factors that contributed to the Badus Swiss …

Review Of For King And Kanata: Canadian Indians And The First World War By Timothy C. Winegard, Robert J. Talbot

Great Plains Quarterly

A comprehensive study of Canadian First Nations' experiences during the Great War is long overdue, making Timothy C. Winegard's For King and Kanata a welcome addition to the historiography. In a style both engaging and accessible, Winegard tells the individual and collective stories of those Indian men who enlisted to fight for the Crown. His book also focuses on how government policy shaped First Nations' participation in the war effort. Race, for instance, played a determining role. At first, the government banned Indian men from serving. As casualties mounted and pressure from Britain grew, however, Canadian officials began active recruitment …

Review Of American Indians And The Mass Media Edited By Meta G. Carstarphen And John P. Sanchez, Dean Rader

Great Plains Quarterly

Earlier in the year, I spent some time on the White Earth Lake Reservation (Ojibwe) in northern Minnesota. At one point, to counter some nasty diaper rash (not mine), I went into a store to buy corn starch. My only choice was Argo. I was prepared for discomfort-I've always hated the bizarre half-Indian-maiden / halfcorncob figure that has come to be recognized as Argo's brand, and the irony of purchasing this item, on this reservation, in the middle of the Corn Belt was too much. But, thankfully, Argo had changed its label, so at least there was one less thing …

Review Of Where The Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous And The Mythological Legacy Of The American West By Bobby Bridger, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly

Musician, writer, and entertainer Bobby Bridger, a descendant of the well-known western trapper and scout Jim Bridger, has written a book attempting to link the past to the present by connecting historical eras of the American western movement with how Native Americans have been viewed, not only at the time, but in modern writing, especially fiction, stage productions, and, most importantly, motion pictures. His thesis is apparently based on a sentiment expressed by Indigenous author Joseph Marshall III at a Western Writers of America Conference to the effect that, although Indians have walked in the white world, whites have not …

Review Of American Indian Nations From Termination To Restoration, 1953-2006 By Roberta Ulrich, James Allison

Great Plains Quarterly

Roberta Ulrich's blistering, 2S0-page tour of dozens of different Indian groups undergoing termination and restoration can at times leave the reader dizzy and gasping for air. With so many different communities undergoing such diverse experiences, it is often hard to see the utility of housing these stories under one roof. Convenience is welcome, but analytical coherence is better. Ulrich herself provides little justification for the project and rarely draws illustrious conclusions across tribal experiences. She does, however, dutifully collect all the stories together and provides a clear structure that allows readers easily to discern common themes and patterns. For that, …

Review Of Eyewitness At Wounded Knee By Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul, And John E. Carter, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly

Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, the Ghost Dance are all phrases that invoke, perhaps more than any others, the senseless, prolonged acts of atrocity against Native Americans. The story of the events, peoples, and places unfolds on a bleak wintry landscape of the Northern Plains at the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars tell and retell this story, pondering the causes and failed communications, often seeking explanations or rationalizations for the assault on Sioux men, women, and children that took place in South Dakota leaving more than 250 dead. Storytellers, poets, and screenwriters employ the frozen, barren landscapes of the Northern …

Review Of Life Stages And Native Women: Memory, Teachings, And Story Medicine By Kim Anderson, Rebeka Tabobondung

Great Plains Quarterly

Life Stages and Native Women unearths the vital teachings of fourteen diverse Indigenous elder oral historians who share their knowledge about the life cycle of Native women. From conception to walking, childhood and youth, adult years, to grandmothers and elders, author Kim Anderson weaves the four life stages from a series of oral history interviews conducted over a period of five years beginning in 2007. Cree/Metis elder and master storyteller Maria Campbell guides Anderson on her journey to gain knowledge from a generation of Creel Metis, Cree, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe elders, each of whom holds tightly to the stories of …

Review Of West-Words: Celebrating Western Canadian Theatre And Playwriting Edited By Moira J. Day, Scott Sharplin

Great Plains Quarterly

Collecting essays from a 2007 national conference hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Drama Department and the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, West-words purports to be "the first comprehensive study of contemporary theatre across the [Canadian] prairies" since 1977. It is certainly wideranging, in terms of style, subject matter, and theme; "comprehensive," however, is beyond the reach of this scattershot anthology.

Editor Moira J. Day divides the entries according to provincial content, moving east to west like the colonists' path across the three prairie provinces. A fourth heading, "Crossing Regional Borders," seems to undermine the tidy geographical categorization of Manitoban, …

Review Of Texas, New Mexico, And The Compromise Of 1850: Boundary Dispute And Sectional Crisis By Mark J. Stegmaier, Bryan Turo

Great Plains Quarterly

In this revision of his 1996 publication, Mark Stegmaier has polished up an already comprehensive history of the Compromise of 1850 as it unfolded from the perspective of Texas and New Mexico. Whereas most histories have focused on the compromise from the standpoint of the national question about slavery, this work illuminates the significance of the part that fixed the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. Stegmaier argues that the boundary dispute acted as the linchpin for the entire block of compromises the 31st Congress passed in 1850. More so than any other issue-including statehood for California, the new fugitive …