Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"Everything Promised Had Been Included In The Writing" Indian Reserve Farming And The Spirit And Intent Of Treaty Six Reconsidered, Derek Whitehouse-Strong

Great Plains Quarterly

In December 2005, a Canadian federal court justice dismissed a six-hundred-million-dollar claim by the Samson Cree related to alleged mismanagement of its energy royalties. In newspaper interviews, a lawyer for the Samson Cree expressed disbelief and stated that the justice "discounted the testimony of our elders" and "followed essentially the word of the white man and the written word of the white man."

He continued: "It's as if the white man cannot be biased, but the Indians might be biased in their recounting of history." Interestingly, 120 years before the justice dismissed the Samson Cree case, the Canadian Department of …

Fields Of Opportunity: Wind Machines Return To The Plains, Jacob Sowers

Great Plains Quarterly

The last two decades have seen a rebirth of wind machines on the rural landscape. In ironic fashion the wind's kinetic energy has grown in significance through its ability to generate commercial amounts of electricity, the commodity that a few generations earlier hastened the demise of the old Great Plains windmill. Yet the reemergence of wind machines on the landscape has been slowed by local opposition. Many places across the country have seen resistance to the construction of vast wind turbine arrays. Although wind energy fulfills both the businessman's requirement for profit and the environmentalist's desire for clean electrical production, …

Alexandra's Dreams: "The Mightiest Of All Lovers" In Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!', Maire Mullins

Great Plains Quarterly

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."l Lorde notes that women often deny the erotic within themselves because of the suspicion in which it is held by western society; she exhorts her readers to challenge the artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the erotic and to recognize this connection in their lives. …

Canada's Campaign For Immigrants And The Images In Canada West Magazine, Laura A. Detre

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the major challenges that Canadian government officials felt they faced at the end of the nineteenth century was the development of the prairie West. By this time there were large urban centers in eastern Canada, but many Canadians worried that they had not truly ensured the future existence of their country. They hoped that filling the middle, the province of Manitoba and the region that would become the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, with prosperous, white, family farmers would support the industrialized cities of the East. To do this the government engaged in a systematic program to encourage …

Managing The Farm, Educating The Farmer O Pioneers! And The New Agriculture, William Conlogue

Great Plains Quarterly

Most studies of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) comment on Alexandra Bergson's mystic relationship with the land and on the land's positive response to her love, on the "perfect harmony in nature" at the novel's center, or on its country versus city elements.² In such interpretations, Alexandra is an ideal farmer, one whose literary roots stretch back to Virgil's Eclogues.³ Although these readings work well, they remain incomplete because they ignore a crucial element: the novel's celebration of an agriculture modeled on urban industrialism. Though Cather herself may have had "the dimmest possible view of literature with …