Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Big Empty; Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers Edited By Ladette Randolph And Nina Shevchuk-Murray, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly

Ladette Randolph and Nina ShevchukMurray have assembled a powerful collection of essays in The Big Empty, so titled because some people might describe Nebraska in that manner. This text counters that perspective. Each essay writer {save one} has published one book of nonfiction, and the expertise of each is apparent. Included are writers who seem like old friends through works-Ted Kooser, Lisa Knopp, Bill Kloefkorn, Roger Welsch, John Janovy Jr., Paul Johnsgard, Joe Starita, Ruth Raymond Thone, Mary Pipher. Other voices are mixed in, and the result is a fluid collection. Topics include Native American issues, J. Sterling Morton's …

Review Of Cowtown Wichita And The Wild, Wicked West. By Stan Hoig, Robin C. Henry

Great Plains Quarterly

Stan Hoig traces the development of Wichita, Kansas, from a nexus of Native American trading and hunting to a fledgling frontier town, to a crossroads of both the cattle and railroad industries, to an emerging modern city at the close of the nineteenth century. Poised at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers, Wichita's location, Hoig notes, made it ideal for trade and interaction among Indians, military, and cattlemen, and immigrant, African American, and Anglo settlers, all of whom contributed to the city's history.

In his introduction, Hoig states his intention is not to place his narrative into …

Review Of Mennonites In Texas: The Quiet In The Land Text And Photographs By Laura L. Camden And Susan Gaetz Duarte., Marilyn E. Lehman

Great Plains Quarterly

This arresting collection of black-and-white prints, complemented by concise, historically and culturally sensitive narrative text, documents two distinct groups of Mennonites who have found refuge in the Great Plains. As the title and cover photo suggest, a place to live out distinctive non-mainstream lifestyles-apart and in peace-is important to these separatist groups of Mennonites. And the Plains of Texas have provided a fitting refuge. Along with "a series of immigrants fleeing the Old World-Germans, Czechs, Russians, Irish, and more," as former governor and Texas icon Ann Richards writes in the preface, these SwissGerman and German-Russian religious ethnic groups have found …

Review Of Welcome To The Homeland: A Journey To The Rural Heart Of America's Conservative Revolution By Brian Mann, Donald Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly

Brian Mann's Welcome to the Homeland weaves together astute observations of the American political system with a personalized journey into the oonservative base of American politics. Mann's thesis is that the political divisions in America can be best characterized by an urban versus rural divide that has evolved over the past eighty or so years. Mann refers to rural voters as homelanders who have increasingly turned to the Republican Party in pursuit of their version of an America with nineteenth-century traditional values. City folk, meanwhile, are dubbed metros, and their increasingly cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and secular world view has led them …

Review Of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960. By Bill Anthes, Joyce M. Szabo

Great Plains Quarterly

Arguing that Native artists developed a unique modernism between 1940 and 1960 as a response to cross-cultural encounters requiring both accommodation and resistance, Bill Anthes explores how differing styles of abstraction and growing artistic freedom coexisted with Native identity. During the 1920s and 1930s, a style of flat application of color, firmly outlined forms, and readily recognizable nostalgic Native images developed in Oklahoma and Santa Fe. Dominating Indian art for decades, this style became "traditional" Indian painting with its tenants upheld by institutions like the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa where annual Indian painting competitions began in 1946. Between 1940 and1960 …

Notes And News- Spring 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

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2008 WILLA CATHER SPRING CONFERENCE & SYMPOSIUM

Constructing A Home On The Range Homemaking In Early-Twentieth-Century Plains Photograph Albums, Christina E. Dando

Great Plains Quarterly

These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would consider this an ideal landscape for home. So how did the people who settled on the Plains "view" this landscape? What did they see? How did this land come to be recognized …

Extending The Security Net The Impact Of Rangeland Insurance On Ranching Economy And Culture, Rex J. Rowley

Great Plains Quarterly

Humans have a complex relationship with the land. At the base of it lies our need for what the land can give: materials for shelter, food and water for sustenance, and scenic beauty for pleasure. But, similar to our interactions with other humans, our relationship with the land is not always perfect. The land can often be our worst enemy. Storm, drought, famine, and pestilence are common words from the historical record representing times when this connection between humans and nature is challenged.

Crop insurance is a relatively recent invention that attempts to level the playing field in our contest …

Review Of Migrations: New Directions In Native American Art. Edited By Marjorie Devon, Janet Catherine Berlo

Great Plains Quarterly

The Tamarind Institute is a well-known and well-respected venue where contemporary artists collaborate with master printmakers to realize their work in multiples, principally in limited edition lithography. In the decades since its establishment in New Mexico in 1970, artists as diverse as Elaine de Kooning, Ed Ruscha, Fritz Scholder, Judy Chicago, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, James Havard, and Jose Bedia have been in residence. As the above sample indicates, Native artists have long been a part of the collaborative mix.

This volume considers the work of six Native artists who collaborated with master printmakers to produce new work: Steven Deo (Creek), …

Review Of After Lewis & Clark: The Forces Of Change, 1806-1871. By Gary Allen Hood, Suzan Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

In the late 1940s, the wealthy Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease collected western art he believed best told the story of America. His unwavering determination led him to collect more than 100,000 objects, which became the founding collection of the Gilcrease Museum.

This beautifully designed volume, which accompanied an exhibition at the Gilcrease in 2006, features the work from the museum's collection by well-known and lesser-known artists who were lured west following Lewis and Clark's epochal expedition, eager to portray the land and peoples of the exotic terra incognita that was now in America.

While this story of exploration and discovery …

Review Of Muting White Noise: Native American And European American Novel Traditions By James H. Cox, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly

If, as James Cox argues, "the origin of colonialism is imaginative," and narrative "the force that sets colonialism in motion," then which stories have anchored Eurowestern colonialism? Conversely, what are the enduring stories of survivance and sovereignty that have sustained Native peoples through five hundred and more years of what Gerald Vizenor has termed "the word wars"? Taking as his premise that words create worlds, that stories carry within them "real world implications," Cox focuses his attention on half of his subtitle: Native American Novel Traditions. More specifically, he considers a prominent strand of this tradition: the artful revising and …

Review Of Beyond The Missouri: The Story Of The American West By Richard W. Etulain, Julie Courtwright

Great Plains Quarterly

In his Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West, Richard Etulain, a self-proclaimed "radical middler," proposes to provide a "center-of-the-road book" that tells of the complex and changeable American West without allowing heroes and villains to overwhelm the narrative. This he does remarkably well. Etulain places his text within a school of Western history, recently emerged, that emphasizes complexity over the old frontier thesis and over the more recent conquest-oriented New Western histories.

Writing a balanced history from the prehistoric landscape to the post-1980s, Etulain takes a broad view of his topic, skillfully weaving a story that …

Review Of The Border Between Them: Violence And Reconciliation On The Kansas-Missouri Line By Jeremy Neely, Nicole Etcheson

Great Plains Quarterly

The Border between Them traces the troubled relationship across the Kansas-Missouri state line during the nineteenth century. Jeremy Neely successfully recreates the world of ordinary settlers, such as western Missouri farmer John Dryden, who didn't care whether Kansas became slave or free but suffered political violence nonetheless. In order to make the settlers' story intelligible, however, Neely often has to describe larger political events, making for much summary familiar to students of the Civil War era.

Missourians pioneered a slave frontier. They expected Kansas to be part of this dynamic economy, but free soil migrants resisted. Neely emphasizes some elements …

Review Of A Fate Worse Than Death: Indian Captivities In The West, 1830-1885 By Gregory And Susan Michno, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola

Great Plains Quarterly

The field of captivity narrative studies has been expanding and evolving since the early 1990s. Thirty academic books have appeared since then, including individual editions, anthologies of narratives, studies of individual captives, and critical and historical monographs. Two aspects of Gregory and Susan Michno's volume contribute to captivity narrative studies in a very limited way: first, it considers the still underexamined captivity narratives from the West and Midwest; and second, like a biographical dictionary, it provides basic information about unfamiliar captives and captivities mostly taken from the narratives themselves. The book also includes maps, illustrations, and various appendices and tables. …

Review Of Welcome To The Homeland: A Journey To The Rural Heart Of America's Conservative Revolution By Brian Mann, Donald P. Haider-Markel

Great Plains Quarterly

Brian Mann's Welcome to the Homeland weaves together astute observations of the American political system with a personalized journey into the oonservative base of American politics. Mann's thesis is that the political divisions in America can be best characterized by an urban versus rural divide that has evolved over the past eighty or so years. Mann refers to rural voters as homelanders who have increasingly turned to the Republican Party in pursuit of their version of an America with nineteenth-century traditional values. City folk, meanwhile, are dubbed metros, and their increasingly cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and secular world view has led them …

Review Of Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan By Robert Collins, Craig Miner

Great Plains Quarterly

No one who ever sat down in a room with James H. Lane or heard him on the platform could doubt that he was a dramatic, mesmerizing personality. Any historian of Bleeding Kansas can testify to his importance. Indeed, he was doubtless the key figure in the affair. Journalists at the time and biographers since have tried to create accounts worthy of Lane himself, but, as Lloyd Lewis pointed out many years ago, he has largely eluded them. Lane remains a "shadowy figure," with many of his instincts and motivations subject to speculation.

A major problem is sources. Robert Collins …

Review Of Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey From Russia To Canada By Arthur Kroeger, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly

Hard Passage is an intelligent, innovative, and eloquently written family history. It recounts the last years of Heinrich and Helena Kroeger's life in Russia, upheaval and exile in the Soviet Union, and their migration to and settlement in Alberta. It also recounts the eventual acculturation of the Kroegers' five sons and a daughter to middle-class, liberal Canadian life. The author, Arthur Kroeger, was one of the sons and the one who was able to attend university-the University of Alberta and then Oxford; he subsequently developed a successful career in Canada's foreign service, earned multiple appointments as federal deputy minister, and …

Review Of Mennonites, Politics, And Peoplehood: Europe-Russia- Canada, 1525-1980 By James Urry, Benjamin W. Redekop

Great Plains Quarterly

For much of their history, Mennonites have tended to think of themselves as apolitical, quietistic folk-"the quiet in the land"-who eschew involvement in worldly affairs, especially those involving the use of any kind of "force," whether it be political, military, or even that of labor unions (such as strikes). Mennonite identity has been wrapped up in a biblical pacifism or "nonresistance" that goes back to the sixteenth century, and this has resulted in an often tense and ambiguous relationship with governments, as James Urry documents in Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood. The book is a deeply researched and sprawling account of …

Review Of Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood In The Boreal Forest By Rudy Wiebe, Hildi Froese Tiessen

Great Plains Quarterly

Rudy Wiebe, author of nine novels and three collections of stories as well as numerous other works, is best known for his historical fiction-particularly for novels featuring Canada's Native peoples. A first-generation Canadian whose German-speaking Mennonite parents fled Stalinist Ukraine in 1929 and then homesteaded in Saskatchewan, Wiebe has tended to set his fiction on the prairies or in the north. Appalled by the prevailing view that the Plains were "empty" before European immigrants arrived, he has consistently worked to document the repressed history of Canada. His writing has focused not only on the First Nations of his native land, …

Review Of The Cowboy Girl: The Life Of Caroline Lockhart By John Clayton, Karen Walcott

Great Plains Quarterly

The back cover of Cowboy Girl promises the story of Caroline Lockhart, "a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism, who wrote novels 'like a man' yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist." What John Clayton delivers is the life story of a racist and elitist who spent much of her free time trying to "get" her enemies.

Lockhart's second novel, The Lady Doc (1912), is a book about revenge, literally. Lockhart wrote the novel to attack the character of one of her enemies, Dr. Frances Lane. Its main character, Dr. Emma Harpe, …

Life And Landscapes In The Post-Office Communities Of Holt County, Nebraska, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly

Thumb through the pages of a DeLorme gazetteer of any Great Plains state .and you will find small black diamonds, each with its own place-name, scattered throughout the large-scale maps. For those who are familiar with the area, the existence of some of the diamonds, supposedly marking the location of a community, can be confusing since these markers do not represent contemporary towns. Additionally, when you travel country roads in rural areas of the Great Plains you will stumble upon markers that identify a nearby post office, which, also no longer exists. What do these diamonds on the map represent? …

Review Of By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death Of Meriwether Lewis Edited By John D. W. Guice, Robert Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly

It was at the 1994 Western History Association (WHA) meeting that Dr. John Guice, then teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, launched his campaign to clear Meriwether Lewis of the stigma of suicide and prove that a terrible murder had taken place at Grinder's Stand in the early morning hours of October 11, 1809. Guice titled his session "A Reconsideration," and he came armed with more complex evidence than had been earlier gathered by Vardis Fisher in 1962 or by Richard Dillon in 1965. But the testimony was all one sided. Co-presenting with Guice was James E. Starrs, a …

Review Of John Graves, Writer Edited By Mark Busby And Terrell Dixon, Pete Gunter

Great Plains Quarterly

A geographical accident, Texas lumps together High Plains and Gulf tropics, western deserts and eastern bayous. The writings of John Graves (chiefly known for Goodbye to a River) mirror these incompatibles, relentlessly probing their transitions and significance, including their human significance. His is a perpetually thoughtful prose.

The first section of John Graves, Writer contains discussions with friends and associates plus a long interview. The second is a "festschrift" celebrating his life and writings. An essay on his relations with Texas Monthly magazine appears here, backed up by a second essay on this topic in the next section, which …

Review Of Contact Zones: Aboriginal And Settler Women In Canada's Colonial Past Edited By Katie Pickles And Myra Rutherdale, Anne Gagnon

Great Plains Quarterly

The articles grouped in Contact Zones examine the racial, class, and gender power relations that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English Canada in the spaces where contact between colonizers and colonized occurred. The repercussions of contact were far greater for Aboriginals since the balance of power between the two groups was rarely even and "[t]he process of 'forming a community' in the new land necessarily meant 'unforming' or re-forming the communities that existed already" (Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism. 1998, #Z). Missionaries, government officials, and settlers attempted to transform Aboriginal women by imposing metropolitan ideals of domesticity, sexuality, and work. …

Review Of Writing The Trail: Five Women's Frontier Narratives By Deborah Lawrence, Sherry Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

This slim volume offers literary analysis of five nineteenth-century women's narratives of their travels to and experiences in the American West. The central themes of the book are that women's narratives differed from men's, and, that in the course of their western experiences, these women shed traditional roles dictated by a patriarchal society and realized new possibilities for self-identity. Western historians, particularly those who have studied women's history, will find little new here. But if this book brings such material to the attention of other students and scholars, then it is clearly worthwhile.

Deborah Lawrence focuses her attention on Susan …

Notes And News- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

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The Pageant Of Paha Sapa An Origin Myth Of White Settlement In The American West, Linea Sundstrom

Great Plains Quarterly

As a literary work initiated and directed by a committee of women, The Pageant of Paha Sapa captures the zeitgeist of the post Arontier era through the eyes of the influential women of one small town. Like all origin myths, this script presented the current populace as the rightful heirs of the place and its resources, having won them through persistence, struggle, and divinely ordained destiny. The pageant's message was that "civilizing" influences had transformed the former Indian paradise and frontier hell-on-wheels into a respectable modern community. This theme of social evolution was typical of the larger pageant movement; however, …

Review Of Taking Charge: Native American Self-Determination And Federal Indian Policy, 1975-1993 By George Pierre Castile., Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly

In Taking Charge George Pierre Castile extends his earlier work, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975 (1998), and carries the story of federal Indian policy through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Castile begins with how President Jimmy Carter's efforts to streamline federal government bureaucracy led to the creation of a new office, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. Carter continued self-determination, but his delegating nearly all Indian matters disappointed most Indians. Issues given most attention involved land and fishing claims, the claims of several eastern tribes for federal recognition, and the …

Review Of Riding To The Rescue: The Transformation Of The Rcmp In Alberta And Saskatchewan, 1914- 1939. By Steve Hewitt, Michael Dawson

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a timely book. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has served as a popular symbol of Canadian identity since the late nineteenth century, is today awash with financial scandals and accusations of corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups. The police force that has its roots in the creation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 is now perceived by many Canadians as just one more example of a modern, bureaucratic organization that has fallen victim to the misuse and abuse of power. Of particular concern is the RCMP's controversial role in monitoring and detaining suspected threats to national security. …

Review Of Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape By Courtney Milne, Terry Graff

Great Plains Quarterly

Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape is a compelling photographic anthology of the diverse and complex topography of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan. Published to commemorate Saskatchewan's centenary in 2006, this handsome coffee-table book comprises 225 sumptuous full-color photographs by the internationally acclaimed master photographer Courtney Milne. Six chapters of stunningly beautiful imagery, combined with personal commentary, chronicle Milne's intimate relationship to his home place, which extends back to his childhood growing up on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River.

For Milne, landscape photography has served as a sustaining inspiration in a remarkable photographic and writing career that has taken …