Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Song Texts And Their Performers: The Centerpiece Of Contemporary Lakota Identity Formulation, R. D. Theisz

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1960s and 1970s both American Indians and non-Indians showed intense interest in and awareness of the Indian world, and many traditional activities became more popular. This boom atmosphere has waned in the late 1980s, and Indian youths and young adults have therefore changed the focus of their search for identity formulation. In this article, I have been concerned with an aspect of Lakota traditionalism that is being granted more and more significance in the Lakota scheme of things-traditional song and dance. I have based the article on my readings in ethnomusicological literature, my informal observations over many years …

Notes & News (Great Plains Quarterly 7:2 [Spring 1987])

Great Plains Quarterly

IN MEMORIAM Margaret Laurence

Twelfth annual conference, to be held 16-18 March 1988, will be "The Arts on the Plains: The Role of Institutions."

Western Literature Association will hold its annual meeting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln 15-17 October 1987

Baylor University will hold a national symposium entitled "Regionalism: Concepts and Applications" 1-3 October 1987.

Many back issues of Great Plains Quarterly are still available

ERRATA -- Prairie Politics and Society: Regionalism in Decline, by Roger Gibbins, was attributed to the wrong publisher in a review

Plains Indian Agrariaism And Class Conflict, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly

Relatively little has been done to trace the political structures of American Indians through the years 1890 to 1940, when reservation economics were undergoing their most dramatic changes. That failure has left the false impression of a fifty-vear institutional vacuum. In fact, the middle years were times of complex reJisrrihutions of power ;md the emergence of indigellous socioeconomic classes. It was also perhaps the earliest period in which Plains Indians enjoyed anything like an Americanstyle, decentralized elective democracy. Federal programs shifted the control of the Indians' food supply. From being skilled hunter- organizers they became recipients of gc)\"ernnwnt patronage, heelme …

The Indian Reorganization Act And The Loss Of Tribal Sovereignty: Constitutions On The Rosebud And Pine Ridge Reservations, Richmond L. Clow

Great Plains Quarterly

The rhetoric of the Indian New Deal has directed scholars to study tribal political activities only after the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Graham D. Taylor expressed the prevailing opinion when he claimed that "the tribal governments established under the Indian Reorganization Act constitute a totally new and unfamiliar level of organization for many Indian groups.'" Although the flurry of new tribal constitutions adopted after 1934 overshadowed previous constitutional activities, Taylor and others overstate the case. Indian tribes had always had the right to determine their own form of government, and many tribes, beginning with the Cherokee in 1827, had …

Leadership Selection In Canadian Indian Communities, Reforming The Present And Incorporating The Past, J Anthony Long, Menno Boldt

Great Plains Quarterly

With improving prospects of achieving a greater measure of political autonomy for their governments, native Indian leaders in Canada are beginning to look seriously at reforming internal tribal/band political structures. Their objectives arc to establish band governments that meet the present social and economic needs of Indian peoples as well as reflect traditional political values. A "hand" is a legal entity specified in the Indian Act, a federal statute that has governed Indians in Canada since shortly after Confederation. In most instances the band corresponds to traditional tribal social and political organization, and these concepts are now often used interchangeably. …

In The Land Of Th Indian Woslata: Plains Indian Influences On Reservation Whites, Timothy J. Kloberdanz

Great Plains Quarterly

If one climbs the high grassy hill that overlooks the town of Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation in south-central North Dakota, the scene that gradually unfolds is an engaging one. Fort Yates is bordered on practically all sides by the expansive waters of Lake Oahe. Except for the fact that the community resembles a veritable island, it looks much like other Great Plains towns, with an assortment of generously spaced old and new structures. From the top of the hill to the north, one can sec for miles across the lake and the Missouri River to the rolling …

The Expeditions Of John Charles Fremont, John L. Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

With the publication of this third volume in the Expeditions of John Charles Fremont series, a massive compilation and editing task begun in 1965 has come to an end. The first volume and accompanying map portfolio, published in 1970, dealt with Fremont's travels between 1838 and 1844, focusing on the first and second expeditions into the American West which secured his fame as an explorer. The second, published in 1973, was devoted to Fremont's third expedition, his participation in the Bear Flag Revolt and subsequent court martial. Finally, the present work covers Fremont's travels between 1848 and 1854, encompassing the …

Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey., Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly

Carlos Schwantes tells us in Coxey's Army that the 1894 "petition in boots" aroused greater fears of social disorder than any event since the disputed election of 1876, although he also makes clear that such fears were largely groundless. The march on Washington to demand federal jobs for the unemployed was the brain child of Jacob Coxey, a prosperous Ohio quarry-owner, and Carl Browne, an itinerant panorama-painter who joined marches of the unemployed in Chicago in 1893. Coxey hoped not only to eliminate unemployment and create good roads but also to inflate the currency bv paying workers in legal tender …

Early Fur Trade On The Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among The Mandan And Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818., James A. Hanson

Great Plains Quarterly

The permanent villages of farming Indians on the Upper Missouri were a central focus for trade in prehistoric times. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, both French and Spanish traders had reach ed the area, and by the early nineteenth century, the Mandan- Hidatsa villages had come to be a Parisian entrepot for the buffalo hunting tribes, the St. Louis and Canadian traders, and the artists and explorers of young America. While the drive up the Missouri from St. Louis is well documented, Wood and Thiessen have unveiled for us an exciting story of the important and early Canadian …

Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing The American Dream., Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly

John E. Carter has collected Solomon D. Butcher's photographs of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural and small town Nebraska life in the most sharply detailed reproductions and the most generous format yet available. Cataloging the physical and social environment of farm families and ranchers, objects of work and leisure, the construction of prairie sod houses, the arrival of technology and urbane civilization on the frontier, Butcher's work provides an irreplaceable record of the establishment of white culture on the Plains.

Trails South: The Wagon-Road Economy In The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, Richard L. Lane

Great Plains Quarterly

The Dodge City-Panhandle Region, as C. Robert Haywood defines it, encompassed a "ragged, imprecise triangle" with its base in the upper panhandle of Texas and its apex at Dodge City. Haywood persuasively argues that for two formative decades-1868 to 1888-this region was unified not only by "common physiographical and demographical characteristics" but by an economic interdependence that transcended state and territorial boundary lines. As a market, shipping point, and source of supply, Dodge City was the effective, if not political, capital of the region. Such remote and diverse locations as Tascosa, Texas, and Fort Supply, Oklahoma, were linked to Dodge …

After The Buffalo Were Gone: The Louis Warren Hill, Sr., Collection Of Indian Art., Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly

This catalogue of the Louis W. Hill Collection of Indian art and crafts, evenly divided between the Museum of the Plains Indians in Browning, Montana, and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, makes available to specialists and general readers a visual portrait of a notable collection. While nearly 170 of the book's 256 pages consist of brief descriptions alongside black-and-white illustrations of items contained in the Hill collection, the volume also includes an account of Louis W. Hill, Glacier Park, and the gathering of the Hill collection by Ann T. Walton; a very brief essay by noted ethnologist …

Tribal Dispossession And The Ottawa Indian University Fraud., Thomas Burnell Colbert

Great Plains Quarterly

The story is complex with many actors-- white missionaries, church officials, land speculators, town boosters, government officials, and Ottawa Indian leaders from opposing factions. Good intentions are mixed with deceit. And in the final chapter, there is neither a happy nor a tragic ending, only a belated settlement. William E. Unrah and H. Craig Miner, two highly capable historians at Wichita State University, have produced this case study of the chicanery associated with the creation of Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas. They expose how the desire of Baptist missionaries to create a college for Ottawa Indians became entangled with land …

Time And Vision In Wright Morris's Photographs Of Nebraska, Joanne Jacobson

Great Plains Quarterly

Wright Morris is better known as a writer than as a photographer, but his photographs of Nebraska deserve more attention than they have received. Morris's work in the 1930s never achieved the fame of the Farm Security Administration photographs. And he himself cut short his photographic work of the 1940s when he and his publishers became frustrated with the expense and the aesthetic strain of his early books' photo-text format. But Morris's images of a premodern Nebraska, taken from the 1930s to the early 1950s, form an impressive body of work that is especially acute for its rendering of a …

On The Nature Of The Horse Of The American West In Nineteenth Century Art, Martin E. Petersen

Great Plains Quarterly

In nineteenth century America the horse was identified with the frontier and served as an image of independence and unrestrained freedom. Western travelers published in their diaries and journals accounts of sighting mustangs, the wild horses of the prairies. Washington Irving's vivid descriptions in his Tour on the Prairirs (1835) were among the earliest. In painting, literature's sister art, however, images of the western horse do not correspond with the written descriptions of the livestock that actually inhabited the area. The artists, rather, painted the ideal Arahian horse, a recognizable type developed throughout the century. The Arahian, considered the oldest …

Cities Of The Prairie Revisited: The Closing Of The Metropolitan Frontier, John C. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

In a series of highly-regarded publications during the early 1970s, Daniel Elazar selected ten medium-sized communities he believed were representative of urban America, placed them in a broad historical context, and examined their ability to respond politically to the changes and problems confronting them in the years between World War II and the Kennedy administration. Elazar now returns to those same communities (predominantly in Illinois) and picks up the story where he left off, carrying it down through the Great Society, Vietnam, and Nixon's New Federalism.

Adobe Walls: The History And Archeology Of The 1874 Trading Post, Anne M. Wolley

Great Plains Quarterly

With the ever increasing public interest in archaeology, especially in historic archaeology, books such as this one are in great demand. Adobe Walls is a good example of how historic archaeology should be done and how it can be presented to the general public as well as to the academic community. The format of the book allows the general reader to become involved in the history of the Adobe Walls Trading Post as well as the actual archaeological work that took place at the site. At the same time the book provides concise information useful to other historians and archaeologists.

Baronets And Buffalo: The British Sportsman In The American West, 1833-1881, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly

This book, "a narrative history of the American West as seen through the eyes and exploits of British sportsmen," begins with an epigraph from George Frederick Ruxton: "Although liable to an accusation of barbarism, I must confess that the very happiest moments of my life have been spent in the wilderness of the Far West" (v,iv). Ruxton was but one of scores of British sportsmen who wandered through the American plains during the nineteenth century-killing buffalo and elk, seeing (and sometimes fleeing) Indians, undergoing hardships, and generally revelling in the wildness they found beyond the frontier. After spending 1846-47 in …

Index To Vol 7

Great Plains Quarterly

No abstract provided.

Navitism Or Not? Perceptions Of British Investments In Kansas, 1882-1901, Larry A. Mcfarlane

Great Plains Quarterly

A recurring topic in the historiography of Populism has been the extent to which the Populists and other agrarian radicals were nativist or anti..Semitic in the tenor of some of their reforms. In this article I trace the progress of legislation intended to restrict or eliminate absentee ownership of Kansas lands by aliens, particularly British landlords, from the first demand for such restriction in 1882 through the enactment of restrictive legislation in 1891 to its repeal in 1901. I parallel this study by following the currents of anti..alien rhetoric of the agrarian radicals who advocated the restrictions. While it is …

Review Of More True Tales Of Old-Time Kansas, Amil Quayle

Great Plains Quarterly

"Henry Born married Ida Dillabaugh from Montague, Michigan, in July, 1900. They had four children-two boys and two girls. They lived beside a beautiful trout lake in the San Juan Mountains about twenty miles above Pagosa Springs during the spring, summer, and early fall. They spent their winters in town." If this type of clean, factual, detailed historical writing appeals to you, I'd recommend More True Tales of Old-Time Kansas by David Dary for your reading pleasure.

Notes & News (Great Plains Quarterly 7:1, Winter 1987)

Great Plains Quarterly

Eleventh annual conference 18-20 March 1987 on "Women's Culture in the Great Plains."

Enron Art Foundation has donated its Maximilian-Bodmer Collection to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska

CANPLAINS Data Base indexes all prairie relevant articles from over 140 periodicals

Montana Archaeological Society invites all interested readers to subscribe to Archaeology in Montana

1985 Don D. Walker award for the best article on western literature or culture has been presented to Roger Stein

1985 Robert Heizer award to Waldo Wedel and Douglas Parks

Nowhere Left To Go: Montana's Crees, Metis, And Chippewas And The Creation Of Rocky Boy's Resevation, Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the federal governments of Canada and the United States asserted their jurisdiction over the Great Plains through a series of treaties that established reservations for the various Indian tribes of the area. By the turn of the century, three small native groups found themselves homeless relics of a distant past long after other peoples had moved to their reservations. Several bands of Cree Indians and a number of mixed-bloods, who called themselves Metis, had used lands on both sides of the line that had become the border between the state of Montana …

Review Of The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism., Paul Comeau

Great Plains Quarterly

The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism is a valuable and compelling addition to Cather criticism. Working from the late eighteenth century definition of romanticism-the process whereby the creative imagination locates meaning in the material world-Susan Rosowski demonstrates convincingly how the central tenets of romanticism informed the progress of Willa Cather's artistic vision as exemplified both in individual works and in the pattern of her canon. Accordingly, the possibility of discovering value in external objects is addressed in the optimistic early novels, of which Alexander's Bridge constitutes a romantic allegory of creativity, The Song of the Lark, Cather's Prelude, and A …

Review Of Indian Education In Canada: Volume 1: The Legacy, Dana Lawrence

Great Plains Quarterly

This eight-essay volume offers a historical and regional overview of Indian education in Canada and deals largely with very specific examples of the types of education provided to Canada's Indian people up to the decade of the 1970s. Of note, the essays are mostly written by non-Indian authors, although all appear to be knowledgeable about their topics.

From Wasteland To Utopia: Changing Images Of The Canadian In The Nineteeth Century, R. Douglas Francis

Great Plains Quarterly

It is common knowledge that what one perceives is greatly conditioned by what one wants or expects to see. Perception is not an objective act that occurs independently of the observer. One is an active agent in the process and brings to one's awareness certain preconceived values, or a priori assumptions, that enable one to organize the deluge of objects, experiences, and impressions into some meaningful and comprehensive world view. Perception changes as new information or altered perspectives are integrated and thus, one's view of the "objective" external world is affected.

At Home On The Range: Essays On The History Of Western Social And Domestic Life., Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly

John Wunder has performed a service to those interested in the social side of western life by bringing these useful and interesting essays together. Part of the Contributions in American History series, this volume contains perspectives on agricultural history that range from the analytical to first-person observation.

Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art From America's Heartland., George P. Horse Capture

Great Plains Quarterly

Many years ago as the beauty and importance of Plains Indian art and history became more essential to my life, I felt the impact of Dr. Ewers long before finally meeting him and his wonderful wife, Marge, in Cody at a Plains Indian seminar fish-fry. We soon made friends and this relationship endures to this day. Knowing of this upcoming work and the extensive research Dr. Ewers devoted to the relatively little-known topic of Plains Indian miniature sculpture, I am elated with this latest publication by a master of the field.

The Indians Of Texas: An Annotatcd Research Bibliography., Joseph B. Herring

Great Plains Quarterly

Michael Tate has provided scholars and students alike with a valuable and comprehensive bibliography of the various Indian tribes that once lived within the boundaries of the present state of Texas. Included are 3,796 citations on the native Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Tonkaw'a, Jumano, \X/ichita, Caddo, Atakapa, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples a:; well as the emigrant Cherokees, AlabamaCoushattas, Seminoles, and Kickapoos who moved to Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century. The work is divided into two books. The first is a tribal arrangement focusing on Indian cultures, and the second is a chronological arrangement of Indian-white rclations from the …

The Life And Times Of James Willard Schultz (Apikuni)., Starr Jenkins

Great Plains Quarterly

Warren Hanna h ere gives us a splendid, complete biography of James Willard Schultz (1 859-1947), a not-so-well -known but excellent writer on the America n West. In 1877, at seventeen, Schultz arrived in Montana Territory and "began to live intimately the life of an Indian [among the Blackfeet] almost from the day he arrived in the West. He ate their food, slept in their lodges , and began to learn the difficult Blackfoot language; he eventually was able not only to speak it well but to think as the Indians did. He began to see the world through the …