Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Happy As A Big Sunflower: Adventures In The West, 1876-1880. By Rolf Johnson., H. Arnold Barton

Great Plains Quarterly

In December 1876, Rolf Johnson, the twenty-year-old son of the Swedish immigrant parents in Henderson Grove, Illinois, began writing a diary he would continue until it ended without explanation four years later in Cubero, New Mexico. In March 1876, the family moved, with other Swedish settlers from Knox County, Illinois, out to Phelps County, Nebraska. Rolf recounts the excitement and hardships of pioneering of the Plains, including plagues of grasshoppers, prairie fires, lawlessness, and Indian unrest. But he also tells of courage, neighborliness, and community building. He works the harvests in eastern Nebraska and hunts buffalo to the west.

Review Of The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Journal By Stephen R. Jones, Ron Block

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Joumal, naturalist Stephen R. Jones provides an informed and passionate portrait of the Sandhills of western Nebraska, "the last remaining relic of the boundless grasslands that once extended from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains." These grass-fixed sand dunes have not only provided Jones with his subject but also a style, since these twenty essays are as graceful, diverse, and startling in their transitions as the Sandhills themselves.

A representative essay may begin in first person, emphasizing the sensual complexity of directly experiencing the Sandhills. But then by subtle shifts and turns, …

Review Of Cowboys, Gentlemen And Cattle Thieves By Warren M. Elofson, Patrick A. Dunae

Great Plains Quarterly

This book focuses on the golden age of the ranching industry in western Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1900s. During that period large ranches were established in what is now southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta, many of them owned by wealthy investors in England and eastern Canada; some of the spreads were managed by graduates of prestigious agricultural colleges. The owners, the managers and their families, and the cowboys they employed comprised a community that was cultured, conservative, and generally law-abiding.

Warren Elofson doesn't see it that way. He argues that the ranching frontier in the Canadian …

Review Of Cowboys, Ranchers And The Cattle Business: Cross-Border Perspectives On Ranching History Edited By Simon Evans, Sarah Carter, And Bill Yeo, Paul Voisey

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection presents a selection of papers delivered at the Canadian Cowboy Conference held in Calgary, Alberta, in 1997 in conjunction with the Glenbow Museum's "Canadian Cowboy Exhibition." The subtitle indicates the main theme, but American readers should note that all of the authors focus on ranching north of the border, and particularly on southern Alberta. They present new research from that frontier and compare it to the existing literature in the United States. The main purpose of their efforts, however, is to challenge the traditional vision of Canadian ranching first articulated by Lewis G. Thomas and refined by such …

"We Anishinaabeg Are The Keepers Of The Names Of The Earth" Louise Erdrich's Great Plains, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

With these words, Louise Erdrich sets forth her own manifesto for writing about her place. A Native of the Northern Plains, Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa nation. In a stunning production of seven novels, six with interwoven tales and characters, two poetry collections, a memoir, and two coauthored books, Erdrich has created a vision of the Great Plains that spans the horizon of time and space and ontologically defines the people of her heritage.

ERDRICH'S NORTH DAKOTA

The literary impact is remarkable. Louise Erdrich's North Dakota cycle of novels includes the award-winning Love Medicine (1984), The …

Title And Contents- Fall 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 21/ Number 4 / Fall 2001

Contents

FIVE VOICES ONE PLACE: AN INTRODUCTION Susan J. Rosowski and John R. Wunder

LAND, JUSTICE, AND ANGIE DEBO: TELLING THE TRUTH TO - AND ABOUT - YOUR NEIGHBORS Patricia Nelson Limerick

THE EARTH SAYS HAVE A PLACE: WILLIAM STAFFORD AND A PLACE OF LANGUAGE Thomas Fox Averill

"NO PLACE TO HIDE": WRIGHT MORRIS'S GREAT PLAINS Joseph J. Wydeven

FROM FEIKEMA TO MANFRED, FROM THE BIG SIOUX BASIN TO THE NORTHERN PLAINS Arthur R. Huseboe

"WE ANISHINAABEG ARE THE KEEPERS OF THE NAMES OF THE EARTH": LOUISE ERDRICH'S GREAT PLAINS …

A Conversation With Jane Smiley, Jonis Agee

Great Plains Quarterly

JANE SMILEY: LOCATION AND A GEOGRAPHER OF LOVE

In her essay on place, Eudora Welty points out that "Henry James once said there isn't any difference between 'the English novel' and 'the American novel,' since there are only two kinds of novels at all: the good and the bad." Then Welty responds to him stating that for good novels "fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place .... The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving …

Review Of The Limits Of Multiculturalism: Interrogating The Origins Of American Anthropology By Scott Michaelsen, Nathan E. Bender

Great Plains Quarterly

Multicultural perspectives in American anthropology are not new but have been present since its inception. Michaelsen examines the origins of North American anthropology as a scholarly discipline in the early to mid-nineteenth century and the participation in it of American Indian writers and scholars. This interesting circuit through the history of anthropology reviews much current research along the way. Rather than offering a final summary of the points of each chapter in order to make a concluding case for the "limits of multiculturalism," Michaelsen uses his first chapter to lay the theoretical groundwork for his arguments and then presents the …

Review Of Reclaiming Indigenous Voice And Vision Edited By Marie Battiste, Dennis Martinez

Great Plains Quarterly

The eighteen essays collected in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision provide, finally and in one volume, a substantive and reasonably comprehensive analysis by the first generation of Indigenous scholars of the present and future role of Indigenous Knowledge and the emerging Indigenous cultural renaissance in the global context of neocolonial Western culture and science. The book springs from an International Summer Institute at the University of Saskatchewan on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples held in 1996 and attended by mostly Indigenous scholars from Canada, the US, India, and New Zealand.

This is not yet another book, produced by …

Review Of Some Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys: A Collection Of Articles And Essays By John R. Erickson, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

"My interest in ranch life is probably genetic," writes Western author and ex-cowboy John R. Erickson. "My mother's people were Texas frontiersmen, ranchers, and cowboys back to 1858." Although the present reviewer grew up in Dublin (Ireland, not Texas), my interest is also genetic, as my movie-loving father filled me with stories of the West. He would have enjoyed Erickso1!'s little book, as did I.

The organization is thematic, with sections containing short essays and articles on people, place, climate (terrible!), animals, cowboys, ranch, rodeo, and tools (saddles and boots- in Catch Rope [1994] Erickson examined roping). While based heavily …

The Earth Says Have A Place William Stafford And A Place Of Language, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

In the spring of 1986, my daughter was almost four years old and my wife and I were to have poet William Stafford to dinner during a visit he made to Washburn University. I searched for a short Stafford poem our daughter might memorize as a welcome and a tribute. We came across this simple gem, and she spoke it to him at the table.

Later in his visit, Stafford told a story about "Note." He traveled extensively all over the world. Once, in Pakistan, he opened his bags for a customs official. "Books," the man observed. "I am a …

Review Of The Black Elk Reader Edited By Clyde Holler, John R. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1931, Nicholas Black Elk gave Nebraska/ Missouri writer John G. Neihardt his spiritual story. His hope was that this white man would send forth words good and true, that the book he made would help the "tree" of his suffering people to grow and bloom again. Now, seventy summers hence, we can but wonder what Black Elk would think of the outcome. To be sure, the book known as Black Elk Speaks has gained great fame and almost canonical stature worldwide, but its faithfulness to Black Elk's vision is now much in doubt. This collection of sixteen scholarly essays …

Review Of Set The Ploughshare Deep: A Prairie Memoir By Timothy Murphy, David R. Solheim

Great Plains Quarterly

Timothy Murphy is an accomplished poet who, in mature adulthood, recently began publishing collections of his work. Four titles are listed dating from 1996. From reading his prairie memoir, one gathers that Murphy used his earlier adult life to establish a level of financial stability before devoting more of his time to literary matters. Set the Plowshare Deep should please a range of readers. It documents three generations of a Red River Valley family, discussing them from two points of view (the book includes a section written by the author's father, Vincent Murphy). The slightly over-sized format and high quality …

Review Of Noble, Wretched, & Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries To The Indians In Canada And The United States, 1820-1900 By C. L. Higham, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

By exploring how nineteenth-century Canadian and American missionaries wrote about Indians, this book examines a little-known aspect of mission work. Their accounts reveal remarkably similar-and increasingly negative- ideas about Indians that helped create the images policymakers and the public alike embraced. In their letters, diaries, official reports, and scholarly essays, Protestant missionaries "shaped the stereotypes that the literate Christian public had of the Indians in both Canada and the United States."

Although Canadian and United States Indian policies were motivated by different strategies and environments (at least until the late nineteenth century)' missionaries on both sides of the border had …

Review Of Art Of The North American Indians: The Thaw Collection Edited By Gilbert T. Vincent, Sherry Brydon, And Ralph T. Coe, Joyce M. Szabo

Great Plains Quarterly

This spectacular volume, with 260 works in color and 510 in black and white, records the Eugene and Clare Thaw collection of Native American art now housed in a wing of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Introductory essays by Eugene Thaw, Gilbert Vincent, and Ralph Coe exploring the origins of the collection and its eventual move to Cooperstown set the stage for eight individual essays by various scholars introducing each of the cultural areas into which the holdings are divided. The Thaw collection was built around the collectors' aesthetic responses to individual works rather than anthropological interest, …

Review Of Another America: Native American Maps And The History Of Our Land By Mark Warhus, W. Raymond Wood

Great Plains Quarterly

This is the first book outlining the nature of Native American cartography and synthesizing that information with Native American history and world views. The geographical knowledge brought together in one individual Native American's mind and expressed in graphic form is not often appreciated, even by serious scholars. Warhus reminds us that a single map, prepared by the Blackfoot Indian chief Ak ko mok ki, provides a detailed picture of more than 200,000 square miles of western North America, and the map by the Arapaho Gero-Schunu-wy-ha the entirety of the Central and Northern Plains. These examples could be multiplied many times, …

Review Of Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? Edited By Devon A. Mihesuah, Julia D. Harrison

Great Plains Quarterly

In writing a review for Great Plains Quarterly one is asked to emphasize the book's Great Plains content. So while Devon Mihesuah's edited reader does not specifically mention particular Native peoples who lived on the Plains any more than it discusses others who lived outside the region, it is of direct relevance to anyone interested in the Great Plains, particularly anyone interested in the region's Native history and the contemporary lived reality of these populations. Issues of repatriation, reburial, looting, the effectiveness of the NAGPRA legislation, relationships among Native people, museums, archaeologists, and anthropologists are currently central to any such …

Notes And News- Fall 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News- Fall 2001

CALL FOR SPEAKERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALL FOR PAPERS

From Feikema To Manfred, From The Big Sioux Basin To The Northern Plains, Arthur R. Huseboe

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1991, when he had just turned seventy-nine years old, Frederick Manfred was interviewed at his Luverne, Minnesota, home by three young writers for an article that was to appear in the Agassiz Review that spring.¹ He answered questions about his earliest urges to become a novelist when he was writing under the pen name Feike Feikema, questions about people who had encouraged his ambitions, and about the autobiographical sources for his novels, or his rumes, as he preferred to call them. He was asked about his writing methods and the motivations for some of his characters and …

Five Voices One Place An Introduction, Susan J. Rosowski, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

The essays gathered together in this issue of Great Plains Quarterly constitute "Five Voices One Place," the 25th annual symposium of the Center for Great Plains Studies. This was a symposium designed to complement the initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish a regional humanities center in the Plains (to be called the Plains Humanities Alliance). Appropriately, the symposium program reflected populist traditions fundamental to the Great Plains. That is, each of the five state humanities councils in the region (defined for this initiative as Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota) selected a writer …

Land, Justice, And Angie Debo Telling The Truth To-And About-Your Neighbors, Patricia Nelson Limerick

Great Plains Quarterly

When Angie Debo was an old woman, she lived in her hometown of Marshall, Oklahoma, where she had warm and close ties with her neighbors. She also had a more geographically dispersed network: a list of several hundred people, scattered around the nation, whom she would mobilize to write senators and congressmen, or to the president, on behalf of particular campaigns for Indian rights. She sent the members of her network mimeographed letters and in urgent circumstances made phone calls to them. She got her network geared up to write in support of Alaskan Native land claims, an enlargement of …

Review Of The Annotated Wizard Of Oz: Centennial Edition By L. Frank Baum, Michael O. Riley

Great Plains Quarterly

Celebrations around the country last year honored the hundredth anniversary of the publication of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. His story of Dorothy, the young girl from "the great Kansas prairie," and her amazing adventures in the magical land of Oz is no more amazing than the book's transformation during its first century from simple children's tale into one of the most recognized and beloved American icons worldwide. A major event in that process was the publication in 1973 of Michael Patrick Hearn's Annotated Wizard of Oz, the first in-depth study of Baum's masterpiece. Modeled …

Review Of The American West: Out Of Myth, Into Reality By Peter H. Hassrick & Visions Of The West: Art And Artifacts From The Private Collection Of J. P. Bryan, Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated And Others Edited By Melissa Baldridge, With An Introduction By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Brian W. Dippie

Great Plains Quarterly

WESTERN ART'S BIG TENT

Western art continues on its own distinctive path: disdained and ignored by art critics, especially in the East; beloved by a huge public, especially in the West. Western art museums display their treasures, traveling exhibitions spread the word, and those with money vote with their wallets. If price is a gage of popularity, then historic and contemporary Western art has never been more popular.

The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality is the catalog of a remarkable achievement- a touring exhibition, featuring 127 works of Western art, that, from inception to realization, was mounted in …

Book News- Fall 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Book Notes

The Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer's Story

Texas and New Mexico on the Eve of the Civil War: The Mansfield and Johnston Inspections, 1859-1861.

Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers

Native American Weapons

Review Of Native American Art: The Collections Of The Ethnological Museum Berlin By Peter Bolz And Hans-Ulrich Sanner, Bruce Bernstein

Great Plains Quarterly

Written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin (once known as the Museum fur Völkerkunde), Native American Art provides a broad sense of the exhibition and the museum's holdings. Its authors' stated intention is to answer the frequently asked question: "How have all the Indian things in the museum gotten there!" The catalog does so in a manner that illuminates and extends our understanding of the Berlin Museum, anthropology museums in general, and American Indian cultures.

The catalog's first chapter, "Indians and Germans: A Relationship Riddled With Clichés," discusses some of the stereotypes …

Review Of The Frontier World Of Edgar Dewdney By Brian Titley, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly

As a bureaucrat and politician, Edgar Dewdney figures prominently in the history of the Canadian West during the late nineteenth century. He was by turns Indian Commissioner (1879-1888), Lieutenant Governor of the North West Territories (1881-1888), a Member of Parliament (representing Assiniboia East), and Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (1888- 1892). This slim volume sheds new light on Dewdney and his legacy.

Dewdney's success in public life was, his biographer argues, the result of good luck, timing, and ability in various degrees. His appointment as Indian Commissioner was a case in point. Dewdney did have …

Review Of Wagons For The Santa Fe Trade: Wheeled Vehicles And Their Makers, 1822-1880 By Mark L. Gardner, Mike Capps

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1821, William Becknell and his companions from Missouri arrived in Santa Fe with a few pack animals loaded with an assortment of trade goods. The response they received from goods-starved New Mexicans was so enthusiastic they quickly returned to Missouri for another load to sell in this new market. Operating on the theory that the more supplies they carried the greater their profits would be, Becknell's 1822 company loaded three wagons this time and again reaped a tremendous reward for their efforts. When news of his success spread he was quickly joined by others, and a trading enterprise to …

Review Of Baum's Road To Oz: The Dakota Years Edited By Nancy Tystad Koupal, Patricia Dimond

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of Baum will appreciate Koupal's text, which not only provides samplings of his early writings, ranging from newspaper editorials to poetry to children's stories, but also furnishes critical essays preceding Baum's work. In addition to representing the multiple genres Baum employed, the volume offers insight into the writer's personal perspectives regarding religion, women's suffrage, and race. Illustrations and photographs compliment the text, serving the Baum scholar as well as anyone interested in a historical perspective of early South Dakota.

Readers will find in-depth coverage of the burgeoning town of Aberdeen and brief commentary on surrounding areas. Climate, scenery, recreation, …

Review Of Frederic Remington: The Writer By Roscoe L. Buckland, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly

Roscoe L. Buckland's Frederic Remington: The Writer sets out to introduce the literary side of the well-known painter-sculptor. It achieves an overview of Remington's life, fiction, and journalism, including a helpful bibliography of critical studies (especially those appearing after 1975), but ultimately proves disappointing.

Part of the disappointment derives from its organization. After a thoughtful preface and a biographical chapter, the book offers six topical chapters focusing on Remington's writings: "Soldiering in the West," "Indians," "Cowboys," "The Strenuous Life," "The Martial Spirit," and "John Ermine of the Yellowstone." The arrangement emphasizes Remington's principal topics, but leads to an …

Review Of The Five Crows Ledger: Biographic Warrior Art Of The Flathead Indians By James D. Keyser, Candace Greene

Great Plains Quarterly

Publication of the Five Crows Ledger brings to light a new source of information for examining the complex and shifting boundaries of Plains Indian culture in the nineteenth century. This set of thirteen drawings clearly demonstrates that the Flathead, usually categorized as a Plateau people, participated heavily in the Plains war practice of counting coup and validating their personal exploits with lasting visual records.

These drawings, now in the collection of the Jesuit Missouri Province Archives in St. Louis, were collected by Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet in western Montana in the early 1840s. De Smet's annotations provide a rich body …