Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Land Of Enchantment, Land Of Conflict: New Mexico In English-Language Fiction By David L. Caffey, David King Dunaway

Great Plains Quarterly

Nearly seventy-five years ago, in The Phantom Herd, novelist Bertha Bower summed up the tension between the presentation of the West and its reality. A movie director and crew are sent out from Hollywood to New Mexico to film a western. Halfway through, the director's disgusted crew demands more realism. The director complains that the problem isn't his but the audience's: the only West he can tell is "served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder." These images still plague us today in the West-in television dramas and in sometimes dangerous school yards .

David …

Book Notes- Winter 2001

Great Plains Quarterly

Stories of Young Pioneers: In Their Own Words

Chiricahua Apache Women and Children: Safekeepers of the Heritage

The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America

A Sharing Of Diversities: Proceedings Of The Jewish Mennonite Ukrainian Conference, "Building Bridges."

Angels on High: Márton Váró's Limestone Angels on the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, Texas.

Review Of Ladonna Harris: A Comanche Life By La Donna Harris, Barbara Torralba-Hobson

Great Plains Quarterly

This autobiographical account of La Donna Harris, a Comanche woman from rural southwest Oklahoma, describes an individual who by all accounts was not initially a candidate for the activist life she has led. As one reads her life's story, however, one understands how Harris has been able to take part in shaping the political agenda for American Indian issues in the 1960s and beyond. Stockel does not write Harris's story but rather edits it, allowing Harris free rein to give her perspective on life as an American Indian woman.

In the initial chapters I became intrigued with the history of …

Review Of Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D.: Omaha Indian Leader And Reformer By Benson Tong, Malea Powell

Great Plains Quarterly

This first full-length biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte represents an important contribution to Great Plains and Native American studies. Tong is an accomplished cultural historian, carefully outlining the cultural and historical contexts, both nationally and regionally, for Picotte's short but accomplished life. Born, as Hastings points out, "into the Omaha Nation in a tepee in 1865," La Flesche Picotte became the first American Indian woman to become a physician (1889) and then spent most of her adult life working among the Omahas as physician, temperance reformer, religious missionary, and land claims advocate. She died 16 September 1916, at the …

Review Of Sacred Fireplace (Oceti Wakan): Life And Teachings Of A Lakota Medicine Man By Pete S. Catches Sr. Edited By Peter V. Catches, Daniel J. Gelo

Great Plains Quarterly

The late Oglala Lakota traditionalist Pete Catches or Petaga Yuha Mani (He Walks with Hot Coals) has left behind a memoir that is most noteworthy for what it doesn't offer. There is no sterile, technical inventory of ritual terms and formulae and very little that could be dismissed as New Age spiritualist bromide. Instead, there is a replication of oral reminiscences as they are customarily delivered by Indian elders-seemingly wandering associations that are, paradoxically, so efficient in generating memorable images in the listener's mind.

Catches's recollections of prosaic childhood teachings from the uncle who raised him (such as, "Always make …

Review Of Birthing A Nation: Gender, Creativity, And The West In American Literature By Susan J. Rosowski, Janis P. Stout

Great Plains Quarterly

Susan Rosowski, best known for her authoritative work on Willa Cather, establishes in Birthing a Nation her status as an authoritative scholar of American literature and cultural history more broadly. In a series of concise chapters on Margaret Fuller, Cather, Jean Stafford, the Classic (masculine) Western, and Marilynne Robinson, Rosowski identifies the centrality of the West to American conceptions of national identity. Borrowing an evocative phrase from Jane Tompkins's West of Everything, she proposes what is "surely a better way" of thinking of its meaning than the terms made familiar by popular Westerns- violence' aloofness, masculine exclusivity.

The controlling …

Review Of Little Gray Men: Roswell And The Rise Of A Popular Culture By Toby Smith, David E. Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly

If you are looking for a definitive summary on the latest scientific evidence for or against the occurrence of what has come to be called the "Roswell Incident"-the crash and government retrieval of a flying saucer and alien bodies near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947- then Toby Smith's Little Gray Men is not for you. The book is not a detailed analysis of the incident itself; in fact, Smith takes it as a given that the alien crash did not occur. Instead, the author places Roswell in a larger cultural and historical context, making the case that Roswell is an …

Review Of Singing For A Spirit: A Portrait Of The Dakota Sioux By Vine Deloria Jr, George E. Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly

This is an engaging account of one of the more prominent Yankton Sioux families by the family's most prominent contemporary scion. Saswe and Tipi Sapa (Frank and Philip Deloria) were Vine Deloria Jr.'s great grandfather and grandfather. While Saswe had been an important medicine man and a chief, his son, Tipi Sapa, followed his father's late life conversion to Christianity and became an Episcopal priest, a vocation followed in turn by his son, Vine Deloria Sr. Philip Deloria became one of the most celebrated Episcopal priests of his day, earning church-wide fame, and one of only three Americans whose statues …

Review Of Termination Revisited: American Indians On The Trail To Self-Determination, 1933-1953 By Kenneth R. Philp, Warren Metcalf

Great Plains Quarterly

As the title suggests, Termination Revisited evaluates the short-lived policy to terminate the trust relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes. In keeping with his earlier work on this subject, Philp contends that termination grew out of the functional shortcomings of the Indian Reorganization Act, which failed to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse Indian population. After World War II, Indian advocates clamored for a new direction in policy, and BIA Commissioner Dillon S. Myer sought to provide it in the form of termination. Philp argues that Myer's authoritarian tendencies and bureaucratic ineptitude undercut the position of like-minded …

Review Of Earth Songs, Moon Dreams: Paintings By American Indian Women By Patricia Janis Broder, Mary Jo Watson

Great Plains Quarterly

With the first book devoted exclusively to women's painting, Patricia Janis Broder addresses a deficiency in Native American art history. Women's arts-painting, or any of their myriad art forms-became an area of serious inquiry after 1960 that has yet to be sufficiently served by scholars.

Broder's introduction explains the importance of the role of women, their arts, styles, and subjects. Mentioned are individuals and "schools" that form the context and modes of contemporary women's art. The author has selected artists' paintings that she determined have "cultural, historical, and aesthetic merit." There are ninety featured artists representing fifty-seven communities. Each artist's …

Review Of Feels Like Far: A Rancher's Life On The Great Plains By Linda Hasselstrom, Nancy Zuercher

Great Plains Quarterly

Feels Like Far is a poignant autobiography. Linda Hasselstrom observes like a naturalist, contemplates like a philosopher, and writes like a poet as she pursues her central question: "Death washed away the solid bedrock of my life as I drove back and forth across the plains this year. ... Are these changes in my life vortical growth? Or the destructive confusion of a prairie twister ?" Flashbacks and reflections weave past and present together.

As she ponders her husband's death, her father's aging and death, her mother's decline, her best friend's death, her move from her ranch to Cheyenne, and …

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 …

Review Of Warriors Of The King: Prairie Indians In World War 1 By James Dempsey, Bill Waiser

Great Plains Quarterly

James Dempsey estimates that some four hundred Indians from Western Canada served during the Great War (1914-18). That he can't be more precise is a consequence of the surviving military documents-the Canadian government did not keep accurate enlistment records for Aboriginal peoples. This problem, however, has not prevented Dempsey from piecing together the story of Western Canada's soldier Indians in World War One. In fact, he has provided an insightful account of how supposed Indian racial attributes played differently on the battlefield and the home front.

Warriors of the King opens with a contradiction. Dempsey describes how the Canadian government, …

Review Of Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill To Larry Mcmurtry By Richard W. Etulain, Roger Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly

In Telling Western Stories Richard Etulain has produced one of those rare combinations of a book that would make an excellent text for any class in Western literature and at the same time a well-written history easily enjoyed simply as a book of general interest. Etulain actually treats ideas and images more than stories, although it is, he argues, through stories that the ideas and images of the American West have been molded this past century and a half.

That is the essence of Etulain's narrative: there is not an absolute history, a clear reality, that determines how we see …

Review Of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics And The Male Homosexual Literary TraditionBy John P. Anders & Willa Cather And The Politics Of Criticism By Joan Acocella, Deborah Carlin

Great Plains Quarterly

PLAIN TRUTHS AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN NEW CATHER CRITICISM

One wonders what Cather, arguably one of the country's finest novelists and an astute observer of human nature, would make of the tendency among critics of her work to choose opposing sides as earnestly and pugnaciously as they have throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Are the stakes really so high? Are Cather and her work such contested terrain that we need to expend so much energy and, indeed, rancor in defending our interpretive claims? Must others be wrong because we (however these affiliations are constituted) are so clearly …

Early Civil Rights Activism In Topeka, Kansas, Prior To The 1954 Brown Case, Jean Van Delinder

Great Plains Quarterly

On an early spring day in the city of Topeka, Kansas, a father walked his child to their neighborhood school. His child was refused admission and was instructed to attend one reserved for "colored children." The parent filed a lawsuit and sued the Topeka Board of Education, demanding that his child be received and instructed at that school, regardless of race. The case went to the Kansas State Supreme Court where it became a precedent for maintaining school segregation in Topeka and other cities in Kansas. The year was 1902. Despite its outcome, this lawsuit illustrates the local-level issues and …

Review Of With Unshakeable Persistence: Rural Teachers Of The Depression Era By Elizabeth Mclachlan, Robert J. Carney

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1905 the Canadian government separated several districts from the Northwest Territories to establish the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Both provinces continued the centralized education system of the Territories. The newly-formed Departments of Education were expected to provide schooling in the recently settled agricultural areas, but were often unable to persuade parents to erect school districts. In 1910 the situation was bleak; Alberta and Saskatchewan had the lowest school age enrollment figures in the country.

Over the next twenty years, both departments accelerated the establishment of school districts administered by locally elected trustees and funded by local property taxes …

Review Of One Degree West: Reflections Of A Plainsdaughter By Julene Bair, Elizabeth Dodd

Great Plains Quarterly

Readers will likely be familiar with the background dramas in One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, Julene Bair's collection of eleven personal essays. Life in western Kansas has changed dramatically since the 1950s; the farming communities that were scraped or nestled into dry land, shortgrass country have seen two migrations in the last half-century: from the farm into town, the course taken by Julene Bair's parents; and out of the region, the trajectory of her own life. Farming itself has changed so much that those who haven't left cannot maintain the shape and rhythm of the lives they …

Review Of Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism By Craig S. Womack, Daniel Justice

Great Plains Quarterly

The struggle of Native scholars to develop a distinctly Native literary criticism-one that draws from tribal histories, stories, and traditions, rather than accepting Eurocentric and often racist standards of critical and artistic sophistication-has seen varied degrees of success since the late 1970s. In 1994, Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior published Tribal Secrets, which called for Indian scholarship centered in Indian lives and world views. Now, at the edge of the colonizers' millennium, easily one of the most nuanced, respectful, and penetrating examples of such scholarship has appeared in Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism.

Womack, who …

Review Of The Piikani Blackfeet: A Culture Under Siege By John C. Jackson, Darrell R. Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly

As a member of the Amskapi Pikuni, or Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, I did not begin serious study of my tribe until 1983, when I returned home. Harvard educated and knowledgeable of the world, I turned my early ventures in learning about the tribe after years of separation into a rewarding obsession. Beginning with John Ewers's The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains (1958), I quickly decided to make a serious effort to acquire knowledge of the tribe and within a few years had reviewed most of the standard, and sometimes obscure, texts and identified redundant pieces. Subsequent study became …

Review Of Woman Of The Plains: The]Ournals And Stories Of Nellie M. Perry Edited By Sandra Gail Teichmann, Maureen E. Reed

Great Plains Quarterly

Sandra Teichmann discovered a charming piece, of Anglo women's regional literary tradition when a librarian introduced her to a descendant of Nellie M. Perry in 1996. "Miss Nellie," as Teichmann came to know her, traveled from Iowa to visit her brother George in the Texas Panhandle's Ochiltree County in 1888. Perry, a schoolteacher, wrote lively, polished, and frequently witty narratives about this and other trips to Ochiltree (now Perryton), where she herself settled in 1916. Perry's narratives and short fiction came into the possession of her descendant, who eagerly shared them with Teichmann.

The editor does not indicate (and perhaps …

Review Of Cather Studies 4: Willa Cather's Canadian And Old World Connections Edited By Robert Thacker And Michael A. Peterman, Merrill Maguire-Skaggs

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections is the first of four new collections that have emerged from international colloquia held in different locales of Cather's work. To those whose Cather is primarily a Nebraska writer, they may provide a jolt. Nevertheless, Willa Cather now not only belongs to the world but is also being claimed by a growing number of its corners: first Quebec; then Pittsburgh; then Winchester, Virginia; later New York City; and, most recently, the Southwest. One explanation for the exponential growth in Cather scholarship is, in fact, these geographical pulls which position her newly and thus …

The Price Of Patriotism Alberta Cattlemen And The Loss Of The American Market, 1942-48, Max Foran

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the most controversial episodes in the history of the western Canadian cattle industry occurred during the years 1942-48 when the Canadian government imposed an embargo on Canadian cattle entering the United States. This unprecedented measure was a reaction to the extraordinary demands of the national war effort, and was accepted conditionally by the cattle industry as a necessary patriotic gesture. However, official wartime policies respecting this embargo, and its retention beyond the war until late 1948 were neither anticipated nor appreciated by western Canadian stockmen. Their efforts to restore a market deemed crucial to their industry's survival, and …