Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels Of Louis Owens By Chris Lalonde, Margaret Dwyer

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last paragraph of his last chapter, "Endgames," Chris LaLonde articulates an idea implied throughout his text: the fiction of Louis Owens is "trickster activism." This was indeed Owens's personal approach to changing how the world at large views American Indians, and how he felt the world at large (including American Indians) do (or should) view the environment in which they live. LaLonde earns high marks for this and many other lucid observations about the fiction of American Indian author and scholar Louis Owens (1948-2002), in the first book-length examination of Owens's five completed novels. "Language has the power …

Review Of America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education And The Ownership Of English, 1860- 1900 By Ruth Spack, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly

Ruth Spack's thoroughly researched study of English education in Indian boarding schools goes beyond historical investigation. Spack shows how the methodology of teaching English imposed American ideologies in Native students. Then she closely examines the primary writings of Indian students and teachers who had learned English in the boarding school system. The result is a fine linguistic and cultural analysis of the complicated transitions from Native languages to the second language of the book's title, English.

Much has been written about the assimilative mission of boarding schools. Their purpose, as stated by Richard H. Pratt, was to "Kill the Indian; …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And The American Frontier: Five Perspectives Edited By Dwight M. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the most interesting literary figures of the twentieth century, Laura Ingalls Wilder, through her books about the American heartland, examines in many ways the heart of America. She questions the Euroamerican pioneer experience, the racial tensions of the contested West, and assumptions about gender roles. Even her relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, asks readers to reconsider the privileging of authorial autonomy; and, with respect to genre aesthetics, Wilder's mimesis of autobiography blurs the line between fact and fiction. Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives, a collection of essays that originated at the …

Review Of Father Francis M. Craft: Missionary To The Sioux By Thomas W. Foley, Michael F. Steltenkamp

Great Plains Quarterly

The bland title of this biography might not attract the many readers the book deserves since Craft's name is known only from occasional footnotes related to the Ghost Dance religion that ended with tragic bloodletting at Wounded Knee in 1890. Using the priest's journals and researching references contained within them, the author draws from obscurity a life that should inspire scholars to tap similar material reposited in Marquette University's Catholic Indian mission archives. Diaries and journals stored there are a treasure trove of ethnographic and historical information that still awaits baring. Biographers can use Foley's work as a standard to …

Review Of "They Treated Us Just Like Indians": The Worlds Of Bennett County, South Dakota By Paula L. Wagoner, Larry J. Zimmerman

Great Plains Quarterly

The land is at the core and "in charge" of the overlapping cultures of the Lakota and whites of Bennett County, South Dakota. The challenging Plains environment is a major element of personal and group identity, a force that "measures one's worth." In her ethnology derived from fieldwork in the county between 1993-1996 and in 2001, Paula Wagoner had expected to find sharp social contrasts between groups. As she discovered, residents had more in common than they might wish to admit.

Fear of loss of the land and the identity rooted to it are behind most tensions and disputes between …

Review Of Fort Robinson And The American Century, 1900- 1948 By Thomas R. Buecker, Paul H. Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly

Fort Robinson, located along the upper reaches of the White River in far northwest Nebraska, enjoyed a long and eventful history. Founded in 1874 and not closed as a military base until 1948, the post played vital roles in the last wars with the Plains Indians: the so-called Sioux war of 1876-77 and the Ghost Dance "outbreak" of 1890-91. In the twentieth century it was a quartermaster remount depot for a time, and during World War II it served as a K-9 training base and a prisoner of war camp.

After 1948 the United States Department of Agriculture used the …

Review Of Breaking Clean By Judy Blunt, Linda Karell

Great Plains Quarterly

"Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience." In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt's memoir of her life as a Montana rancher's daughter, and eventually as a Montana rancher's wife, she reminds us that storytelling mines the minute and the particular in order to unearth larger truths. In this memoir, those truths are about the cramped inarticulateness of women's lives and the paucity of real, vibrant choices, as well as the ranching community's support for its members during the inevitable crises that occur on the windswept Montana Plains.

Now …

Review Of Chasing The Glitter: Black Hills Milling, 1874- 1959 By Richmond L. Clow, Chris H. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly

In the 1800s, the American Gold Rush shifted from California and Nevada to Colorado, and then to South Dakota. The search for gold, and the wealth and profits it brought, helped develop the American West. Richard Clow's Chasing the Glitter: Blacks Hills Milling, 1874-1959 tells the story of Black Hills gold mining in South Dakota. Drawn from successful mining ventures in California, Nevada, and Colorado, gold miners and investors hoped to strike it rich again in the Black Hills. But only by milling and extracting the gold trapped in tons of hard-rock ore could these companies and their investors make …

Review Of Red Matters : Native American Studies By Arnold Krupat, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly

A reviewer of Red Matters might reasonably expect a work with the post-colon title Native American Studies to foreground Native intellectual voices or the voices of Native and nonnative scholars who work in the field and publish in the field's journals and to privilege indigenous critical perspectives. The reviewer might have some apprehension, however, that Krupat would say he or she was provincial or a "back to the blanket" scholar. The title, nevertheless, is part of a broad deception, for though red matters in Red Matters, non-indigenous critical perspectives and Western and non-Native intellectual, cultural, and historical traditions matter …

Review Of The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By R. Douglas Hurt, Victoria Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Frontiers have dominated American historiography ever since Frederick Jackson Turner placed the term into the academic lexicon in the early twentieth century. Historians such as Bolton and Webb built entire careers around the ideology of the American western frontier, and the concept has grown exponentially since the mid-twentieth century.

Today's scholar can choose from a host of publications focused on geographical frontiers. The American South, the Appalachians, Spanish Borderlands, colonial America, Canada, even Alaska and Hawaii, have all been dissected under the frontier scalpel. But surprisingly few scholars have focused on Native American frontiers.

Dale Van Every broke ground in …

Review Of The Light Crust Doughboys Are On The Air: Celebrating Seventy Years Of Texas Music By John Mark Dempsey, Joe W. Specht

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1930s and 1940s radio played a huge role in the development and dissemination of American popular music, especially country music. Regular live exposure on the radio was often more important for a country music performer's career than were recording opportunities. And there is no better example of how the interaction of radio with recordings and public appearances helped to sustain a career than that of the Light Crust Doughboys. Of course it helps if you have a longtime sponsor, too.

The Light Crust Doughboys were formed in 1930 by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, …

Review Of When Montana And I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood By Margaret Bell, Randi Tanglen

Great Plains Quarterly

"I might not have gone to school, but I had to solve more problems than most children," asserts Margaret Bell in When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood. As the oldest child in a family of four girls with no mother and a shiftless stepfather, Bell relates that she was often responsible for tasks not usually relegated to women-and especially not to children. In her childhood memoir, she describes pulling a yearling calf out of an iced-over spring by herself, developing an intricate system for managing ranch chores while her stepfather was away, and spending her days …

Notes And News- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Call For Papers

20th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Visiting Scholars Program

Willa Cather Literary A Ward 2004

Map Correction

Review Of The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, And Indian Hymns By Luke Eric Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, And Ralph Kotay, Benjamin R. Kracht

Great Plains Quarterly

Christianity, metaphorically referred to as the "Jesus road," came to the Kiowas of southwestern Oklahoma towards the end of the nineteenth century. Today, most Kiowas are at least nominally Christian, and, like other Oklahoma Indians, render prayers and hymns in their Native tongue in services that are otherwise Baptist, Methodist, or Pentecostal. In explaining why the Kiowas accepted Christianity and how Kiowa hymns still play a vital part in Kiowa community life, The Jesus Road contributes to a growing body of literature about Native American Christians who have not abandoned their personal and cultural identity. Anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter, historian …

Review Of Montana Legacy: Essays On History, People, And Place Edited By Harry W. Fritz, Mary Murphy, And Robert R. Swartout Jr., Don Spritzer

Great Plains Quarterly

Montana Legacy is a sequel to the well-received 1992 anthology, The Montana Heritage. Like its predecessor, this new collection offers sixteen republished essays arranged in roughly chronological order. And much like the articles in Montana Heritage, these new pieces either explore a little-studied aspect of Montana's past or offer a revised slant on a more familiar topic.

The two best revisionist essays are Colin G. Calloway's "Army Allies or Tribal Survival?" and David Emmons's "The Orange and Green in Montana." Calloway's reinterpretation of the 1876 military campaign leading to the Battle of the Little Big Horn examines the …

Review Of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir By Bob Kerrey, Marilyn B. Young

Great Plains Quarterly

Bob Kerrey's memoir begins with a promise to his dying father to find out what happened to the father's brother, lost in the Philippines during WWII. This Kerrey did, but instead of writing his uncle's story, he wrote his own, of growing up in the 1950s in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of seven children in a solid, church-going, middle-class family. "We biked everywhere," Kerrey writes. "The edge of the universe lay at the ends of the dirt roads leading to those places where the wild and wooly frontier began." The fearful things in this safe place were either abstract (Soviet and …

Religion, Idealism, And African American Autobiography In The Northern Plains: Era Bell Thompson’S American Daughter, Kevin L. Cole, Leah Weins

Great Plains Quarterly

In her introduction to American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, Margo Culley writes, “It would be hard to point to a field of contemporary literary studies more vibrant than autobiography studies. Where else does one find a wealth of primary material still mostly unread and unranked?” “Unread and unranked” aptly describes Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter, an autobiographical account of an African American woman who comes of age on the plains of North Dakota in the early twentieth century. It is one of those almost forgotten autobiographies that deserves to be read, ranked, and reconsidered, especially in the …

Ancient Way In A New Land: Benedictine Education In The Great Plains, Marielle Frigge O.S.B.

Great Plains Quarterly

In the first half of the sixth century, an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, provided a framework for Christian monastic life. In the last half of the nineteenth century, his descendants arrived in the Great Plains, part of the westward movement of Christian missionaries in North America. What could this ancient way of life offer to a new land of Native tribes and immigrant farmers, traders, and soldiers? And what might this new land contribute to the shaping of a uniquely American form of monastic life?

These Benedictine men and women brought with them centuries of experience as learners and …

Fairy Castle Or Steamer Trunk? Creating Place In O. E. Rølvaag’S Giants In The Earth, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

What happens when humans move beyond the boundaries of civilization? Does the very act transform them? How do they define themselves in apparently empty space? Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of Americans headed west to the frontier, the borderland between civilization and wilderness. Most went willingly, confident or desperately hopeful that they would have the freedom to create a place of their own and, in the process, recreate themselves. Before they set out for the frontier, they imagined it a garden, based on the myths of plenty and entitlement that were described in boosters’ letters, newspaper accounts, railroad brochures, and …

Title And Contents- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 23/ Number 4/ Fall 2003

Contents

RELIGION, IDEALISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE NORTHERN PLAINS: ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Kevin L. Cole and Leah Weins

ANCIENT WAY IN A NEW LAND:BENEDICTINE EDUCATION IN THE GREAT PLAINS Marielle Frigge

FAIRY CASTLE OR STEAMER TRUNK?:

CREATING PLACE IN O. E. R0LVAAG'S GIANTS IN THE EARTH Diane Quantic

Book Reviews

Victor P. Lytwyn Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People of the Great Swampy Land By PETER GELLER

R. Douglas Hurt The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By VICTORIA SMITH

Ruth Spack America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of …

Review Of The Snow Geese: A Story Of Home By William Hennes, Bruce D.J. Batt

Great Plains Quarterly

William Hennes is an Englishman who was struck by a serious illness in his twenty-fifth year. Following multiple surgeries, he required several months of convalescence, most of it occurring at his parents' home, from his earliest memories the stable touch point to his life. The remainder of this true story is built around themes of home, nostalgia for familiar surroundings, homesickness, and the quest that many organisms have to go home at critical junctures of their lives. The subtitle is more descriptive of the fascinating narrative that follows than is The Snow Geese.

During his extended recovery period Hennes …

Review Of Geometry In Architecture: Texas Buildings Yesterday And Today By Clovis Heimsath, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly

Geometry in Architecture is really two books in one. The subtitle, Texas Buildings Yesterday and Today, provides the context for the theme of a book that is fundamentally a pictorial essay covering selected architectural elements of early Texas buildings. The original book, written in 1968 and titled Pioneer Texas Buildings: A Geometry Lesson, was an essay in two parts. The written section provided Heimsath's personal observations on the state of architecture as he perceived it in 1968. As a critique of architectural design, his views, though caustic, had some degree of validity. His major criticism was his concern …

Review Of Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People Of The Great Swampy Land By Victor P. Lytwyn, Peter Geller

Great Plains Quarterly

In Muskekowuck Athinuwick, Victor Lytwyn provides a detailed study of the indigenous people of the Hudson Bay lowlands. At its core is the author's extensive historical research in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg; the academic context is the scholarly debate over the effects of the fur trade on indigenous peoples. As a historical geographer, Lytwyn brings an important spatial understanding to the Cree past, which is conveyed through the accompanying maps.

The first half of the book is the more methodologically diverse, as it examines pre-contact history, international relations (particularly the alliances with neighboring Cree and northern …

Review Of Growing Up With The Town: Family And Community On The Great Plains By Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly

Dorothy Schwieder knows community history. As a historian at Iowa State University, she investigated a number of Iowa locations, especially that state's coal camps. In Growing Up with the Town, Schwieder takes a much more personal look at the community she grew up in, Presho, South Dakota. Her father arrived in Presho in 1909, just four years after the Milwaukee Railroad established the town, and Schwieder tells Presho's story through the activities of her family. She has two motives: first, "to preserve at least a part of a small town's experience in its first fifty years," and second, "to …

Notes And News- Summer 2003

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes And News

Research Fellowships

Great Plains Symposium

Call For Papers: Southern Humanities Council

Review Of Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations Edited By Gretchen M. Bataille, Shari Huhndorf

Great Plains Quarterly

"The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact" between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise …

Review Of Toward Defining The Prairies: Region, Culture, And History Edited By Robert Wardhaugh, Nina Van Gessel

Great Plains Quarterly

Prair'ie n. a large treeless tract of level or undulating grassland esp. in N. America. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

"How does one define a place? How does one define a region?" asks editor Robert Wardhaugh. Postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism have problematized the concept of definition in general and definition of place in particular. In this age of posts-, the dictionary becomes a site of misplaced signposts bent on leading one astray. No matter the limitations of "definition," the Prairies can no longer be defined solely in a narrow, physical sense. Rather, we must "move beyond the transparency of geography to …

Review Of The Nature Of Home By Lisa Knopp, Jonathan Ritz

Great Plains Quarterly

In this collection of personal essays, Lisa Knopp creates a constellation of various nonfiction forms, including memoir, social and natural history, biography, and travel writing, around the central subject of "home"-"what home is, how one might find it, what it means to be at home or away from home or homeless .... " Brief lexicon entries, consisting of an OED definition of a particular word along with the writer's musings on the word's relation to her central subject, serve as interludes between each of the book's twenty-two essays. The combination of lexicon entries and essays creates a rich and resonant …

Black Enclaves Of Violence: Race And Homicide In Great Plains Cities, 1890-1920, Clare V. Mckanna Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

These killings, occurring three years apart in Coffeyville, Kansas, offer bookend images of interracial homicides in the Great Plains. In the first shooting, Charles Vann, a black man and the victim, had been drinking at Walnut and Eleventh Streets in the "tenderloin" district, a black neighborhood in Coffeyville. This region, near the railroad yards, provided entertainment for black customers and occasionally whites in saloons, brothels, and gambling parlors. William Rodecker, a white male horse trader, had just arrived from Missouri and started drinking heavily in this area. About 8 P.M. Rodecker accosted Vann at the corner of Twelfth and Walnut …

Review Of Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience By Norma Smith, Sara Hayden

Great Plains Quarterly

Norma Smith's posthumously published biography of Jeannette Rankin offers a welcome addition to scholarship devoted to this early feminist, Congresswoman, and peace activist. Rankin's life story intersects with several major developments in Western politics and US public life. Rankin began her political career lobbying for woman's suffrage in Washington, eventually heading up the successful 1914 suffrage campaign in her home state of Montana. Rankin's suffrage work positioned her to run for national office; in 1916 she became one of Montana's two members of the House of Representatives and the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Rankin ran …