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"Her Heritage Is Helpful": Race, Ethnicity, And Gender In The Politicization Of Ladonna Harris, Sarah Eppler Janda

Great Plains Quarterly

"What is it like to live in a tent?" asked Robert Kennedy's five-year-old daughter, Kerry, when she met LaDonna Harris for the first time in 1965. LaDonna assured her that Indians no longer lived in "tents" and Kerry's mother, Ethel, jokingly told LaDonna not to disillusion the child. LaDonna insisted that she wanted Kerry to have an accurate understanding of what Indians were like, to which Kerry responded by asking if she shot a bow and arrow. The exchange speaks volumes about the ignorance through which mainstream society viewed Native Americans, and mirrored many of Harris's other experiences with the …

Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …

The First Phase Of Destruction Killing The Southern Plains Buffalo, 1790-1840, Pekka Hamalainen

Great Plains Quarterly

The eradication of the vast bison herds from the North American Great Plains is one of the oldest topics in western history and, recently, also one of the most popular. Drawing ideas and methodologies from ecology and zoology, historians have revealed in the 1990s an entirely new anatomy of the destruction. According to the new interpretation, the great slaughter of the 1870s merely delivered a clinching blow to herds that had already been weakened in a number of ways. Concentrating on the Southern Plains, Dan Flores has concluded that large-scale dying may have begun as early as 1840, when a …