American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Crisscrossing Borders In Literature Of The American West Edited By Reginald Dyck And Cheli Reutter, Linda K. Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With its uninspired Pepto-Bismol pink-colored cover, Crisscrossing Borders in the Literature of the American West might escape attention. That would be a loss because this new collection, edited by Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter, is a striking series of essays that simultaneously argue for and model new postnational and transnational approaches to western literary studies. In the introduction, Dyck asks, "Is it possible to have a western literary studies that recognizes the many forms of difference that create borders within and around the region while neither reifying those borders nor discounting their power?" The strategies employed by the various authors …

Review Of Writing Indian, Native Conversations By John Lloyd Purdy, Geraldine Mendoza Gutwein

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Writing Indian, Native Conversations provides keen discussion across three decades of Native American literature in the twentieth century along with consideration of literature in the new millennium. Interviews with well-known Native American scholars and authors such as Paula Gunn Allen, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Louis Owens provide a foreground from which Purdy delves more deeply into the works of Silko, Welch, Erdrich, King, Vizenor, and others. The critical, theoretical framework from which he analyzes the works is based on a construct that has at its core the assumption that "we all come to a work of literature …

Review Of Border To Border: Historic Quilts And Quiltmakers Of Montana By Annie Hanshew, Barbara Caron

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

State-wide efforts to document quilts began with the Kentucky project in 1981; by 2010 more than fifty books reported the findings of projects in thirty-seven states. Border to Border is the culmination of the Montana Historic Quilt Project, which began in 1987 and ultimately registered more than 2,000 quilts. A perceptive introduction by Mary Murphy, professor of history at Montana State University - Bozeman, places Montana quilts within a wider context not only of needlework and women's roles, but also of westward expansion, industrialization, transportation networks, consumerism, fairs and expositions, and other state and world events. Murphy commends the Montana …

Review Of Wallace Stegner And The American West By Philip L. Fradkin, Bonney Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Philip L. Fradkin's biography constitutes a balanced and well-researched addition to the biographical scholarship currently available on a treasured and enduring American and western American author, environmentalist, and teacher. Adding to previous work by Forrest and Margaret Robinson (1977), as well as by Jackson Benson (1996), Fradkin supplements these portraits of Wallace Stegner with his own emphases-in particular Stegner's continuing commitment to thinking about the American West, about water and aridity, and about public intellectuals' obligations to conservation and environmental responsibility.

Review Of The Lipan Apaches: People Of The Wind And Lightning By Thomas A. Britten, Deborah Bernsten

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Lipan Apaches is the first comprehensive study of a people who were important, integral actors in the history of the Southern Plains, most especially the history of Texas. Rather than casting the Lipans as the victims of Spanish or later American conquest, this meticulously researched work brings to life Lipan history, one steeped in a "tradition of adaptation and cultural reinvention" that of necessity was constantly responding to new and often painful shifting social realities. Britten poses these questions: Who were the Lipan Apaches and under what circumstances did a tribal identity emerge ? To what extent did they …

Review Of Addie Of The Flint Hills: A Prairie Child During The Depression (1915-1935) By Adaline Sorace, Karen Manners Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her early nineties, decades after she had left the Kansas Flint Hills, Adaline Beedle Sorace sat down with her daughter to write her memoirs. With extraordinarily vivid recall, she evokes the place and the people of her youth, weaving the strands of a family and personal saga that stretches from the 1860s to the 1930s.

"Addie" Sorace's maternal forebears, the pioneering RogIer family, were German immigrants who settled in Chase County, Kansas, in the 1860s. Over the decades, the Roglers acquired thousands of acres of rolling grassland and became one of the wealthiest and most influential cattle ranching families …

Review Of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 By Suzanne Barta Julin, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Tourists," said Doane Robinson, the father of Mount Rushmore, "soon get fed up on scenery." As car-based tourism exploded after World War I, South Dakotans believed the Black Hills needed not just pretty pines and streams, but a new layer of roadside attractions to bring in more tourists and keep them spending longer. This book is about the making of that tourist landscape-not so much the landscape itself, or the tourists looking at it, but the makers and movers behind the scenes who drove the transformation.

This is, in other words, a book about economic planning. It is a left-wing …

Review Of Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic By Michael F. Steltenkamp, Dale Stover

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic, Michael Steltenkamp explains that because of his chance acquaintance with Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, who "wanted people to know about his [Black Elk's] life as a catechist, I became the biographer of his life in the twentieth century." The author claims that his earlier book, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala (1993), which reports Lucy's version of her father's life, "showed how this otherwise stereo typically Plains Indian medicine man assumed a Christian identity, and how this was the religious legacy for which he was most remembered within …

Review Of The Girl In Saskatoon: A Meditation On Friendship, Memory And Murder By Sharon Butala, Susan Maher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On a warm May evening in 1962, young Saskatoon resident Alexandra Wiwcharuk left her flat to mail some letters and enjoy a little time on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River before reporting in for her night shift as a nurse at City Hospital. Sitting near a weir, she was within sight of a parking area and city streets. Many others were out that evening, sharing Alex's delight in heat and late sun on a holiday weekend, walking the paths, laughing over jokes and shared gossip, watching children play, and soaking in the city scene. But none of them …

Review Of African Americans On The Great Plains: An Anthology Edited And With An Introduction By Bruce A. Glasrud And Charles A. Braithwaite, David J. Peavler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the last decade, Great Plains Quarterly has taken the lead in soliciting and publishing articles about the African American experience in the Central Plains. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite have incorporated these articles into a single anthology that should become required reading in college history courses throughout the region. Unfortunately for readers of this journal, however, the book offers little in the way of new information about this important topic.

The editors provide a brief historiographical introduction that details the important scholarly contributions to Great Plains African American history. Although the editors' definition of the region …

Review Of Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman And American Indian Thought By David Martinez, Gwen W. Westerman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a Dakota man, Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939) carried the values and history of his people into a rapidly changing world at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most often noted for his contributions as a narrator of Dakota life on the Great Plains in Indian Boyhood and From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Eastman was also an intellectual and an activist who worked diligently to address contemporary issues of Indian rights-efforts now brought into a new light in Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought.

Review Of Delaware Tribe In A Cherokee Nation By Brice Obermeyer, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The federal acknowledgment process is a highly contested procedure under the best of circumstances. For the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma the negotiations to establish their national identity while living within the physical boundaries of the Cherokee Nation continue to divide its members and challenge modern interpretations of enrollment. Brice Obermeyer, a cultural anthropologist at Emporia State University and NAGPRA representative for the Delaware Tribe, provides a comprehensive discussion of this historic relationship.

Obermeyer summarizes the histories that brought the Cherokees and Delawares to eastern Oklahoma and the legal efforts to establish an independent Delaware identity since the 1867 Cherokee-Delaware Agreement. …

Review Of Native Liberty: Natural Reason And Cultural Survivance By Gerald Vizenor, Michael Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Poet, novelist, and critic Gerald Vizenor is arguably the most accomplished and prolific intellectual in the field of Native American studies. His new collection of cultural criticism includes four original essays and nine expanded revisions of uncollected published pieces. "Ontic Images," perhaps the finest selection, applies his concept of Native transmotion to representations of Natives in photography. Two perceptive pieces of art criticism discuss the aesthetics and contributions of Anishinaabe artists George Morrison and David Bradley. On the whole, this work serves as a useful introduction to the theory and criticism of this brilliant Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe, Chippewa) writer.

Review Of Conquests & Consequences: The American West From Frontier To Region By Carol L. Higham And William H. Katerberg, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or "center of power in its own right"? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are "roughly the length of an average single dormitory room"). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the …

Review Of Meriwether Lewis By Thomas C. Danisi And John C. Jackson, J. I. Merritt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, perhaps no figure from the early history of the Republic remains more enigmatic than Meriwether Lewis, who with fellow Army officer William Clark led one of the most celebrated expeditions in the history of exploration. Lewis and Clark's twenty-eight-month "tour," which took them to the Pacific Ocean and back via the Missouri and Columbia drainages, gave the young nation a wealth of knowledge about the Louisiana Territory and Pacific Northwest. Lewis was just thirty-two years old when the Corps of Discovery banked its canoes in St. Louis in September 1806. Yet the young …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30 / Number 4 / Fall 2010

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait Of A Community In Black And White By Bob Ray Sanders, Carla Williams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White came about through the confluence of two significant events around 1994: the enthusiastic reception surrounding the publication of a similarly themed title, Behold the People: R. C. Hickman's Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961; and Littlejohn's family contacting the director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin about possibly donating his prints and negatives there. These are significant because they point to the need for an archive to preserve and organize material of this scope-some 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints made over …

Review Of Uprising! Woody Crumbo's Indian Art By Robert Perry, Robert B. Pickering

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In any discussion of important Indian artists of the twentieth century, Woody Crumbo (1912-1989) is a pivotal player. His dynamic figures, brilliant colors, and traditional themes were combined to create a new kind of art. He used traditional art forms and themes from his Potawatomi background as well as themes and incidents from other tribal traditions to inspire his work. Not satisfied with just creating art, Crumbo mentored other artists, and for much of his life he was personally involved in the business of art-creating new opportunities for himself and other Indian artists.

Review Of Taming The Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs Of The Texas High Plains By John Miller Morris, Anne E. Peterson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The advent of the real photographic postcard (RPPC) and the burgeoning growth in the early twentieth century of the Texas Panhandle area of the southern Great Plains coincide. More than 100,000 "optimists" spilled into the region after 1906. The frontier receded as farmsteads grew around railroad towns. The era also witnessed a surge in popularity of the real photographic postcard from 1906 into the 1920s, mailed by the tens of thousands and collected in albums documenting the region. As the population grew, photographers increasingly worked for land developers making images of farmland and also of excursionists traveling to see the …

Review Of A Nation In Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston And The Chickasaws, 1898-1939 By Michael W. Lovegrove, Lisa K. Neuman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What happens when a Native American nation is gradually and purposefully dismantled in order to make way for a new state government? How do tribal leaders meet the challenges of an impending dissolution of their own government and simultaneously fight against the erosion of their tribal sovereignty? These compelling questions inform A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939, a new history of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and its leadership under Governor Douglas Henry Johnston (1898-1902; 1904-1939), whose tenure, according to author Michael W. Lovegrove, was longer than that of any other American Indian executive. …