American Studies Commons^™

Review Of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays By Roger Epp. Edmonton, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the aftermath of the 1996 release of the massive report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and Canada's subsequent official statement of regret for the "Indian policies" that successive governments have pursued down to our own day, "We Are All Treaty People: History, Reconciliation and the 'Settler Problem'" is arguably this book's most provocative essay. Roger Epp begins by asserting that the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Euro-Canadian settlers who came afterward "constitutes a ... powerful common history, inherited, not chosen, whose birthright we can either disavow, because its burdens are too great, or else make our …

Review Of Braiding Histories: Learning From Aboriginal Peoples' Experiences And Perspectives By Susan Dion, Lynne Davis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In its final report in 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed that Canadians have little knowledge of Aboriginal people, the issues of importance to them, and the history that underlies Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relationships today. How can this be changed? In Braiding Histories, Susan Dion takes up the complexities of transforming the consciousness of non-Aboriginal people through education.

The book is organized around three focal points. First, the author and her brother Michael Dion {re)write and {re}tell the life stories of several Aboriginal people, including Beothuk survivor Shanawdithit, the Plains Cree leader Mistahimaskwa, and the writers' mother, Audrey Dion, …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 30/ Number 3 / Summer 2010 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Bringing The War Home The Patriotic Imagination In Saskatoon, 1939-1942, Brendan Kelly

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War, noted historian Gerald D. Nash argued that the war, more than any other event in the West's history, completely altered that region.1 There is as yet no equivalent of Nash's fine study for the Great Plains north of the forty-ninth parallel, or what Canadians call the "prairies."² This gap notwithstanding, historians of western Canada have begun to explore at least one key aspect of Nash's research: the war's impact on cities. Since 1995 there have been three histories of urban centers in wartime: Red Deer (Alberta), Lethbridge …

Review Of Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating The Journals Of Lewis And Clark: The Complete Collection By Charles Fritz, Rock Hushka

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The traditional Lewis and Clark buff will find much enjoyment in Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark: The Complete Collection. Fritz's delineation gives accurate impressions of the majesty of diverse topographies, ranging from the low-slung prairies of Nebraska to the rugged mountain chains at the Great Divide. His depictions of the North Dakota winter convey the special quality of light produced only by the frigid stillness of the High Plains. Fritz has an extraordinary ability to paint water, from the slow grace of the Missouri River to the thundering falls on the Columbia to …

Review Of Music Of The First Nations: Tradition And Innovation In Native North America Edited By Tara Browner, Anna Hoefnagels

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of nine essays examines diverse traditions and issues in contemporary Native American music from a variety of perspectives. The anthology also covers a wide geographic span, ranging from the Inuits of northern Canada to the Choctaws of Mississippi, and the Passamaquoddies of New Brunswick in eastern Canada to the Coast Salish of western Washington. Many of these chapters highlight the movement of Aboriginal people and their music, as well as the transformations and retentions that characterized these movements and interactions with other Aboriginal groups and European settlers. An article addressing intertribal powwow music and another on country music …

Review Of Anthology Of New Perspectives Edited By John R. Wunder And Kurt E. Kinbacher, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book grew out of the ninth biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference on North American Studies hosted by the Renvall Institute at the University of Helsinki in 2002. It thus includes significant coverage of Canadian as well as American Indian history and several comparative studies of Canadian and American tribes. It is also wide ranging in terms of disciplines, including historical, anthropological, and literary studies.

Of the volume's seventeen articles, nine are authored by scholars either trained in or currently teaching at Finnish and Canadian institutions, thereby contributing an international flavor to the collection. The complexities of Metis identity …

Review Of Class And Race In The Frontier Army: Military Life In The West, 1870-1890 By Kevin Adams, Samuel Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Class and Race in the Frontier Army is social history first, military second. Adams has two theses: that an "enormous class division" trumped ethnicity, but not race, and that military historians have sought comfort in depicting the army as socially isolated, a unique institution. A book so critical deserves critique; Class and Race is both a laudable effort to connect military to social history, and a product of late twentieth-century graduate school, producing focused insights and reminding us of the big picture, but leaving the mid-level blurry. Adams's historiographical undertone is that whiteness scholars have exaggerated the racialization of European …

"Picturing The Past" Farm Women On The Grasslands Frontier, 1850-1900, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

According to a widely used, recently published college survey text about westward expansion in the United States, "rural life in the great open spaces of the trans-Mississippi west was filled with hard work, monotony, and often stultifying isolation." The textbook goes on to say, "Nowhere were the physical hardships more starkly revealed than in the lives of pioneer women." The authors emphasize this point with a passage from Hamlin Garland's autobiography describing his family's pioneer experience on the prairie: '''My heart filled with bitterness and rebellion, bitterness against the pioneering madness which had scattered our family, and rebellion toward my …

Review Of An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs By Allan Blakeney, John C. Courtney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As NDP premier of his adopted province for eleven years, Allan Blakeney was one of the main combatants in the federal-provincial turf wars of the 1970s and early 1980s over resource development and taxation and the patriation of the Canadian constitution. Before entering active politics he spent a decade as a public servant in Saskatchewan. For four years he served as a cabinet minister responsible for, successively, three key departments (education, finance, and health), and seven years on the opposition benches (one as leader of the opposition). By the time he left active politics in 1988, Blakeney had devoted thirty-eight …

Review Of Survivance: Narratives Of Native Presence Edited By Gerald Vizenor, Lisa Cole

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, first introduced in Manifest Manners (1994), articulates a means of conceiving new expressions of Native life, free from the simulated "Indian," thereby highlighting the cultural value of precontact history. In this anthology, eighteen scholars variously acknowledge Vizenor's contribution of survivance to literary analysis and the wide-ranging applications of his insights to contexts such as language, race, and culture.

Vizenor functions as both a contributor to and editor for this volume. His organization of the chapters is particularly noteworthy in the intricate ways each one relates to those in close proximity. Thus, he enters into …

Review Of Branding Texas: Performing Culture In The Lone Star State By Leigh Clemons, Paula Marks

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Leigh Clemons identifies Texas cultural identity as composed of "a complex set of performances" reinforcing ideas about the state's distinctiveness and its inhabitants' lives and values. She examines a number of cultural and historical depictions of Texas people and events, not surprisingly finding that the privileged cultural identity is that born of the Texas Revolution, with forceful Anglo males at center stage and other, less powerful groups on the periphery challenging the dominant narrative.

Clemons begins with "archival spaces of Texan cultural memory," including the Alamo and other Revolutionary battlefields. Here she examines how the old triumphalist narratives of Anglo-centered …

Review Of Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading The West By Marcia Meredith Hensley, Sandra Schackel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the republication of Letters of a Woman Homesteader in 1982, Elinore Pruitt Stewart's descriptions of homesteading near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, have served as a model for the single woman's homesteading experience. Although Pruitt held her homestead for barely a week before marrying her employer Clyde Stewart, her letters shaped our notions of the homestead experience in the early twentieth century. Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West, a collection of twentieth-century homesteading accounts, many of them in the Great Plains region, greatly expands this genre.

A newcomer to Wyoming in 1983, author Marcia Meredith Hensley recognized that neither …

Review Of Fort Laramie: Military Bastion Of The High Plains By Douglas C. Mcchristian, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the annals of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century, few locations stand out more prominently than Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. During its almost sixty years as an active military post, the fort and the community that grew up around it bristled with the activities of the full array of iconic western figures, from fur traders and overland emigrants to Native Americans and the soldiers and government officials dispatched to deal with them, either through negotiation or military force. With Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains, former National Park Service field historian Douglas C. McChristian breathes …

The Role Of Ecotourism In Biodiversity And Grassland Conservation In Botswana, Glyn Maude, Richard Reading

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Botswana has a variety of ecosystems, all of which support a multitude of wildlife species. The Kalahari is a vast semidesert that covers over 84% of the country. Grasslands along with scattered trees and drought-resistant undergrowth dominate large tracts of the Kalahari’s landscape. The northeastern Kalahari extends into the wetter environments of Botswana—the Okavango Delta, the Savuti, and the Chobe—within which grassland habitats support abundant wildlife species. Botswana is unique in that most of its biodiversity remains intact, with a higher percentage of its total landmass conserved than any other country. Botswana achieves this level of protection primarily through ecotourism, …

Book Review: Healing Traditions: The Mental Health Of Aboriginal Peoples In Canada Edited By Laurence J. Kirmayer And Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Peter Menzies

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In Healing Traditions, the editors have assembled the voices of 29 academics, researchers, and mental health professionals from across Canada as well as Australia and the United States. This distinguished panel offers an important contribution to our understanding of Aboriginal mental health issues and the unique healing processes currently underway in a number of communities. Kirkmayer and Valaskakis contextualize mental health in a distinctive manner, acknowledging how Canada’s First Peoples have been affected by colonization over several hundred years. We learn how historic social policies continue to affect individuals, their families, and the communities in which they live. The …

The World’S Temperate Grasslands Conservation Priorities Great Plains Studies (Spring 2010)

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Plate 2. Identified priorities for conservation of the world’s temperate grasslands. Figure produced by Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2009.

Book Review: Ancient Nomads, Daniel J. Wescott

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Ancient Nomads is the companion book to a Canadian Museum of Civilization exhibition comparing the cultures of nomadic peoples from the Russian and Canadian grasslands. Following an introduction, the “Grasslands” chapter describes the terrain, climate, vegetation, and wildlife in the Russian Steppes and the Canadian Great Plains. The authors then provide a brief archaeological history of both regions from approximately 35,000 to 5,000 years ago. The subsequent chapters provide an overview of various cultural aspects of nomads from the Steppes and the Plains: subsistence, food, transportation, housing, clothing, use of metal, spiritual life, and relationships with other nomadic and sedentary …

Book Review Of James Lovelock: In Search Of Gaia, By John Gribbin And Mary Gribbin, Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

My book review editor asked me what might be relevant to the Great Plains in a biography of James Lovelock, a book I’d suggested as worth reviewing in Great Plains Research. I assured him that much in it either is or should be relevant to the Great Plains and to science researchers working on studies of aspects of the Great Plains.

James Ephraim Lovelock, born on July 26, 1919, of fairly humble origins, did not do well in school, partly because he was dyslexic. In spite of this and other health problems over the years, he went on to …

Book Review: Prairie Dogs: Communication And Community In An Animal Society By C.N. Slobodchikoff, Bianca S. Perla, And Jennifer L. Verdolin, Daniel T. Blumstein

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Prairie dogs (genus Cynomys) are midsized ground squirrels and a sentinel of the Great Plains’ health. Where there are prairie dogs, there are predators. Where there are prairie dogs, the soil is turned over and aerated. Where there are prairie dogs, plant biodiversity is maintained by their intermittent disturbance. Sadly, prairie dogs are vilified by humans: they are shot, poisoned, drowned, sucked out of their burrows with high powered vacuums, and their habitats paved over and converted to housing and shopping centers. In this book, the authors tell us about their studies of social behavior and communication in Gunnison’s …