Cultural History Commons^™

Review Of Women Elders' Life Stories Of The Omaha Tribe: Macy, Nebraska, 2004-2005 By Wynne L. Summers, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I'm not sure that I've ever read such a light volume that carries such heavy contents. This book's dramatic core encompasses the life stories of three women from the Omaha Tribe in Macy, Nebraska: Eleanor Baxter, the first woman elected tribal chairperson; and Alice Saunsoci and Hawate (Wenona Caramony), language teachers and educators. Their stories collectively describe mid to late twentieth-century experiences of American Indian women, each of whom grew up learning, living, and working on the Omaha reservation and off it in what they describe as "multicultural societies" such as in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each returned to the reservation later …

Some Thoughts On "Taking" Pictures Imaging "Indians" And The Counter-Narratives Of Visual Sovereignty, Morgan F. Bell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Soon after its inception the camera became the primary vehicle for producing images of Native Americans. Without question, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century images of Native Americans have been integral in forming the stereotypical ideal of "Indian." For many imaginations, these images have frozen North America's indigenous people, not only in a timeless past but, in essence, outside time. This essay examines photographic images that illustrate this phenomenon and some that dismantle it. The fact that indigenous people picked up the camera long ago to commission and produce their own images, although long overlooked, is a topic that has received …

Review Of Hancock's War: Conflict On The Southern Plains By William Y. Chalfant, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Major General Winfield Scott Hancock headed west from Fort Riley in late March of 1867, well prepared to engage the Cheyennes in western Kansas. Seven companies of infantry, eight of cavalry, and an artillery battery accompanied him. A man with political ambitions, he also brought the press along to publicize his efforts. Hancock had neither knowledge nor curiosity about the culture of the people he sought. He wanted to fight them. "I think it would be to our advantage to have these Indians refuse the demands I intend to make, a war with the Cheyennes would answer our purpose."

Traveling …

Review Essay: Packing, Unpacking, And Repacking The Cinema Of Guy Maddin, George Melnyk

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Guy Maddin is Canada's most unusual filmmaker. He also happens to have a global cult following for his retro b&w films. His stature as a cult filmmaker began almost a quarter of a century ago, when his sophomore film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), was launched at a midnight screening in New York that drew audiences for a year. A Winnipegger by birth, he has become that city's most famous filmmaker and one of the few Canadian film directors with an international following. His New York debut led to a regular stint in the 1990s as a film commentator …

Review Of Playing In Shadows: Texas And Negro League Baseball By Rob Fink, Pellom Mcdaniels Iii

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most underappreciated aspects of American life and history is that of black baseball. Shortly after the invention of the game, African American men began playing as an expression of their status as middle-class professionals. These particular black men had access to leisure time and the disposable income necessary to acquire the proper equipment and pay the necessary fees to participate in organized play. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved African American men who had been introduced to the game by Union soldiers used their ability to play the game as an expression of their independence, as well as a …

Review Of Here You Have My Story: Eyewitness Accounts Of The Nineteenth-Century Central Plains Edited By Richard E. Jensen, Adam R. Hodge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The history of the central Great Plains is at its heart a vast collection of stories about the complex interactions between humans and the grasslands. When American settlers during the nineteenth century ventured into what had hitherto been Indian country, they found that their fortunes were inextricably bound to the whims of the often harsh Plains environment. In Here You Have My Story: Eyewitness Accounts of the Nineteenth-Century Central Plains, readers have the opportunity to view the challenges and triumphs of settling the Plains of present day Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming through the eyes of those who were …

Review Of Like No Other Place: The Sandhills Of Nebraska Photographs And Text By David A. Owen, Drake Hokanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our collective understanding of place benefits greatly from the work of careful observers/ interpreters/writers/photographers who ultimately blend narrative and photographs into an explication of the nature of a region, a county, a town, a neighborhood, or a highway into a book of substance. Such books can bring us far more than straight geography, journalism, sociology, anthropology, or history can alone. Done right, the very cut of the wind and timbre of voices come through, making the place not only clear, but real.

Like No Other Place combines Owen's narrative about time, people, and place in the Nebraska Sandhills with his …

Review Of Native American Performance And Representation Edited By S. E. Wilmer, T. Christopher Aplin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Modern Native American artistic performances originated in the widespread North American ceremonial complexes that combined community-based oral tradition and musical practice with the visual performative arts. Growing out of a 2002 "Ritual and Performance" workshop hosted by editor S. E. Wilmer, Native American Performance and Representation illuminates the links that bind American and Canadian Indigenous traditions to their correlate modernities, their diverse ceremonial rituals to expressive artistic performances. This edited volume casts its net broadly, attempting to "review and assess the changing nature of Native performance strategies in a multicultural society." But it essentially focuses on post-1960s theatrical performances and …

Review Of Clearing A Path: New Ways Of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art Edited By Carmen Robertson And Sherry Farrell Racette, Mary Longman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This exhibition catalogue celebrates the rich and diverse traditional art works made by Aboriginal and Metis artists living in Saskatchewan. These works reveal the seamless historical continuum of art practice on the Plains, from antler and bone carvings and porcupine quill work to beadwork in both oldstyle geometric and abstracted symbolism and to Metis floral designs.

Horacepoolaw Photographer,Mentor,Grandfather, Thomas Poolaw

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are at least 2,000 silver nitrate negatives in the Horace Poolaw collection, and as many stories to go along with them. If you begin to talk about one image, it leads from that story to the next, and the next, and pretty soon two or three hours have gone by. Rather than discussing in detail the images in the Horace Poolaw collection, I would like to discuss Horace Poolaw the man-a complex yet loving individual who was much more than just a photographer. It is still difficult for me to talk about a person whose influence helped shape my …

Modernity, Multiples, And Masculinity Horace Poolaw's Postcards Of Elder Kiowa Men, Laura E. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century commodified aspects of their cultures in order to make a living and sometimes present their identities, history, and artworks in ways that were satisfying to them. Ten vintage postcards from the Oklahoma Historical Society by Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-1984) indicate that he recognized popular tastes for Plains Indian male imagery while both participating in that production and working independently of it. Poolaw printed some of his photographs on postcard stock to sell at local fairs in the early to mid twentieth century. In order for the postcards to appeal …

Review Of Wyoming Range War: The Infamous Invasion Of Johnson County By John W. Davis, Ross F. Collins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book offers a thorough indictment of Wyoming Plains cattlemen at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth asking if we really need another thorough indictment of a group so thoroughly indicted that one more thorough indictment seems like taking yet another swing at a worn-out punching bag. Yes, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in 1892 was controlled by bad men whose arrogance was reflected in a ridiculous scheme doomed to failure. Asa Shinn Mercer told us that in Banditti of the Plains, published only two years after the Johnson County War. And much of his account …

Review Of Spirit Matters: Ron [Gyo-Zo] Spickett, Artist, Poet, Lay-Priest By Geoffrey Simmins, Leslie Dawn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most surveys of modernist art in the Canadian prairie provinces in the 1960s focus on the annual Emma Lake Workshops. These gatherings brought prominent avant-garde artists such as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland to Saskatchewan and introduced the controversial American critic Clement Greenberg and his ideas on the development of purity, abstraction, and flatness in painting. Yet not all prairie artists who thought of themselves as modernist followed this path. Many of them have been excluded from published histories.

One such artist is Ron Spickett, the subject of a recent retrospective exhibition curated by Geoffrey Simmins. Simmins's complementary book covers …

Review Of The Death Of Meriwether Lewis: A Historical Crime Scene Investigation By James E. Starrs And Kira Gale, James J. Holmberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Was the death of Meriwether Lewis at a backwoods inn on the Natchez Trace on October 11, 1809, suicide or murder? Those on the scene as well as those who knew him best, including Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, all pronounced it a suicide. But was it? Suicide stood as the accepted verdict until the 18408 when the report of the Lewis Monument Committee suggested it was murder. No evidence was given, but once the possibility was raised it grew in popularity and acceptance. Relying on evidence and emotion to reach a conclusion, the two sides in the suicide vs. …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 2 / Spring 2011

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Review Of American Indians And The Fight For Equal Voting Rights By Laughlin Mcdonald, Matthew L. M. Fletcher

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The continuing relevance of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Deep South is an open question for many people, but the importance of the Act in Indian Country cannot seriously be questioned. Laughlin McDonald's powerful book provides a frontline view of the cases brought by American Indians in Nebraska, South Dakota, Montana, and elsewhere. McDonald, the head of the ACLO's Voting Rights Project, himself litigated these cases to successful conclusion on behalf of his Native clients.

In parts of the United States, many state and local governments quietly excluded Indian people from the suffrage until after World War …

Review Of Historic Photos Of Nebraska Text And Captions By Ted Stryker, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the salient features of Great Plains Quarterly is its inclusion of an extensive array of illustrations, maps, and photographs along with most articles. These images are meant to enhance their essays and enrich the reader's understanding of their contexts. Occasionally, pictures say so much that one wishes for more photographs and less text. That's not a weakness of Historic Photos of Nebraska, which contains 192 photographs in its 216 pages.

This is Turner Publishing's second book focused on the region's photographs; the first was Jeffrey Spencer's Historic Photos of Omaha (2007). Using images selected from the Boys …

Acting For The Camera Horace Poolaw's Film Stills Of Family, 1925-1950, Hadley Jerman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the late 1920s, American technology historian Lewis Mumford drafted these words in a manuscript that would become Technics and Civilization. At the same time, Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw began documenting daily life in southwestern Oklahoma with the very technology Mumford alleged altered the way humanity saw itself. As Poolaw began making dramatically posed, narrative-rich portraits of family members, Mumford asserted that the modern individual now viewed him or herself "as a public character, being watched" by others. He further suggested that humankind developed a "camera-eye" way of looking at the world and at oneself as if continuously on display. …

Review Of The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars By Hugh J. Reilly, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a community of scholars, we need to ask more from books like this. Despite a topic ripe with fruitful and compelling potential, Reilly's approach to newspaper coverage of the Plains Indian Wars lacks rigor, nuance, and engagement with contemporary critical conversations.

Reilly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses eight "watershed events," from the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1891. Newspapers throughout the United States, indeed the world, reported on these conflicts. The coverage that appeared in national publications, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune …

Review Of Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective By Christy Stanlake, Julie Pearson-Little Thunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Understanding Native American drama requires a critical perspective often lacking in theater and academia. Christy Stanlake's book helps remedy this problem with a two-fold strategy. First, she identifies four Native-authored discourses generated in part by the study of American Indian fiction and poetry. Then she applies these discourses to readings from nine Native plays, showing how Native philosophies shape Native drama on the page and in performance. Stanlake explains that place, or "platiality," in western theater assumes new dimensions in Native drama, expressing complex relationships among character, language, and landscape. She examines the historical and political aspects of Native storytelling …