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Title And Contents- Fall 2009

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 4 / Fall 2009

"DAUGHTERS OF BRITISH BLOOD" OR "HORDES OF MEN OF ALIEN RACE"; THE HOMESTEADS-FOR-WOMEN CAMPAIGN IN WESTERN CANADA

PARALLEL TRACKS, SAME TERMINUS; THE ROLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEWSPAPERS AND RAILROADS IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEBRASKA

"REJOICING IN THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE"; THE IMAGE OF THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE DURING THE FUR TRADE

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories At Historic Reconstructions." By Laura Peers, Sandra Dudley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Based on research carried out over a decade into enactment at five North American reconstructed historic sites in the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes, this is essentially a book about encounters: encounters between Native interpreters and visitors at historic sites, of course-but also encounters between differing preconceptions of history, between ways of life, between people and things, and between the present and the past. Indeed, the chapters are interspersed with "vignettes" or snapshots of such encounters.

All the sites discussed in the book depict the people, activity, and material culture associated with missions and fur trading. They were …

Review Of "The Choctaws In Oklahoma: From Tribe To Nation, 1855-1970." By Clara Sue Kidwell, Robert Keith Collins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scholars of anthropology (particularly historical anthropology), history, and Native American studies interested in Choctaw history, cultural changes, everyday life choices, and contributions to American culture should find The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World important new contributions to the historical literature articulated by strong Choctaw voices. And readers interested in the complexities of Choctaw life in the Southern Plains, how Choctaws interacted with the region's other Indigenous groups (e.g., Kiowas and Comanches), and the inconsistencies between federal policies and Choctaw lived realities over time will be …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 1 / Winter 2009

THE METHODISTS' GREAT 1869 CAMP MEETING AND ABORIGINAL CONSERVATION STRATEGIES IN THE NORTH SASKATCHEWAN RIVER VALLEY

"YOU HAVE TO BE INVOLVED ... TO PLAY A PART IN IT": ASSESSING KAINAI ATTITUDES ABOUT VOTING IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

JIM, ANTONIA, AND THE WOLVES: DISPLACEMENT IN CATHER'S MY ANTONIA

REVIEW ESSAY: WHAT'S CHOCTAW HISTORY-AND WHO GETS TO SAY?

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of Defamiliarizing The Aboriginal: Cultural Practices And Decolonization In Canada. By Julia V. Emberley., Laura Peers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book examines how "representational technologies," including photography and archival material, were used to establish colonial control over Aboriginal families in Canada. Case studies include a critique of photographer Mary Schaffer's images of Aboriginal people in the Rocky Mountains, an analysis of an RCMP file concerning the disappearance of an Inuit woman and children, and a discussion of prairie writer Rudy Wiebe's retelling of Yvonne Johnson's life. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal is a subtle addition to literature on the mechanisms of cultural representation and their dynamics within colonialism, placing these issues especially well within the framework of postcolonial and feminist politics. …

Review Of African Creeks: Estelvste And The Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar, Robbie Ethridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Estelvste, or "black people," in the Creek Indian language, are the subjects of this well-written, absorbing story of the people of African descent whose lot in life cast them with the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama and, after Indian Removal, present- day Oklahoma. Gary Zellar refers to them as African Creeks, distinguishing this particular population from both African Americans, Euro-American Creeks, and Indian Creeks. Such distinctions are necessary to the history of the Creek Indians because, after European contact, Creek lives became irreversibly and forever blended with those of the immigrant populations, yet the Creeks themselves adhered …

Review Of The Comanche Empire. By Pekka Hamalainen, Mariah F. Wade

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Comanche Empire is an important and well-researched book that traces the development of the Comanche nation in the eastern and western borders of the Greater Southwest from the early eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Segmented into eight thematic chapters, this work explores the Comanches' sources of inward power and power over others, but privileges the Comanche perspective to place the author's conclusions within a historical context. Hamalainen's treatment of the complex relationships between the Comanches and other European and Native American societies is unique, particularly as it clarifies the social and trade mechanisms the Comanches established and nurtured …

Book Review: The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp In Southwestern Nebraska Edited By Douglas B. Bamforth, Daniel S. Amick

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

Douglas Bamforth and his colleagues demonstrate in this edited volume the valuable role in modern archaeology for thoughtful reinvestigation of previously studied site locations and archaeological collections. Containing 14 chapters by 11 contributors, The Allen Site includes comprehensive paleoenvironmental research and detailed reanalysis of cultural materials recovered from renowned excavations conducted in the Medicine Creek Basin between 1947 and 1949, deposits that hold a series of human occupations ranging from 10,550 to 8,000 radiocarbon years in age. These new studies provide valuable improvements to our understanding of environmental change and early human adaptations during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene …

Great Plains Research: A Journal Of Natural And Social Sciences Volume 19, Number 1 (Spring 2009): News And Notes

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

News and Notes

Conferences

Lecture Announcement

Call for Papers

Charles E. Bessey Award

Leslie Hewes Award

Book Review: The Arapaho Language By Andrew Cowell, With Alonzo Moss Sr., Neyooxet Greymorning

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

The Arapaho Language is divided into five primary analytical areas on phonology, inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, usage, complex clauses, and syntax. Under these headings an additional 21 subfields and numerous grammatical rules are also provided. One feature that makes this book particularly beneficial is its extensive use of narrative texts, historical accounts, and life experiences of several individuals as examples for discussing how grammatical rules work within the language, which also provides helpful examples of the subtleties, complexity, and flexibility used by Arapaho speakers that differ from other Algonquian languages.

Although it is clear that this book is written primarily …

Book Review: Hard Road West: History And Geology Along The Gold Rush Trail By Keith Heyer Meldahl., Harmon D. Maher Jr.

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

The dust jacket of Hard Road West promises familiar pleasures to John McPhee lovers, and so I picked the book up with great anticipation. McPhee’s works have greatly heightened the interest of writers and readers in the genre of creative nonfiction, and while for me, Keith Meldahl’s work does not quite reach McPhee’s stratospheric heights, for the right audience it is definitely a very good read.

The book is organized from east to west, forward in time, following in detail the wagon trail journey to the California gold fields. That human migration, driven by the search for geologic riches, provides …

Archeological Interpretation Of The Frontier Battle At Mud Springs, Nebraska, Peter Bleed, Douglas D. Scott

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

Between February 4 and 7, 1865, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors engaged a force of U.S. Army soldiers at Mud Springs, Nebraska. Historical records from both sides indicate that this fight marked an early phase of the Indian Wars. Based on systematic metal detections, firearms identification, and terrain analysis, this paper adds archeological insights into the arms and tactics used by the opposing sides. Well-armed Native fighters used terrain to approach U.S. troops, who maintained a defensive posture. U.S. soldiers appear to have dug a rifle pit to see approaching attackers.

The Limits Of International Humanitarian Law, Melissa Eli

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The goal of international humanitarian law is to humanize war in an effort to minimize human suffering and the long-term negative consequences of war. However, despite the adoption by most countries of the Geneva Conventions and other relevant agreements, crimes of war occur in every conflict around the world on a regular basis. Additionally, as the form of warfare changes, so does the implementation and consequences of various war crimes. Genocide, systematic rape, and the use of child soldiers are three of the most significant war crimes facing sub-Saharan Africa today. Each has consequences so severe that specific international laws …

Human Trafficking In The People’S Republic Of China, Annie Dullum

Human Rights & Human Welfare

As China rises to become a superpower and is placed in the national spotlight as the host for the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, China is struggling to represent its ability to be powerful and stable within its own borders resulting from a staggering human rights record. Among the policies contributing to human rights violation, population controls are in place that create barriers to residence and immigration, which means that desperate individuals cannot legally move to other countries. As well, Chinese citizens are vulnerable to the practices of traffickers who move individuals illegally around the world.

Child Labor In Latin America: Poverty As Cause And Effect, Michaelle Tauson

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Throughout much of the developing world, children make up an alarming portion of the workforce. These children are robbed of their childhood in order to provide economic supplementation to their families. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 5.7 million children in Latin America participate in the regional workforce (2006). It is a common misconception that children, who do not participate in the formal workforce, are not child laborers. However, the ILO defines child labor as any work that is detrimental to a child’s well-being or interferes with a child’s education. Due to the many categories and classifications of child …

Violated: Women’S Human Rights In Sub-Saharan Africa, Kathryn Birdwell Wester

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), women are facing human rights abuses unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Despite the region’s diversity, its female inhabitants largely share experiences of sexual discrimination and abuse, intimate violence, political marginalization, and economic deprivation.

Religious Freedom, Democracy, And International Human Rights, John Witte Jr., M. Christian Green

Faculty Articles

Clearly, religion and freedom do not yet coincide in many countries, however rosy their new constitutional claims are as to religious rights and freedoms for all. Apostasy, Blasphemy, Conversion, Defamation, and Evangelization-these are the new alphabet of religious rights violation in a number of regions around the world. Occurring at the intersection of religion and international human rights, these violations are also challenges to the universality of human rights and the democratic institutions that generate and affirm them.

Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …

Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …

Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed By Jared Diamond (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), Kathleen Florita

Global Tides

Book review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005).

Legitimizing The Invented Congolese Space: The Gaze From Within In Early Congolese Fiction, Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Postcolonial discourses describe colonization as a process of invention to impose the will of a conquering West on "backward" societies. The will to power conjugated with the need for row materials served as the main catalysts. They put side by side a hegemonic intruder bent on duplicating itself, and a powerless and compliant native unable to react to the blitz of transformations. Hence, the master/slave or father/child relationships that describe the colonial framework. The task is to interrogate these generally accepted assumptions and binary oppositions. Although marginalized, the Congolese native was unwilling to become on object for the colonizer's gaze. …

China’S Infanticide Epidemic, Winter Wall

Human Rights & Human Welfare

China’s one-child policy, initiated to curtail China’s rapid population growth, has resulted in fundamental human rights abuses. Due to the cultural stigma of having female children, the stringent policy has led to millions of female infants being aborted, abandoned, or killed. As China struggles with population control, families are faced with the necessity of bearing male children, who are perceived as being more valuable to the family and who are often charged with the care of their elderly parents. Consequently, the elimination of female infants has created a skewed sex ratio in China’s population—the social, economic, and physical repercussions of …

The Brazilian Paradox: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Battle For Human Rights, Adrienne Rosenberg

Human Rights & Human Welfare

With a rich religious history of Catholicism juxtaposed with a sexually liberal public, Brazil interacts with its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community in a very distinct and often conflicting manner. Although homosexuality has been legal in the state since 1823, save the armed forces, and civil unions are currently permitted in some areas, Brazil has functioned within this paradox as both worst transgressor, with a high record of hate crimes and discrimination, and as world leader, with a progressive domestic and global push for LGBT rights. In order to accurately assess these two opposing statuses, one must analyze the …

The Colonial Legacy And Human Rights In Mexico: Indigenous Rights And The Zapatista Movement, Alexander Karklins

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The current status of human rights in Latin America has been profoundly affected by the legacy of colonial institutions. Since the time of conquest, through colonialism, and after independence, the growth of the Latin American state has been challenged by the alternative discourse of indigenous rights. In Mexico, the dominance of mestizaje (or the quest for a single Mexican ethnic identity) in the formation of its modern state apparatus has left indigenous cultures out of the realm of political participation and exposed to human rights violations. With the Zapatista uprising of 1994-1996, the contradictions inherent in Mexico’s constitution were brought …

Violence Against Sex Workers In Latin America: Pervasiveness, Impunity, And Implications, Stephanie A. Bell

Human Rights & Human Welfare

On December 17, 2005, two transgendered sex workers in Guatemala City were shot in the head, one fatally. Witnesses—including the survivor—alleged that police forces shot the victims. Human rights advocates have argued that the attack was part of a broader social cleansing campaign that has targeted all sex workers.

Sex workers in Latin America are subjected to violence regularly. This violence varies greatly, but its pervasiveness and the impunity for perpetrators are two common themes. Violence against sex workers comes from many different sources: police, pimps, johns, serial killers, gang members and others. The violence also takes many forms, including …

Chinese New Year In West Kalimantan: Ritual Theatre And Political Circus, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since 2002, when Chinese New Year became a national holiday in Indonesia, spirit medium parades on the fifteen day of the New Year (called Cap Go Meh) have been growing in size in certain West Kalimantan towns, especially Singkawang. This parade in particular has become a major tourist draw-card. Referring to local history, Chinese popular religion and Hakka culture, this article applies a performance analysis methodology to dissect this contemporary phenomenon from religious, historical and inter-ethnic perspectives. It shows how the parades have become enmeshed in current inter-ethnic politics in West Kalimantan, as well as revealing the way that adaptations …

Loss, Gain, Survival: Women In Bangladesh, Caitlin Harrison

Theses : Honours

This dissertation explores the changing public and private paradigms of Bangladeshi women in a modernising society, and investigates the aspects of modernisation that are driving such change. It argues that there is a rising level of violence against women, as traditional patriarchal paradigms meet modernisation and the Western hegemony. While modernisation has been instrumental in encouraging the integration of women into the public sphere, the Western assumption that modernisation will increase women's empowerment in an incremental manner ignores the new issues and tensions that modernisation creates. ·In both the public and private spheres, women's empowerment in Bangladesh is a constant …

Whose Peoples’ Games?, James Leibold

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With the self-professed slogans of the Green Olympics, High-tech Olympics and the People’s Olympics, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) should have anticipated criticism. It left nothing to chance in hosting the world’s athletes and spectators—gleaming stadia, smiling faces and blue skies: all as ordered. But as many Western observers noted, BOCOG forgot to invite the Chinese people—with security guards, CCTV cameras and robot-like volunteers ensuring little spontaneity or popular emotion at the so-called People’s Games.

In the wake of the unprecedented media coverage of China’s global “coming out party,” few have paused to consider who and …

Socio-Economic And Cost Of Living Indicators Among Foreign And Domestic-Born Latino Nationalities In The New York Metropolitan Area, 2005, Howard Caro-López

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report focuses on comparing socio-economic conditions between foreign born and domestic born populations among the major Latino national groups in the New York City metropolitan area as of 2005.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: New York City Latinos lag considerably behind all other groups in terms of total family income. While median family income for non-Hispanic white residents far …

Washington Heights/Inwood Demographic, Economic, And Social Transformations 1990 – 2005 With A Special Focus On The Dominican Population, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This report examines demographic and socioeconomic factors concerning New York City based Latinos in Washington Heights and Inwood – particularly Dominicans.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: Since the 1980s the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights/Inwood has been transformed by the immigration of a large Latino population of whom Dominicans have been the most prominent national group. Latinos made up …