Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, And The Struggle For Civil Rights In Texas By Brian D. Behnken, Edwin Dorn

Great Plains Quarterly

If you are an African American, a Mexican American, or a progressive Anglo who grew up in Texas in the past century, reading Brian Behnken's book, filled as it is with examples of the state's racism, is sure to tear off a few old scabs. Behnken's main objective, however, is to explain the factors that kept black civil rights activists from working with their Hispanic counterparts to reduce racial segregation and discrimination.

One factor, Behnken argues convincingly, was geography: the battleground for the black struggle was in the eastern part of the state, the Mexican American battleground hundreds of miles …

Review Of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, And Place Edited By Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, And Karla Armbruster, Jenny Kerber

Great Plains Quarterly

Given the emphasis that advocates of bioregionalism have historically placed on principles of decentralization and localization in the development of more ecologically sustainable modes of inhabitation, it is perhaps not surprising that no wide-ranging survey of bioregional literary criticism has appeared on the scene until now. This is a shame, however, because it turns out that examining bioregional practices across cultures and places yields a wealth of new ideas about how to live more sustainably in one's home place. In The Bioregional Imagination, readers finally have access to a much-needed set of comparative perspectives on bioregionalism, ranging from the implementation …

Review Of Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History Edited By Susan A. Miller And James Riding In, Angela Parker

Great Plains Quarterly

Susan Miller and James Riding In position this anthology as the first to collect historical work from Native scholars participating in an "Indigenous discourse"-an academic conversation "rooted in North American Indigenous thought" and, they claim, global Indigenous thought. If your essentialism alarm bells are ringing, it is for good reason. Ignore the alarms long enough to work your way through the entire anthology and you will find rich, complicated, vibrant historical analysis and critique from Indigenous historians working in Canada and the United States.

The introduction and framing essays by Susan Miller in part 1 elaborate on the idea of …

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2013 Vol. 33 No.4 -- Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Making War On Jupiter Pluvius The Culture And Science Of Rainmaking In The Southern Great Plains, 1870-1913, Michael R. Whitaker

Great Plains Quarterly

For two weeks in August 1891, the grounds of the "C" Ranch in rural West Texas thundered with the sound of explosions, as a federal government- sponsored expeditionary force hurled hundreds of pounds of heavy ordnance against an invisible enemy. In command of this unusual operation was "General" Robert Dyrenforth, who with $9,000 of congressional funding in pocket was doing his utmost to find out whether, as a bit of folk wisdom ran, the furious tumult and aerial concussions of battle could somehow cause rain. From tiny western hamlets to the metropolises of the East, Americans were fascinated by the …

Eastern Beads, Western Applications Wampum Among Plains Tribes, Jordan Keagle

Great Plains Quarterly

In the seventeenth century, when Europeans first arrived in what are now the New England and mid-Atlantic states, they encountered a wide array of indigenous tribes already calling the land home. The new setrlers soon realized the importance of shell beads called wampum. Manufactured primarily along Long Island Sound, these beads, shaped from marine shells, could be made into belts or grouped as strings.¹ Though whites failed to grasp the nuances of wampum culture, leading to the generalization of wampum as "Indian money," they nevertheless recognized its significance in Native American trade and diplomacy. Eventually, wampum came to be …

The 2013 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, R. Matthew Joeckel

Great Plains Quarterly

After long deliberations by members of three subcommittees and the chairs of those committees, the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize was awarded to Blackfoot Redemption: A Blood Indian's Story of Murder, Confinement, and Imperfect Justice, by William E. Farr, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. As the chair of the prize committee, I am pleased to state that many fine books were submitted for the competition, and that each of them was meritorious in some way. Nevertheless, Blackfoot Redemption is unique among the submissions-and indeed among the vast majority of accounts of Plains Native American lives in …

Review Of Inside The Ark: The Hutterites In Canada And The United States By Yossi Katz And John Lehr, Rod Janzen

Great Plains Quarterly

Geographers Yossi Katz and John Lehr's new book on the Hutterites provides an in-depth analysis of the social life of one of the four branches of the Hutterite Church in North America, the Group 2 Schmiedeleut. In many ways it is also an informative introduction to Hutterite life in general.

Katz and Lehr provide detailed explanations of virtually every aspect of Hutterite life in the province of Manitoba. This includes social and political organization at the colony and intercolony levels, religious and cultural traditions, the impact of space and how it is employed (with helpful charts and images), as well …

Review Of Theodore Roosevelt In The Badlands: A Young Politician's Quest For Recovery In The American West By Roger L. Di Silvestro, Mark Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly

Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have long been aware of the significance of the time he spent in the Badlands of Dakota Territory during the 1880s. After an initial visit in 1883, Roosevelt returned the following year, this time overwhelmed with grief. Earlier that year he had experienced unimaginable personal tragedy when his beloved wife, Alice, and his mother died on the very same day. A few months later TR returned to western Dakota by train, bound for a landscape he hoped would bring him solace, healing, and renewal.

Over the next several years, Roosevelt returned to the Badlands for weeks …

Review Of The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works Edited By Mark Andrew White, Emma I. Hansen

Great Plains Quarterly

Beginning in the 1950s, Arizona collector James T. Bialac assembled an extensive and eclectic collection of Native American art, consisting of approximately 2,500 paintings and 1,500 kachina dolls, baskets, jewelry, pottery, and sculptures. The collection represents several regions, with particular strengths in the southwestern and southeastern United States and the Southern Plains. Produced by the University of Oklahoma in recognition of Bialac's donation of his collection to the university's Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the catalogue provides an overview of this assemblage, featuring images of selected works and accompanying essays.

Following Mary Jo Watson's introduction, ''A Tradition of Appreciation: …

Review Of Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs And U.S. Soldiers On The Upper Missouri, 1854-1868 By Doreen Chaky, Steven C. Haack

Great Plains Quarterly

When strong tensions exist between cultures, small incidents can have grave consequences. Thus, in August of 1854, when a Sioux Indian living near Fort Laramie, Nebraska Territory, found a lame cow and killed it to feed his family, a sad chapter began. The cow's emigrant owner complained of his loss to the fort's commander, and Lt. John Grattan was soon on his way to a Sioux encampment to demand that the thief be turned over to face justice. As a cannon rolled into place to reinforce his demand, violence broke out, and thirty soldiers, including Grattan, soon lay dead. Secretary …

Review Of Hell Of A Vision: Regionalism And The Modem American West By Robert L. Dorman, Allen Frost

Great Plains Quarterly

This thorough study of the American West takes as a given the region's contested and continuously shifting identity among scholars as well as among artists, activists, and government agencies. One of Robert Dorman's many contributions to the field in Hell of a Vision is his decision to chart the formations of these multiple Wests alongside each other, from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The primary texts examined here range from the canonical to the unexpected. Dorman's archive begins with John Wesley Powell's maps of the "Arid Region," produced in 1891 for the U.S. Geological …

Review Of Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past And Present By Jean A. Boyd, John Mark Dempsey

Great Plains Quarterly

The patrons of Saturday-night Texas dance halls still two-step to the music of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, more than thirty-five years after Wills's death. Jean Boyd is one of the Texas music authors who has mythologized Wills in her previous "We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills": An Oral History (2003) and The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (1998). In her newest book, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present, Boyd puts the spotlight on less well known practitioners of the music that Wills pioneered along with …

Review Of Living With American Indian Art: The Hirschfield Collection By Alan J. Hirschfield With Terry Winchell, Heather Ahtone

Great Plains Quarterly

As the reality sets in that Native Americans have not become the vanishing race, their continuum of artistic excellence is underscored in the collection amassed by Alan and Berte Hirschfield. Living with American Indian Art documents how these avid collectors have integrated a broad range of cultural materials into a private Wyoming home, reflecting their collecting passion and broad interests. From the TIingit baskets to the Zia pottery to the Cheyenne buckskin dresses, the Native arts found in the Hirschfield collection are exquisite works, in keeping with Alan Hirschfield's mantra, "When you see something beautiful, buy it!"

The Diminishment Of The Great Sioux Reservation Treaties, Tricks, And Time, Alan L. Neville, Alyssa Kaye Anderson

Great Plains Quarterly

Historically, Indian-white relations have been marred by mistrust and dishonesty. This is especially true in numerous land dealings between the United States government and the Lakota/ Dakota/Nakota people of the northern Great Plains. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court noted, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."¹

Our focus here is to chronicle and analyze the tragic diminishment of the Great Sioux Reservation, first established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.² The land loss progressed with the Homestead Act of 1862, Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, …

Review Of Weapons Of The Lewis And Clark Expedition By Jim Garry, Brooke Wibracht

Great Plains Quarterly

Jim Garry's recent publication offers a meticulous assessment of the Corps of Discovery's arsenal. One of Garry's goals centers on correcting outdated information from well-known books, about the Corps and the weaponry the men carried, especially Carl P. Russell's Guns of the Early Frontiers (1957). The author acknowledges that historians have continuously advanced the scholarship on the Corps' weaponry, but misconceptions about the arsenal still exist, muddying the historical record. He encourages readers to view his book as a tool for placing the expedition and the weapons of the early nineteenth century in an accurate historical context.

The volume contains …

Review Of I'Ll Be Here In The Morning: The Songwriting Legacy Of Townes Van Zandt By Brian T. Atkinson, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas's Townes Van Zandtwas a musician's musician whose fame grew after his 1996 death. Brian T. Atkinson, contributor to the Austin AmericanStatesman, Texas Music, Lone Star, American Songwriter, and No Depression, has woven together a collection of interviews from Van Zandt's contemporaries and friends, as well as his musical heirs-singer-songwriters who grew up too late to have known the troubled author of "Pancho and Lefty," "Tecumseh Valley," and "Lungs" but who admired his dark, poetic lyrics.

Review Of Villages On Wheels: A Social History Of The Gathering To Zion By Stanley B. Kimball And Violet T. Kimball, W. Paul Reeve

Great Plains Quarterly

Villages on Wheels is the culmination of historian Stanley B. Kimball's more than fifteen years' research on and long career as a scholar of the Mormon Trail. When he died in 2003, his wife, Violet, a writer, photojournalist, and occasional student of the trail herself, completed the project. This social history, a detailed examination of the everyday aspects of creating and maintaining a mobile society, is the result of their collaboration.

Based upon "hundreds of journals"-mostly located at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Church History Library in Salt Lake City, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at …

Review Of A Geography Of Blood: Unearthing Memory From A Prairie Landscape By Candace Savage, Susan Naramore Maher

Great Plains Quarterly

Candace Savage and her companion Keith Bell first discovered Eastend, Saskatchewan, on a journey home to Saskatoon from Cody, Wyoming. They planned a brief stopover but ended up hooked on the town, returning for further visits, and finally buying a home. In a sense, Savage has been pursuing a deeper habitation of Eastend for many years. As a recent transplant, she has sought to understand this comer of Saskatchewan across many spatial manifestations and through many layers of cultural existence. A frequent visitor to the Wallace Stegner House, immortalized in Wolf Willow, she has also worked to uproot Stegner's …

Review Of The Indianization Of Lewis And Clark By William Swagerty, Clarissa W. Confer

Great Plains Quarterly

This two-volume work sets out to chronicle and analyze the process of change experienced by the men of the Corps of Discovery as they traveled through the homelands of diverse American Indian cultures on their way to the Pacific and back. Doubtlessly, an undertaking as bold and arduous as the Lewis and Clark expedition altered those who experienced it. One could examine these changes a variety of ways. Here, author William Swagerty focuses on the intersection between Euro- American and Native American cultures-the point at which white men traded aspects of their culture for those of the people they had …

Sibley’S Winnebago Prisoners: Deconstructing Race And Recovering Kinship In The Dakota War Of 1862, Linda M. Waggoner

Great Plains Quarterly

On October 21, 1862, two months following the first violent outbreak of the U.S. and Dakota War, Alonzo J. Edgerton, captain of Company B of the Tenth Minnesota Regiment, pursued “quite a young looking Indian” after he was spotted crossing the Blue Earth River headed toward the Winnebago Indian Agency, twelve miles east of Mankato in Blue Earth County. Unarmed and riding bareback, Edgerton’s suspect was not a Dakota warrior on the lam but a Ho-Chunk Indian trying to return home. Nothing but a dirty rag covered his head, while his pierced ear lobes flashed a pair of shiny brass …

“Ever Since The Hanging Of Oliphant” Lynching And The Suppression Of Mob Violence In Topeka, Kansas, Brent M.S. Campney

Great Plains Quarterly

“The most remarkable scene ever enacted in the heart of a great city was witnessed in Topeka last night, in the final act of the tragedy on which the curtain rose with the sunrise yesterday,” reported the Topeka Daily Capital on June 5, 1889. “Twelve hours after the spirit of Alonzo T. Rodgers had taken its flight, his murderer was hung in the very center of the capital city, under the broad glare of the electric light and by a body of ‘vigilantes’ which in its composition was equalled by no other in all the history of the western world.” …

“How Badly Can Cattle And Land Sales Suffer From This?” Drought And Cattle Sickness On The Ja Ranch, 1910–1918, Matthew M. Day

Great Plains Quarterly

Timothy Dwight Hobart, general manager of the JA Ranch in northwestern Texas, had a problem on his hands. Trying to sell his cattle in 1918, he had helped transport hundreds of head of cattle within the ranch. However, J. W. Kent, who was with the JA Ranch for a substantial portion of its history to date, noticed that the cattle were not feeling well. Anthrax had poisoned the cattle, and it was spreading quickly. “We are burning the carcasses,” Hobart wrote, “and not leaving a stone unturned to stamp out the disease.” What was he to do?

In this study …

Crowns Of Honor Sacred Laws Of Eagle-Feather War Bonnets And Repatriating The Icon Of The Great Plains, Leo Killsback

Great Plains Quarterly

I dedicate this article to all the current Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four Chiefs, headmen of the warrior societies, and combat veterans, as well as modern tribal leaders, warriors, ceremonial practitioners, and tribal citizens who continue to use eagles in the traditional manner, thus ensuring the survival of the warrior ways.

In 2010 a war bonnet belonging to Oglala Lakota chief Fools Crow was repatriated to hereditary chief Mel Lone Hill of Batesland, South Dakota, which is located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Fools Crow’s war bonnet was of the original warrior types, made of immature golden eagle tail feathers, …

Family, Ethnic Entrepreneurship, And The Lebanese Of Kansas, Jay M. Price, Sue Abdinnour

Great Plains Quarterly

As they entered the elegant lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, Elias G. Stevens and his wife, Handuma, must have marveled at how their lives turned out. They had both been born and raised in what was once the Ottoman province of Syria. They had come to the United States at the turn of the century, found their way to Wichita, Kansas, and worked hard to build a successful candy and tobacco business. They were in New York to meet with representatives from Philip Morris. Surveying the accommodations, however, Handuma noticed a major problem that had to be addressed right away. …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 4 / Fall 2012

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Review Of Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse, The Plague Of Doves Edited By Deborah L. Madsen, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Important North American novels published since 1990, discussed in three parts, each containing three essays on a total of three key recent works: this is the formal straitjacket the publication format of the Continuum Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction imposes on its editors. Each of the nine contributors to this volume is committed to a particular theoretical approach, some so strongly that their essays momentarily turn into handbook articles on the theory in question beforealmost as an afterthought-coming back to Louise Erdrich's novels.

Review Of Norwegians And Swedes In The United States: Friends And Neighbors Edited By Philip J. Anderson And Dag Blanck, Betty A. Bergland

Great Plains Quarterly

Norwegians and Swedes is an international and interdisciplinary collection of essays representing recent scholarship on migration and emphasizing relationships between two groups of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants from Europe. Emerging from a 2007 conference, the book contains seventeen essays by active scholars in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States. Donna R. Gabaccia's thoughtful foreword helps frame the book and informs readers that twenty years ago Rudolph J. Vecoli called for an "interethnic perspective on American immigration history." This collection might be seen as the fruit of that vision. Emerging at! a time when immigration continues to vex the …

Review Of Indigenous Dance And Dancing Indian: Contested Representation In The Global Era By Matthew Krystal, Jacqueline Shea Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a thoughtful, helpful, somewhat unusually focused book that looks at K'iche Maya Traditional Dance in Guatemala, Native American Powwow (particularly in the Upper Midwest), Folkloric dance in the Chicago area, and at the University of Illinois's "Chief Illiniwek" dancing mascot from an anthropologically informed ethnographic perspective. The section on Maya dance comes from the author's dissertation research, while the sections on Indigenous dance and "playing Indian" in the Midwest are from fieldwork he has undertaken, postdissertation, while teaching at North Central College in Illinois. Krystal brings these diverse performance practices into dialogue with each other by looking at …

Review Of A Separate Country: Postcoloniality And American Indian Nations By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Nobody cares about American Indian studies more than Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and her latest book makes that clear. She calls for stronger departments and a dedicated methodology, and bemoans mere interdisciplinary programs, which force scholars to produce research that caters to traditional Western disciplines and promotes what she considers unsuitable intellectual frameworks. In particular, she decries postcolonial theory, favoring decolonization theory instead and the use of Indigeneity as a category of analysis. From that starting point, the author covers a range of important topics. A high point is the chapter discussing non-Indians who fraudulently assume Indian identity. Her overarching critique of …