Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Book Review: North For The Harvest: Mexican Workers, Growers, And The Sugar Beet Industry By Jim Norris, Maria S. Arbelaez

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

From its origins at the end of the 19th century, the American sugar beet industry has been linked to Mexican immigrant labor. Moreover, the painstaking job of thinning, topping, and harvesting the large and heavy beets became an almost entirely Mexican labor specialty by the turn of the 20th century. Betabeleros, as the Mexican and Mexican-American laborers were and are known, sojourned north from the borderlands to Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, South and North Dakota, Michigan, and Minnesota fields. In each of these states, the sugar beet industry willingly pursued immigrant labor to do the work while immigrant networks did …

Book Review: Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies And Practices By Karen Coody Cooper, Majel Boxer

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In recent years a number of related academic fields have explored the connections between museums and Indigenous peoples. The growth in published monographs and edited volumes has in part been spurred on by the 2004 opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. This monograph raises significant questions and reveals numerous debates surrounding such issues as ownership and access to museum collections and archives; the repatriation of human remains, funerary items, and cultural patrimony; Native American traditional and modern art and art museums; the need for consultation and collaboration with Indigenous peoples and communities; and the …

Book Review: Lipset’S Agrarian Socialism: A Re-Examination Edited By David E. Smith, Jim Mochoruk

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Seymour Martin Lipset, rather famously associated with the concept of “American Exceptionalism” and renowned as one of the leading practitioners of political sociology in the United States, was better known in Canada for works that seemed to make little, if any, impression upon U.S. readers. First and foremost was his landmark study of the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation’s (CCF) rise to political power in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan—Agrarian Socialism. It is the stuff of legend in Canadian academic circles how a young PhD student—a Jewish leftist from New York no less—came to Saskatchewan in the mid …

Proposed Standards And Guidelines For Private Nature Reserves In The Northern Great Plains, Curtis Freese, Dawn Montanye, Steve Forrest

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

More than three-quarters of the land in the Northern Great Plains is privately owned and less than 2% of the region is in public protected areas; therefore, sound private-land management is critical for restoring and conserving the region’s biodiversity. Although considerable progress has been made in recent years in fostering and assembling nature reserves on private lands in various regions of the world, this approach has received little attention in North America, including the Northern Great Plains. We review here recommendations, trends and issues related to private protected areas globally and in Canada and the United States. We then discuss …

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

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, …

Global Trends In Private Protected Areas And Their Implications For The Northern Great Plains, Jeff Langholz

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Like many parts of the world, the Northern Great Plains faces immense challenges to sustainable land use. Privately owned conservation areas have emerged as a potential solution. This article reviews five global trends in so-called private protected areas and discusses their implications for the Northern Great Plains. The trends point to five recommendations to the Northern Great Plains community: (1) act now to tap rapidly growing policy support; (2) combine many models, including private protected areas that are owned by individuals and groups, formal and informal, large and small, and are dedicated to strict protection as well as sustainable use; …

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

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 …

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

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 …

Book Review: Thunder And Herds: Rock Art Of The High Plains By Lawrence L. Loendorf, Linea Sundstrom

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Archaeology is often described as detective work. In this detailed exploration of the High Plains of Colorado and New Mexico, archaeologist Lawrence Loendorf proves as adept as Sherlock Holmes in bringing diverse and often surprising clues to bear on understanding the who, when, where, and why of ancient rock carvings and paintings. From climate change to cultural migrations to landscape, Loendorf carefully reconstructs the contexts, cultural and physical, in which long-ago and not-so-long-ago American Indians created this complex array of images.

The twin joys of archaeology are discovery and the challenge of filling in missing pieces of history. The former …

News And Notes Great Plains Studies (Spring 2010)

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

CONFERENCES

PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

CHARLES E. BESSEY AWARD

LESLIE HEWES AWARD

THE GREAT PLAINS DISTINGUISHED BOOK PRIZE

Book Review: Large-Scale Ecosystem Restoration: Five Case Studies From The United States Edited By Mary Doyle And Cynthia A. Drew, Rich Walters

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This book focuses on how the adaptive management process is driving watershed-wide, science-based collaborative restoration efforts in the Everglades, the Platte River Basin, the California Bay-Delta, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Upper Mississippi River. The adaptive management process, driven by a federal mandates, is used in each restoration project to resolve scientific uncertainties as well as conflicts among diverse local stakeholders. All five case studies deal with the overarching issue of water quality and quantity. Restoring historic hydrologic regimes in areas where human developments have altered hydrology is the ecological goal of each of these projects. This conflict between consumptive …

Conservation And Economic Lessons Learned From Managing The Namibrand Nature Reserve, Nils Odendaal, Danica Shaw

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The NamibRand Nature Reserve, located in southern Namibia, is a private nature reserve established to protect and conserve the unique ecology and wildlife of the southwest Namib Desert. At 172,200 ha, NamibRand is one of the largest private conservation areas in southern Africa. The reserve consists of 13 former livestock farms rehabilitated into a continuous natural conservation area and shares a 100 km border with the Namib-Naukluft National Park. The reserve is a model for private conservation in southern Africa, as it demonstrates holistic biodiversity conservation balanced with financial sustainability. Innovative approaches to resource management ensure that this critical area …

Toward A Strategy For The Conservation And Protection Of The World’S Temperate Grasslands, William D. Henwood

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Temperate grasslands are one of the world’s great biomes and were once home to some of the largest assemblages of wildlife the earth has ever known. Today these grasslands are considered the most altered terrestrial ecosystem on the planet and are recognized as the most endangered ecosystem on most continents. While species and habitat declines continue, temperate grasslands have the lowest level of protection of the world’s 14 biomes. With only 4% of the biome under protected status, considerable effort will be required to increase this level of protection. Several international bodies have suggested that achieving at least a 10% …

Book Review: Protection Of First Nations Cultural Heritage: Laws, Policy, And Reform Edited By Catherine Bell And Robert K. Paterson, Katherine Pettipas

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Editors Catherine Bell and Robert Paterson, along with fifteen contributors, have produced a leading-edge work on the complex topic of First Nations cultural heritage and the law in Canada. A companion volume to First Nations Cultural Heritage and Law: Case Studies, Voices, and Perspectives (2008), it is part of the “Law and Society Series” that promotes interdisciplinary approaches to the study of law and society. Underlying both volumes is the premise that material and intangible cultural heritage are inseparable and fundamental to Indigenous human rights and the continuity and revival of the collective identities of First Nations.

At the heart …

Book Review: Remarkable Plants Of Texas: Uncommon Accounts Of Our Common Natives By Matt Warnock Turner, Jackie M. Poole

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

At last: a book dealing with numerous Texas plants that is neither a field guide nor a dry litany of ethnobotanical uses. Remarkable Plants of Texas is an easy, informative, and enjoyable read. Its 65 entries cover over 80 species of some of the most common, well-known, and well-used plants of Texas (many of which also occur in the southeastern or southwestern United States or Mexico). The short (four- to eight-page) chapters are grouped by life form: trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants (also including cacti, grasses, vines, and aquatics). Although most treatments are about a single species, a few cover …

Book Review: Health Care In Saskatchewan: An Analytical Profile By Gregory Marchildon And Kevin O’Fee, Kelly Chessie

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Marchildon and O’Fee set out to provide a detailed description of the Saskatchewan health care system, integrating details of how health care is organized, funded, and delivered in this Canadian prairie province. To accomplish their goal of fostering a better understanding of the provincial health system and its inputs and outcomes, they walk their readers through a thicket of details, including standings on health status indicators; macrolevel organizational structures; financing and expenditures; range of services, resources and technologies; and a sample of semirecent health reforms. They then close with a brief assessment of the system’s performance.

What the authors attempt …

Conserving Mongolia’S Grasslands, With Challenges, Opportunities, And Lessons For North America’S Great Plains, Richard P. Reading, Don Bedunah, Sukh Amgalanbaatar

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Mongolia and North America contain expansive grassland ecosystems that remain sparsely populated, dominated by agriculture, and support relatively isolated human communities dependent on natural resources. Until recently Mongolians raised livestock using extensive pastoralism without seriously threatening most of the region’s biodiversity. Yet that changed rapidly following the recent transition from a communist, command-control economy to a democratic, free-market economy. The main challenges to protecting biodiversity on grasslands in Mongolia include overgrazing, poaching, mining, and inadequate management, training, and resources. Mongolia and the Great Plains both retain great opportunities for biodiversity conservation that could also benefit local people. Mongolia has begun …

Lessons Learned From Biodiversity Conservation In The Private Lands Of Laikipia, Kenya, Siva R. Sundaresan, Corinna Riginos

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Increasingly, private land around the world is being set aside for conservation. The Laikipia District in Kenya is one area where wildlife conservation has been relatively successful on privately owned lands. This region supports a higher diversity of large mammals than any other region in East Africa, yet only 2% of the district is formally protected. Land is mostly owned and managed by private ranchers or groups of Maasai families on “group ranches.” In most private ranches, wildlife conservation and tourism have become important sources of revenue over the last two decades. Wildlife, once merely tolerated, are now considered desirable …

Grasslands Of The World Great Plains Research (Spring 2010)

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Grasslands of the World Map

Plate 1. Grasslands discussed in this special issue are highlighted and illustrated. Figure produced by N. Bragin, Denver Zoological Foundation. Sources: ESRI World Robinson template and Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World, 2001; World Wildlife Fund – US, 2004; and Olson et al. 2001, Terrestrial ecoregions of the world: A new map of life on earth, BioScience 51:933-38.

Cattle Ranching And Biodiversity Conservation As Allies In South America’S Flooded Savannas, Almira Hoogesteijn, Rafael Hoogesteijn

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Cattle ranching in Latin America supports wildlife conservation. Ranching probably represents one of the few land uses in which we can advance conservation goals. The approximately 950,000 km2 of Bolivian, Brazilian, Paraguayan, Colombian, and Venezuelan savannas that are privately owned and dedicated to meat production provide a model for conservation programs. We present a geographic and historical description that covers several centuries and ends with descriptions of seven successful cattle ranches (three in the Venezuelan Llanos and four in the Brazilian Pantanal) where cattle ranching, ecotourism, and wildlife conservation coexist. These three activities support each other: tourism creates additional income …

Book Review: The Power Of The Texas Governor: Connally To Bush By Brian Mccall, Sean P. Cunningham

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

According to Brian McCall, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives since 1991, the governorship of Texas is an office designed for individuals with the ability to project power in creative ways—beyond the mere execution of expressed authority, and with the complementary skill of a strong vision-casting and agenda-setting leadership style. Put another way, in The Power of the Texas Governor: Connally to Bush, McCall, who equates power to “a social game,” boldly claims that the Texas governorship stands as among the best laboratories for any study of human behavior. McCall attempts to use that laboratory to …

Book Review: One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record By Candace S. Greene, Phillip Earenfight

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In One Hundred Summers, Candace Greene examines a recently discovered bundle of heavily worn Kiowa calendar drawings by one of the great Kiowa calendar keepers, Silver Horn, now in the collections of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH). The loose drawings, once bound in a ledger book, document events from 1828 to 1929, a period that brought unprecedented change to the Kiowas.

Greene opens her study with an introduction to the Kiowa calendar tradition, followed by two shorter chapters dealing specifically with Silver Horn’s calendar at the SNOMNH. Chapter 4 presents the 64 surviving sheets that …

Book Review: Strengths And Challenges Of New Immigrant Families: Implications For Research, Education, Policy, And Service Edited By Rochelle L. Dalla, John Defrain, Julie Johnson, And Douglas A. Abbott, Katherine Fennelly

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Strengths and Challenges of New Immigrant Families is a multidisciplinary compendium of articles and essays about immigrants and refugee families. Most (but not all) of the studies were conducted in the Great Plains states. The authors include academics, providers, and policy advocates. The work is well intentioned, but demonstrates the risks of compiling conference papers into a book; the result is a tome of variable quality. Indeed, in the introduction the editors acknowledge that it was a challenge “arranging the final manuscripts into a coherent whole.” That said, one value of the book is the inclusion of research on a …

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

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

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: Rewilding The West: Restoration In A Prairie Landscape By Richard Manning, Mace Hack

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Rewilding the West gives a first impression of being the story of an innovative conservation project—creation of a 3.5 million-acre wildlife preserve from both public and private lands, restocked with bison and other traditional Plains wildlife—in the Missouri Breaks of eastcentral Montana. However, Manning only devotes thirteen pages to the project at the end of the book, with a few additional references to it scattered throughout. Instead, he traces the history of the site, from the days of the bison to modern times. In doing so, he provides a fascinating and useful frame of reference for current conservation efforts in …

Book Review: Cranes: A Natural History Of A Bird In Crisis By Janice M. Hughes, Paul A. Johnsgard

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Janice Hughes’s research has mostly involved evolutionary studies of cuckoo-like birds. Thus I would not have expected her to produce what is easily the best account of America’s effort to save from extinction the whooping crane, one of our rarest and, arguably, most beautiful birds. Over the years there have been several book-length accounts of these efforts, by authors such as Robert Doughty, J.J. McCoy, Faith McNulty, and Jerome Pratt. None of these is as complete, as well written, or as compelling as this book. Additionally, it is the most up-to-date, bringing the story of the whooping crane’s recovery program …

Book Review: Transplanting The Great Society: Lyndon Johnson And Food For Peace By Kristin L. Ahlberg, R. Douglas Hurt

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In 1954 the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, commonly known as Public Law 480, established a new food aid program designed to eliminate agricultural surpluses and improve farm prices. Although Congress also intended it to expand foreign trade, encourage foreign economic development, and enhance the foreign policy of the United States, Lyndon Johnson used Public Law 480 as a political tool to extend the principles of the Great Society internationally and, most importantly, fight Communist expansion. Rechristened as the Food for Peace program in 1959, Lyndon Johnson later transformed it from a domestic agricultural policy to a foreign policy …

Book Review: Kiowa Ethnogeography By William C. Meadows, Michael P. Jordan

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

With his latest book Meadows has made a significant contribution to our understanding of Native American ethnogeography. Comprehensive in scope, the work addresses the Kiowa people’s evolving relationship to the land from their initial migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to contemporary life in rural southwestern Oklahoma. Meadows demonstrates that the Kiowa people have maintained a sense of homeland throughout two episodes of migration, confinement to a reservation, and the allotment of tribal lands in 1901. After providing a useful overview of research on Native American ethnogeography, he delves into a discussion of Kiowa interactions with the environment …

Book Review: Lost Tracks: Buffalo National Park, 1909-1939 By Jennifer Brower, Alan Maceachern

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Buffalo National Park stands as both a high and a low point in the history of the Canadian national park system. In 1908, it was created near Wainwright, Alberta, as a reserve, and soon a park, to house Plains bison being shipped from Montana; the park’s existence helped to restore the near-extinct species. The bison population grew too swiftly, in fact, leading to deteriorated range conditions and rampant tuberculosis. In a misguided attempt to alleviate this pressure, the Parks Branch in the 1920s shipped tubercular Plains bison to Wood Buffalo National Park, consequently infecting and hybridizing the purebred wood bison …

Book Review: The Grace Abbott Reader Edited By John Sorensen With Judith Sealander, Sonya Michel

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Those familiar with the Abbott sisters generally regard Grace as the doer, Edith as the thinker. Both were leading Progressive-Era reformers, but while Edith made her mark as a pioneering social work educator and theorist, Grace—a one-time resident of Hull House who fought for women’s suffrage, immigrant rights, and child welfare—went on to become the second chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and gained a reputation as a powerful advocate and effective administrator. Along the way, however, Grace Abbott also wrote a number of articles and speeches that reflect deep thought as well as strong beliefs in equality and progress. …