Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, And Healing By Jo-Ann Episkenew, Keavy Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Metis scholar and activist Jo-Ann Episkenew examines the potential of literature to assist Canadian Indigenous communities in healing from the impacts of colonial government policy in this, her first scholarly monograph. While the discourse of "healing" has been a central feature of both bureaucratic and academic discussions of Indigenous issues since the 1990s, Episkenew's study appears at a time when the detrimental effects of policies like the residential school system are again gaining public attention as Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission gets underway. The book contains a useful overview of the government interventions that have impinged upon Indigenous peoples in …

Review Of Replenishing The Earth: The Settler Revolution And The Rise Of The Anglo-World, 1783-1939 By James Belich, Jon Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the early modern era, the great powers of the world enjoyed a rough parity of strength. But in the nineteenth century, during a great "divergence," the Anglo-American world gained ground over the others. Some historians have attributed this to inherent advantages of Anglo-Saxon culture, others to the natural resources of the Anglo world, and others to its growth-promoting institutions. James Belich believes historians must also consider another factor, what he calls the Anglo-American "Settler Revolution" of the nineteenth century.

Other European powers, Belich argues, did not have the staying power of the Anglo-American world. The Dutch, for example, had …

Review Of Gateway To The Northern Plains: Railroads And The Birth Of Fargo And Moorhead By Carroll Engelhardt, Kimberly K. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One worries about the editorial staff at the University of Minnesota Press in determining to accept the manuscript for Gateway to the Northern Plains. You can almost see them scratching their heads, frustrated with the job of marketing a volume that could belong in every section of every bookstore and could find an appropriate home on the shelf of any scholar of the American experience. Indeed, that is the delightful challenge of Carroll Engelhardt's labor of love. Engelhardt, an emeritus professor of history at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, clearly devoted years of research and writing to the preparation of …

Review Of First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact Of Indigenous Thought In Canada Edited By Annis May Timpson, Priscilla Settee

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This timely collection offers perceptive, thought-provoking perspectives on contemporary issues Indigenous communities face. Privatization, governance, language preservation, museums, public policy, and official knowledge are some of the topics the book tackles. Written by a range of seasoned and emerging scholars, First Nations, First Thoughts is organized into five subject areas (each containing two or three papers): challenging dominant discourses; oral histories; cultural representation; governance; and political self-determination. The title is a clever response to Thomas Flanagan's First Nations? Second Thoughts (2000). One of the articles rebuts the content of this infamous, rather anti-Indigenous-sovereignty book. Because Flanagan is consulted on issues …

Review Of Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining The Bird In British Romantic And Contemporary Native American Literature By Thomas C. Gannon, Frederick White

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thomas Gannon's verve animates his investigation and contrast of avian images from British Romantic poets and Native American authors. In the introductory chapter, he provides a steadfast theoretical basis grounded in a syncretic psychological-ecotheory. In the next two chapters he meticulously constructs his view that the British Romantic poets' attempt to connect with nature, specifically birds, at the surface level seems accomplished but, with deeper pondering, falls far short of being convincing. Gannon exposes how western expression of nature cannot capture any essence of subject-subject, that is "I-Thou." The second and third chapters explore examples to show avian representation is …

Review Of White Mother To A Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, And The Removal Of Indigenous Children In The American West And Australia, 1880-1940 By Margaret D. Jacobs, Lynette Russell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Comparative studies involving similar historical events in different locales have been neglected over the last few decades, in my opinion to the detriment of history. It is indeed gratifying to see this change with the publication recently of several important comparative works. Two that compare North America with Australia are Penelope Edmonds's outstanding Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (2010) and Katherine Ellinghaus's Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in Australia and the United States, 1887-1937 (2006). To this we can now add Margaret D. Jacobs's important White Mother to …

Review Of Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong By Paul Chaat Smith, Laura M. Furlan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his recent collection of essays, associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian Paul Chaat Smith argues for a reorientation of knowledge about Indian peoples. The essays, all previously published, are sometimes autobiographical, sometimes humorous, and range in topic from Ishi to the Alcatraz occupation. In "The Big Movie," for example, Smith takes on films that feature Indians, from the first moving picture made by Thomas Edison in 1894, Sioux Ghost Dance, to The Searchers, Last of the Mohicans, and Dances with Wolves. Indians, Smith writes, have become "a kind of national mascot." These …

Moneneheo And Naheverien Cheyenne And Mennonite Sewing Circles, Convergences And Conflicts, 1890-1970, Kimberly D. Schmidt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Marie Gerber Petter was skeptical. Born in the Swiss Jura Mountains, she knew that one does not find water in high places. It was 1893 when Marie and her husband, Rodolphe Petter, came to North America for the express purpose of bringing Christianity to Native Americans. After studying English and visiting Mennonite churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas to garner monetary support for their work among the Southern Cheyenne, they made the forty-mile journey from Darlington, Oklahoma Territory, to an area near present-day Hammon by covered wagon. She was in need of water. When she asked, the local Cheyenne chief, …

Review Of Art As Performance, Story As Criticism: Reflections On Native Literary Aesthetics By Craig S. Womack, Mark Rifkin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is a grand experiment. In it, Womack plays with the possibilities of critical form as well as analytic content. One of the commonplaces of Native literary studies is that knowledge is made through story, so artistic production should count as a means of studying the world. Following this line of thought, Womack here blends story with more conventional scholarship, creating a multilayered counterpoint that conveys more the sense of an opening to a conversation than the self-enclosure that can emanate from thesis-driven arguments. In this vein, the pieces collected here-ranging from new short …

Review Of Our Boys: A Perfect Season On The Plains With The Smith Center Redmen By Joe Drape, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The best book on Great Plains sports is H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights (1990). That classic has spawned a critically acclaimed television series and numerous awards. FNL not only told the story of a football season at Odessa Permian High School in urban West Texas; it also asked and answered some very big questions that concerned high school athletic corruption, coaching pressures, cheerleader/ football player interaction, school integration, local community politics, treatment of players of color, Texas's new rules prohibiting playing with failing grades, pressures on teachers, drugs, player abuse, and on and on. It remains a beautifully written …

Review Of "I Thought Pocahontas Was A Movie": Perspectives On Race/Culture Binaries In Education And Service Professions. Edited By Carol Schick And James Mcninch., Tracy L. Friedel

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

This edited volume argues that a race/culture binary lies at the heart of Canada's ongoing relationship with the descendants of the country's First Peoples. In looking at the service professions, editors Carol Schick and James McNinch trouble taken-for-granted assumptions based upon racial, cultural, and ethnic difference, arguing that representations of Indigenous peoples as culturally inferior, a trope that has replaced the idea of biological inferiority, is highly instrumental in the social positioning and unequal power relations that exists today in Canadian society. In turn, the editors tie this discussion back to Canada's colonial history and the social, material, and ideological …

See The Difference, Make A Difference, Be The Difference, Theresa Dark

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Pax Ecclesia: Globalization And Catholic Literary Modernism, Christopher Wachal

Dissertations

The transnational turn in literary studies has brought new rubrics and critical vocabularies to the study of cultures experiencing the destabilizing effects of globalization. It gives special attention to the ways cultural forms, including literature, must be reformulated in the absence of the coherence of the nation-state. Often unremarked upon, however, is the role of religion in providing other channels of affinity around which to cohere. Many writers in the 20th century respond to the shocks of globalizing modernity by writing in light of particular faith traditions, especially the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns that characterize the Catholic literary tradition. …

Contemplation And The Human Animal In The Philosophy Of St. Thomas Aquinas, Edyta M. Imai

Dissertations

This dissertation explores how, according to Thomas Aquinas, the operations of the sensitive soul are necessary for ordinary (i.e., not mystical) human contemplation, and for the acquisition of knowledge which precedes contemplation.

The sensitive soul is the soul possessed by all sentient beings, that is, animals, and thus, in examining the role of the sensitive soul in human contemplation we learn about the way the animal side of our nature participates in contemplation.

According to Aquinas, we possess natural inclinations, which direct us to our proper ends, our proper good. Knowledge of truth is also a good to which we …

Global Distributive Justice After Rawls: A Modified Poggean Argument For How We Harm The World's Poorest, Mark Chakoian

Dissertations

This work presents an analysis of Thomas Pogge's approach to the problem of world poverty as presented in World Poverty and Human Rights. It begins by situating the project of Pogge relative to the work of his predecessor John Rawls. It then moves on to compare Pogge's negative-duty approach to more common positive-duty approaches by discussing the relative merits and weaknesses of the approach of Peter Singer to the problem of poverty. The remaining chapters give an in-depth analysis of Pogge's argument itself. Although there are significant holes and inconsistencies in Pogge's approach, a reformulated argument that preserves his original …

Thinking Through The Phenomenon Of Trust: A Philosophical Investigation, Jeffrey M. Courtright

Dissertations

Jeffrey M. Courtright

THINKING THROUGH THE PHENOMENON OF TRUST: A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION

The phenomenon of trust is historically underrepresented as a topic of serious investigation in Western philosophy. This dissertation investigates the integral role that trust plays in enabling and sustaining meaning and significance in human existence. This thesis is substantiated in the following ways.

First, I explicate various senses and ways of thinking about trust in the work of two historically important philosophers, Plato and Nietzsche. I show that Socrates, in Plato's dialogue Phaedo, articulates the feeling of being entrusted with life, a feeling that one experiences as a …

Images Of God, Imago Dei And God's Relationship With Humanity Through The Image Of Mary's Breast Milk: A Focus Upon Sor María Anna Águeda De San Ignacio (1695-1756), Neomi Dolores Deanda

Dissertations

This dissertation presents an original contribution to the academic field of Theology, specifically Constructive Theology, because it begins the retrieval work of a woman's voice from seventeenth and eighteenth century Mexico, an entire area of historical and theological thought which has been globally under-explored. Analysis of María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio's eighteenth century original publications give a glimpse into this woman's official authority during her time, which also presents a historical woman's voice who has held ecclesial authority.

This project engages María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio's work to draw theological insights and further expand understandings about notions of …

So That Love May Be Safeguarded: The Nature, Form, And Function Of Obedience As A Heuristic Device For The Theology Of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Daniel Paul Burns

Dissertations

Hans Urs von Balthasar's literary body of work is enormous. His style is erudite and often abstruse. As a result, it is often difficult to systematize and arrange his work into coherent and consistent categories. This dissertation offers the singular category of obedience as a heuristic device to help render the entire von Balthasarian corpus more understandable. For von Balthasar, the word "obedience" is multivalent and rich in meaning. It cuts across all aspects of human relationships, of human relationships with God, and even God's relationship with Himself. This dissertation claims that the meaning of the word "obedience" is central …

Introducing The Common Good Index And A Common Good Immigration Ethic, Ana Bedard

Dissertations

The U.S. and Mexican bishops, in their influential pastoral letter Strangers No Longer, frame immigration ethics through the lens of solidarity with the immigrant. This frame leads them to erroneously interpret the preferential option for the poor and ignore potential harm to poor U.S. citizens caused by recent undocumented immigration from Mexico and other countries. A better framework to immigration ethics is a specified common good approach, which is created in this dissertation. This approach uses the definition of the common good found in Catholic social thought and concretizes it through using a theological anthropology based in Martha Nussbaum's human …

Patriarchy, Christianity, And The African Hiv/Aids Epidemic: Rethinking Christian Marriage In Light Of The Experiences Of Hiv Positive Women In Tanzania, Melissa Danielle Browning

Dissertations

Given that women and girls carry the heaviest burdens of the African HIV/AIDS epidemic, their lived experiences should be the starting point for any pedagogy of prevention. In light of this claim, this dissertation project uses qualitative fieldwork with HIV positive women living in Mwanza, Tanzania to ask why marriage is an HIV/AIDS risk factor. By beginning with women's experience as a hermeneutical lens, this dissertation seeks to establish a creative space where African women can imagine new alternatives to HIV/AIDS prevention that would promote human flourishing and abundant life in African communities. The aim of this dissertation is to …

Theology As Improvisation: Using The Musical Metaphor Of Attunement To Think Theologically, Nathan Crawford

Dissertations

This project places itself within the tradition of Christian theology which has sought to think about its thinking of God. In so doing, the tradition has seen it necessary to do this thinking in light of one's contemporary situation. Thus, this project carries this line of thought through by thinking the thinking of God within the contemporary context. The thesis of the project is that theology is improvisation. This thesis is advanced through an analysis of the idea of attunement in both theology and improvisation.

The project articulates the nature of theology as improvisation by analyzing the nature of attunement …

Trilectic Of Testimony: A Phenomenological Construal Of The Eucharist As Manifestation-Proclamation-Attestation, Donald Lee Wallenfang

Dissertations

This thesis seeks to revolutionize thinking the sacrament, in particular the Eucharist. Instead of construing the Eucharist in terms of substance or symbol, the Eucharist is construed phenomenologically as manifestation-proclamation-attestation. In this way, the particular emphases of Catholic (manifestation), Jewish and Protestant (proclamation, attestation) thought converge around the question of the phenomenality of the religious phenomenon, specifically the Eucharist-phenomenon. Representative of each of these three faith traditions, the following prominent thinkers are placed in dialectical confrontation: Jean-Luc Marion (Catholic, manifestation), Paul Ricoeur (Protestant, proclamation/attestation) and Emmanuel Levinas (Jewish, proclamation/attestation). Building on the seminal work of Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbole et sacrement: …

A Diachronic Analysis Of The Use Of Scripture In The Variant Versions Of The Apocryphon Of John, David Creech

Dissertations

This dissertation explores at length the Apocryphon of John's ambivalent treatment of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Although Moses is explicitly corrected at five points in the text--four times mentioned by name (NHC II 13,18-21; 22,22-25; 23,3-4; and 29,6-10) and one time by inference (NHC II 21,9-14)--the Genesis account of creation is nonetheless the basis for the Apocryphon's cosmogony and anthropogony. It is argued that the Apocryphon's uneven treatment of the Bible is the result of a development of the text in the midst of a dispute with other early catholics.

Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Catalog, 2011-2012, Office Of The Registrar

Undergraduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Catalog, 2011-2012, Office Of The Registrar

Undergraduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Western Landscape In Cormac Mccarthy And Wallace Stegner: Myths Of The Frontier By Megan Riley Mcgilchrist, Harry F. Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Megan Riley McGilchrist sees the Vietnam War and the cultural upheaval it represents as a watershed event in understanding how the western novel treats the theme of landscape. She constructs her analysis through the writings of Wallace Stegner and the western novels of Cormac McCarthy, the former retaining a belief in the innate goodness of the land and the latter rejecting the benevolence of the natural world. McGilchrist argues that, as the fulfillment of the frontier ethos, the Vietnam War-absent in Stegner but present in McCarthy-changed life in the mythimbued West. For McGilchrist, elements of the mythic West, both abhorrent …

Review Of The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army In The West, 1783-1900 By Robert Wooster, Mark R. Scherer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Given the vast breadth and depth of American military historiography, well-organized and well-written narrative overviews of the field are always welcome. Robert Wooster's recently released The American Military Frontiers certainly fits that description. Wooster, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, and the author of four other books on western military history, synthesizes several generations of previous scholarship to support his most fundamental theme: that the Army served not only as the executor of nineteenth century national policy, but also as an important catalytic "shaper" of that policy. In its attention to the multiple roles played by …

Review Of Seeking Life Whole: Willa Cather And The Brewsters By Lucy Marks And David Porter, Kari A. Ronning

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Seeking Life Whole, eighth in Fairleigh Dickinson's series on Willa Cather, is a volume in two parts, with nine subdivisions, and excellent notes. Part 1 contains Lucy Marks's biographical account of the lives of expatriate painters Achsah Barlow Brewster and her husband Earl H. Brewster, and David Porter's biographical and critical account of the previously unknown relationship between the Brewsters and Willa Cather. The Brewsters went to Europe after their marriage in 1910 to dedicate themselves to painting, nature, study, and a simple, beautiful way of life; they attracted a remarkable range of friends. Their type has been satirized, …

Review Of Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, And Violence In Pre-Civil War Kansas By Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Michael D. Pierson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bleeding Kansas has long been an important topic for political historians exploring how it influenced Congress, presidential campaigns, and the coming of the Civil War. Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel's book uses the insights of recent social historians to add depth to this political narrative, thereby strengthening our understanding of how antebellum Kansas changed America.

Bleeding Borders begins with a chapter that positions Kansas as a frontier territory. Oertel's antebellum Kansans are divided by race, but not just between white and black. Starting her history in the 1820s, Oertel finds that "white settlers' perceptions of and interactions with Kansas Indians played a …

Review Of No Place Like Home: Notes From A Western Life By Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gretchen Legler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What's happening to Linda Hasselstrom's Great Plains is happening everywhere, even in western Maine, where New Yorkers migrate north, buying second houses in communities once home to lobstermen, farmers, and lumberjacks, changing the face of the social, political, and natural landscape. It's enough to make a person, well, want to let off some steam, and perhaps try to come to some conclusions about what is happening to land and community in America in general and in the Great Plains in particular, which is what Hasselstrom does in her newest work of nonfiction. In this collection of linked essays, she returns …