History Commons^™

Review Of Seeing Red: A History Of Natives In Canadian Newspapers By Mark Cronlund Anderson And Carmen L. Robertson, Timonthy P. Foran

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this intensely provocative book, University of Regina professors Anderson and Robertson contend that newspapers have played a central role in the Canadian colonial project through. their representation of Aboriginal peoples over the past 140 years. Despite having become less overtly racist in tone and terminology since the late nineteenth century, Canadian newspapers have nevertheless persisted in framing Aboriginal peoples within three essentialist tropes: depravity, innate inferiority, and a stubborn resistance to progress. These tropes have fed into the mainstream ideology underpinning colonial practices-the treaty system, residential schools, and ongoing assimilationist efforts-while simultaneously providing a foil against which mainstream Canada …

Review Of Museum Pieces: Toward The Indigenization Of Canadian Museums By Ruth B. Phillips, Lee-Ann Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The recent history of museums and Indigenous peoples has developed along diverging lines in Canada and the United States. In Canada, the controversy around The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, an exhibition organized for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, provided the impetus for the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples which, in turn, sparked subsequent debates surrounding museological policies and practices over the past twenty years. Ruth Phillips locates this exhibition as the point of departure for the "postcolonial project" that has informed subsequent museum reform in Canada.

Thoroughly articulated with characteristic rigor, Phillips's …

Review Of Re-Imagining Ukranian Canadians: History, Politics, And Identity Edited By Rhonda L. Hinther And Jim Mochoruk, Myroslaw Tateryn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Hinther and Mochoruk offer the reader an interdisciplinary look at aspects of Canadian history through the prism of the Ukrainian Canadian experience. The volume includes contributions from an array of specialists: historians, literary critics, archivists, curators, geographers, and others. Consequently, the quality of the articles is wide-ranging, but overall the editors succeed in demonstrating that the immigrant experience is neither homogeneous nor adequately studied.

The editors' introduction is most helpful, succinctly describing the state of academic inquiry into the Ukrainian Canadian experience. The editors accurately describe the "mythology" of the prairie peasant-cum-dangerous foreigner. They present the evolution of scholarship from …

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 (through 2013)

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

Review Of Grand Procession: Contemporary Artistic Visions Of American Indians: The Diker Collection At The Denver Art Museum By Lois Sherr Dubin, Jessica R. Metcalfe

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Life in miniature, history in vibrant hues, art on parade-this is what is presented in Grand Procession, a catalogue printed by the Denver Art Museum to accompany its recent exhibit of contemporary Native American dolls. Meant to serve as a celebration of this art form, the book makes clear that these figures are more than just playthings: they are sculptural "little people" meticulously clothed and accurately designed to depict Plains and Plateau ceremonial regalia.

Dolls have been created for centuries throughout North America, and exhibits such as the Heard Museum's 2010 More Than Child's Play have sought to elevate …

Review Of Agricultural History: History Of The Prairie West Series, Volume 3. Edited By Gregory P. Marchildon., Bradford Rennie

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

This is the third book of the History of the Prairie West Series published by the Canadian Plains Research Center in Regina, Saskatchewan. The series, edited by Gregory P. Marchildon, consists of articles previously published in Prairie Forum, a journal devoted to the northern Great Plains, primarily the region encompassing the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The book is organized into four sections: the first contains broad articles that survey prairie history; the other three focus on farming, ranching, and marketing, respectively.

Review Of Sustaining The Cherokee Family: Kinship And The Allotment Of An Indigenous Nation By Rose Stremlau, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Cherokee families, Rose Stremlau states in her elegantly written book, were and remain "egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized." These characteristics, she argues, have provided stability through difficult times, as Cherokee families faced colonization, displacement and removal, the Civil War, and ultimately the allotment policy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries {although it is important to note that she also carries her analysis beyond the allotment era, into the mid-to-late twentieth century}. Using U.S. and Cherokee census data, Dawes Commission records, Guion Miller Commission applications, probate records, articles from the national Cherokee Advocate, and oral histories in the Doris Duke …

Ligia Grischa Bylaws

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

1. The Ligia Grischa fixes the period of its existence for 15 years.

2. In this society can only be accepted persons from 12 to 60 years, who show in their life a good behavior.

3. Every member must pay $5.00 on entering the "Ligia Grischa" and signing the statues. He must also pay 1 Taler every month and on the 5th of June 1875 another 10 Talers.

4. Every member who enters after the foundation of the "Ligia Grischa" is obliged to pay the same capital plus 5% more than the members who joined at the foundation of the …

Review Of Murder, The Media, And The Politics Of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard And James Byrd Jr. By Jennifer Petersen, Thomas R. Dunn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The 1998 murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. prompted strong emotions in the national debate over hate crimes. Yet while legal, literary, and critical readings of the murders have emerged, little attention has been devoted to these emotions and their role in the politics that followed. Jennifer Petersen remedies this deficiency, offering broader insights about politics, media, and the public sphere.

Drawing upon close readings of local and national media, Petersen tirelessly traces the complex affective webs that surround each case. In the first half of her book, Petersen describes the national media's characterization of Shepard as an …

Review Of Where The Tall Grass Grows: Becoming Indigenous And The Mythological Legacy Of The American West By Bobby Bridger, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Musician, writer, and entertainer Bobby Bridger, a descendant of the well-known western trapper and scout Jim Bridger, has written a book attempting to link the past to the present by connecting historical eras of the American western movement with how Native Americans have been viewed, not only at the time, but in modern writing, especially fiction, stage productions, and, most importantly, motion pictures. His thesis is apparently based on a sentiment expressed by Indigenous author Joseph Marshall III at a Western Writers of America Conference to the effect that, although Indians have walked in the white world, whites have not …

Review Of For King And Kanata: Canadian Indians And The First World War By Timothy C. Winegard, Robert J. Talbot

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A comprehensive study of Canadian First Nations' experiences during the Great War is long overdue, making Timothy C. Winegard's For King and Kanata a welcome addition to the historiography. In a style both engaging and accessible, Winegard tells the individual and collective stories of those Indian men who enlisted to fight for the Crown. His book also focuses on how government policy shaped First Nations' participation in the war effort. Race, for instance, played a determining role. At first, the government banned Indian men from serving. As casualties mounted and pressure from Britain grew, however, Canadian officials began active recruitment …

Review Of The Catherian Cathedral: Gothic Cathedral Iconography In Willa Cather's Fiction By Christine E. Kephart, Nicholas Birns

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Christine Kephart's book is published in a series dedicated to the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, one of the leading Cather scholars. It honors Skaggs's memory with an original, sprightly, and captivating illumination of the motif of the cathedral throughout Cather's writing. We all know about Death Comes to the Archbishop and, to a lesser extent, Shadows on the Rock with their overt engagement of New World Catholicism and the presence within them of churches, cathedrals, and bishops. But Kephart looks for the cathedral motif throughout Cather's oeuvre, beginning with her failed first novel, Alexander's Bridge, where Kephart sees the …

Review Of Plains Indian Art: The Pioneering Work Of John C. Ewers Edited By Jane Ewers Robinson, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Canfield Ewers (1909-1997) authored two important books on Plains Indian art: Plains Indian Painting: A Description of an Aboriginal American Art (1939) and Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art from America's Heartland (1986). The present collection is the second of two volumes of short essays first published in journals and specialized catalogs. The first, Plains Indian History and Culture: Essays on Continuity and Change (1997), included a number of essays that looked to works of art as sources of primary historical information. This volume collects fifteen essays foregrounding works of art and matters of style, iconography, the historiography of …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 4 / Fall 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Review Of American Indians And The Mass Media Edited By Meta G. Carstarphen And John P. Sanchez, Dean Rader

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Earlier in the year, I spent some time on the White Earth Lake Reservation (Ojibwe) in northern Minnesota. At one point, to counter some nasty diaper rash (not mine), I went into a store to buy corn starch. My only choice was Argo. I was prepared for discomfort-I've always hated the bizarre half-Indian-maiden / halfcorncob figure that has come to be recognized as Argo's brand, and the irony of purchasing this item, on this reservation, in the middle of the Corn Belt was too much. But, thankfully, Argo had changed its label, so at least there was one less thing …

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

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

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 …

On Sir Charles Bell’S The Hand, 1833, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay explores the cultural context in which Sir Charles Bell’s 1833 Bridgewater Treatise was published by focusing on the work as a culmination of his deep religious faith, his Edinburgh anatomical training, and his occupation as a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary. It argues that The Handwas not merely an extension of Paleyan natural theology but also an important response to the era’s struggle with the grim physical reality of the supersession of manual labor by automatic manufacture.

"On Our Way For The Sunny South, Land Of Chivalry": Northern Imperial Attitudes In The Civil War South, Kaci Nash

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the discourse of Northerners who traveled into the South during the Civil War. Northern soldiers, nurses, teachers, relief workers, and officers’ wives adopted an imperial framework in their encounter with the South. By the eve of the war, years of sectional turmoil had resulted in a perceived ontological separation between the North and the nation’s internal Other—the South. To Northerners, the region was comprised of untamed wilderness, an antiquated society, and an inferior culture. When over two million Northerners mobilized and entered the southern states, they broadly adopted imperial viewpoints and awakened to the cultural power they …

All Good Things Must Come To An End: China Beat’S 1,000th Post, Maura Cunningham, Kate Merkel-Hess, Ken Pomeranz, Jeff Wasserstrom

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With much gratitude, the China Beat editors say goodbye.

What a difference four years can make—for a blog, a country, and a planet. (“Blog, country, planet” might have made a nice coat of arms if we’d thought of it…) When China Beat launched early in 2008, blogs seemed like relatively new kids on the block, at least to academics. Four years later, the genre is old hat, sharing a landscape with newcomers like Tumblr, Twitter, and other microblogging platforms, and we’re increasingly catching up on China news not on computers but on devices that fit in our palms.

The blog …

Review Of Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History By Julie Courtwright, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The scholarly literature on the history of fire has proliferated over the last generation or so, but until now we have lacked a general history of prairie fire. Julie Courtwright fills this gap. She explains that she hopes "to open a wider discussion of prairie fire and to foster recognition of its environmental and social influence on the Great Plains, thereby broadening the larger history of fire and of the American West." That statement of purpose hints at the intended contributions of the book; Courtwright does not offer many interpretations and arguments that will surprise those familiar with the scholarly …

"I Fear The Consequences To Our Animals": Emigrants And Their Livestock On The Overland Trails, Diana L. Ahmad

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"You cannot be too careful of your teams; on their condition depends entirely your success in getting through" to the Pacific coast, warned Philip L. Platt and N. Slater in their 1852 Travelers' Guide across the Plains upon the Overland Route to California.¹ The diaries, letters, and guidebooks written by the emigrants who crossed North America on the overland trails during the mid-nineteenth century reveal a new awareness of the animals that journeyed with them. Often written as advice to those who might follow them, the travelers worried about their animals in ways beyond what theologians and philosophers …

Review Of Texas, New Mexico, And The Compromise Of 1850: Boundary Dispute And Sectional Crisis By Mark J. Stegmaier, Bryan Turo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this revision of his 1996 publication, Mark Stegmaier has polished up an already comprehensive history of the Compromise of 1850 as it unfolded from the perspective of Texas and New Mexico. Whereas most histories have focused on the compromise from the standpoint of the national question about slavery, this work illuminates the significance of the part that fixed the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. Stegmaier argues that the boundary dispute acted as the linchpin for the entire block of compromises the 31st Congress passed in 1850. More so than any other issue-including statehood for California, the new fugitive …

Review Of Life Stages And Native Women: Memory, Teachings, And Story Medicine By Kim Anderson, Rebeka Tabobondung

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Life Stages and Native Women unearths the vital teachings of fourteen diverse Indigenous elder oral historians who share their knowledge about the life cycle of Native women. From conception to walking, childhood and youth, adult years, to grandmothers and elders, author Kim Anderson weaves the four life stages from a series of oral history interviews conducted over a period of five years beginning in 2007. Cree/Metis elder and master storyteller Maria Campbell guides Anderson on her journey to gain knowledge from a generation of Creel Metis, Cree, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe elders, each of whom holds tightly to the stories of …

Review Of Portraits Of The Prairie: The Land That Inspired Willa Cather By Richard Schilling, Richard Jussel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ultimately, it seems, most Nebraskans seek to return to their roots: to the "home place," a tree-shaded glen, a favorite swimming hole, or a hilltop view of the old town. Essentially, this is what Richard Schilling returns us to in Portraits of the Prairie: The Land that Inspired Willa Cather. Strolling through Cather's works, he weds her words to his own sketches and watercolors, although quickly pointing out that his paintings "are not illustrations of Cather's stories," but images of the land that an artist sees today. As a result, Schilling creates a work of art that explores the sensitivity …

Review Of Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, The Law, And The Making Of A Settler Society By Lesley Erickson, William Katerberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Westward Bound is a detailed study of sex and violence in Canada's prairie provinces and British Columbia-the circumstances and causes of that violence, its policing and prosecution, and the role of both in the shaping of class, race, and gender relations during the settlement era. Lesley Erickson's study can be read profitably along with studies of the us. West, such as David Peterson del Mar's Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (2002). Erickson makes few comparisons to the US., framing her analysis instead mostly in relation to historiography on other parts of Canada and Britain. But …

Review Of Always An Adventure: An Autobiography By Hugh A. Dempsey, Michael Payne

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Autobiography has been dismissed as the most self-indulgent of literary forms-biographer Humphrey Carter called it the "most respectable form of lying"-but Always an Adventure seems a little deficient in these respects. Instead, it offers a forthright account of the life of one of Canada's most eminent public historians.

After starting his working life in 1947 as a sign painter, Hugh Dempsey quickly moved on to become a newspaper reporter and publicist before taking up a career with the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary. His book discusses the early, and sometimes contentious, history of the Glenbow, and Dempsey's stories of …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 3 / Summer 2012

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Christopher Lasch And Prairie Populism, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Christopher Lasch was born in Omaha in 1932. By the end of his life, cut short at age sixty-one, he had become one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. During his life of active writing from the time of the early Cold War until the fall of the Soviet Union, Lasch's distinctive voice pierced through the din of the nation's noisy political and cultural debates. The historian Jackson Lears recalled, in particular, the "spell that Lasch cast over a generation of historians and cultural critics who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s." A product and one-time …

Review Of Eyewitness At Wounded Knee By Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul, And John E. Carter, Dawn G. Marsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge, the Ghost Dance are all phrases that invoke, perhaps more than any others, the senseless, prolonged acts of atrocity against Native Americans. The story of the events, peoples, and places unfolds on a bleak wintry landscape of the Northern Plains at the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars tell and retell this story, pondering the causes and failed communications, often seeking explanations or rationalizations for the assault on Sioux men, women, and children that took place in South Dakota leaving more than 250 dead. Storytellers, poets, and screenwriters employ the frozen, barren landscapes of the Northern …