Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Early Human-Bison Population Interdependence In The Plains Ecosystem, Henry Epp, Ian Dyck

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Human population size in the Great Plains ecosystem before European contact has been of longstanding interest to scholars. The same is true of bison numbers. Given the near total dependence on bison by nonagricultural precontact humans, integrating information on both human and bison numbers from that time is of further interest, providing the focus for this paper. Recent research on the behavioral ecology of bison and related ungulates has led to the identification of two distinct, although not mutually exclusive, populations: resident and migrant herds. Moreover, migrants tend to vastly outnumber residents, often by more than 4 to 1. The …

Review Of Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, And Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940 By Maureen K. Lux, R. Wesley Heber

Great Plains Quarterly

Medicine That Walks recounts the impact of the federal government's Indian policy on the health and well-being of Canadian Plains Indians. The end of the bison as a staple of life, the treaties with the Crown, and the subsequent removal of Indians from the land, followed by settlement replacement-these form the backdrop for a thesis on historical cause and effect. The thesis is that race-based federal policies resulted in social, physical, and spiritual degradation for Indian people. Lux's account unfolds as a clash of cultures in which Indian traditions and practices struggle to survive the relentless onslaught of western domination …

Review Of A Flowering Of Quilts Edited By Patricia Cox Crews, Joe Cunningham

Great Plains Quarterly

A Flowering of Quilts comes to us from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s International Quilt Study Center, created by Robert and Ardis James, who donated their magnificent collection of quilts to the university. The book is the catalogue of a two-year exhibition at the Center called "Fanciful Flowers: Botany and the American Quilt" focusing on the connection between American women's love of floral designs in quilts and their affinity for botany in the nineteenth century.

The book itself is like a great walled garden of flowers. Before you can get to the gorgeous photographs of the fifty-three quilts, you must scale …

Review Of Indian Orphanages By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

During research on American Indian schooling, I sometimes noticed references to orphan children, yet never pursued the matter. Fortunately, Marilyn Irvin Holt did, and her carefully-researched and moving book is the first comprehensive study of Indian orphanages. Although critical of their failings, Holt comes to a surprisingly positive conclusion. Located on reservations, they "offered a way for youngsters to maintain contact with their tribal groups" and "provided a point of identity for both residents and the larger Indian community." When mounting criticism of institutionalization forced the closure of many orphanages in the twentieth century, tribal people became more vulnerable to …

Migration Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly

The 26th annual Center for Great Plains Studies symposium, "Great Plains Migrations," held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 7 -9 May 2002, was innovative in its interdisciplinary concept and content. The co-chairs of the symposium, Mary Liz Jameson, Research Assistant Professor of Entomology and Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and David Wishart, Professor of Geography, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, brought together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and biological sciences to examine migration in all its dimensions-from historical and contemporary human migrations to migrations of flora and fauna. The concept of migration is central to the development and dynamics of the Great …

Piecing Together The Ponca Past Reconstructing Degiha Migrations To The Great Plains, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly

The twenty-first century presents opportunities, as well as limitations, for the American Indian Nations of the Great Plains. Opportunities include enhanced economic development activities (e.g., casino gambling, telecommunications, and high-tech industries) and innovative tribal programming such as language immersion programs made possible through enhanced self-governance initiatives. Limitations include familiar scripts that perpetually threaten tribal sovereignty and chronically underfunded annual appropriations for Native American health, housing, and social service programs.

The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, terminated in 1965 and restored to federally recognized status in 1990,¹ embraces these challenges by exploring the limits of self-governance, economic development opportunities, and cultural …

Title And Contents- Fall 2002

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 22/ Number 4 / Fall 2002

Contents

MIGRATION OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Charles A. Braithwaite

A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH TO GREAT PLAINS MIGRATION John C. Hudson

DRAWN BY THE BISON: LATE PREHISTORIC NATIVE MIGRATION INTO THE CENTRAL PLAINS Lauren W. Ritterbush

PIECING TOGETHER THE PONCA PAST: RECONSTRUCTING DEGIHA MIGRATONS TO THE GREAT PLAINS Beth R. Ritter

Book Reviews

Notes And News

Patrick Douaud and Bruce Dawson, eds. Plain Speaking: Essays on Aboriginal Peoples and the Prairie By L. BROOKS HILL

George Rollie Adams General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons By RANDY KANE

Marilyn Irvin …

Review Of Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions By Joseph Epes Brown With Emily Cousins, Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly

This volume passes on to readers some of the teachings of the late scholar and educator Joseph Epes Brown. In consultation with Brown's wife Elenita Brown and daughter Marina Brown Weatherly, writer and editor Emily Cousins has produced a clear and succinct synthesis of what Brown taught his classes at the University of Montana about Native American concepts of the sacred. She accomplishes this through the complex task of blending some of his class lecture notes, published articles, and conference talks with recollections from his students and quotations from published Native American sources.

Following Brown's example in his lectures, Cousins …

Review Of Orphan Trains: The Story Of Charles Loring Brace And The Children He Saved And Failed By Stephen O' Connor, Marilyn Irvin Holt

Great Plains Quarterly

Charles Loring Brace, who began working among the poor as a city missionary and became the force behind the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS), is best remembered as the architect of the orphan trains, a placement program that sent thousands of orphaned, destitute, and abandoned children to new homes, including those in the Plains states. This biography of Brace places him within the context of his times and renders a more extensive view of the man and his beliefs than found in other publications. The volume offers insights into CAS programs for the poor in New York City and, …

Review Of Mavericks: An Incorrigible History Of Alberta By Aritha Van Herk, Donald B. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Aritha van Herk's well-written and fast paced Mavericks provides an excellent introduction to Alberta. Served up without footnotes, Mavericks is not history, at least in the academic sense. What Aritha van Herk, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, provides instead is a fascinating personal view of Alberta's past. It contains valuable insights into how many Albertans view themselves and describes particularly well many Albertans' views about their relationship with the rest of Canada.

The first chapter, "Aggravating, Awful, Awkward, Awesome Alberta," is all about the Albertan attitude. What propels the book, what glues it together, is an …

Review Of Working The Garden: American Writers And The Industrialization Of Agriculture By William Conlogue, Mary Paniccia-Carden

Great Plains Quarterly

In Working the Garden William Conlogue critiques readings of American literature dependent on pastoral assumptions, proposing instead a georgic perspective that would examine "the history of the intersections we have made among human work, human imagination, and the physical environment." While he takes a somewhat reductive view of previous critical approaches and of American applications of pastoral modes, his demonstration of the ways in which georgic questions alter our understanding of our literature promises to be of significant importance to the study of Great Plains literature.

The georgic, Conlogue explains, "explores the lived landscapes of rural experience" where "our ambiguous …

Review Of Urban Indian Reserves: Forging New Relationships In Saskatchewan Edited By F. Laurie Barron And Joseph Garcea, J. R. Miller

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Although the four Saskatchewan urban reserves examined in this collection are not the only ones in Canada, or even in Saskatchewan for that matter, they are among the most interesting and instructive. Established between 1982 and 1996, the reserves in Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Fort Qu' Appelle, and Yorkton went through differing processes with strikingly similar results. Establishment of the Saskatoon and Yorkton reserves proceeded smoothly, but similar initiatives in Prince Albert and Fort Qu' Appelle had to overcome local opposition. Indeed, the Prince Albert urban reserve was established by the federal government over the municipality's objections. In spite of the …

Review Of Addictions And Native Americans By Laurence Armand French, Benson Tong

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Notwithstanding the title, this short book focuses largely on health issues arising from alcoholism in the indigenous population of North America. The evidence overwhelmingly points to this particular substance abuse as the number-one killer among Native Americans, accounting for the four leading causes of death: accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, suicide, and homicide. Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), which plagues infants with physical and psychological problems, is another effect of Indian alcoholism.

Review Of Letters From The Dust Bowl By Caroline Henderson, Brian Q. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1907, Caroline Boa, a thirty-year-old school teacher and graduate of Mount Holyoke College, filed on a quarter section in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The following year she married Will Henderson, a one-time cowboy, well-digger, and would-be rancher. For the next fifty-seven years the couple farmed their homestead, although Caroline also taught school for three years in another community and later spent two years working on a master's degree.

Henderson is best known for her "Letters from the Dust Bowl," published by Atlantic Monthly in 1936, one of dozens of articles she wrote for popular magazines between 1913 and 1937. In …

Review Of F. P. Grove In Europe And Canada: Translated Lives By Klaus Martens, Irene Gammel

Great Plains Quarterly

Canada's leading prairie author Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) had a predilection for strong and silent heroes: the unforgettable Niels Lindstedt in Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth (1933), John Elliot in Our Daily Bread (1928). Grove's fictional landscape was a multicultural potpourri of immigrants from Sweden, Iceland, Germany, and Russia with new-world men and women transforming the prairie wilderness into fertile and flourishing settlements. Yet Grove, aka German author and translator Felix Paul Greve, was also a literary con man who led his audience down the garden path in a fictionalized autobiography, In Search …

Review Of Plain Speaking: Essays On Aboriginal Peoples And The Prairie Edited By Patrick Douaud And Bruce Dawson, L. Brooks Hill

Great Plains Quarterly

Primarily derived from a March 2001 conference held in Regina, Saskatchewan, these essays present diverse perspectives on various connections between First Nations and Metis peoples and the Canadian Plains. Designed to create a more holistic perspective, the conference and this companion book used a wide variety of presentational formats to capture the diversity of past and present connections between Aboriginal Peoples and the prairies. The twelve articles range from traditional academic reports to autobiographical commentaries, photo essays, and transcribed interviews from an Elders' roundtable.

Essential to this collection is the confrontation of modernism with traditionalism. In his article Neal McLeod …

Review Of General William S. Harney: Prince Of Dragoons By George Rollie Adams, Randy Kane

Great Plains Quarterly

The foremost army office! (next to Winfield Scott) from the end of the War of 1812 to the beginning of the Civil War, William S. Harney experienced the entire spectrum of military activity during the period. More than anything else, he was an army officer of the Indian frontier, and it was on the frontier opposing Indians that he made a name for himself.

Harney was tall, powerful, and athletic as well as volatile, profane, and violent. This combination tended to bring him to the fore wherever he was stationed. He was at his best during active command in the …

Review Of Rebirth Of The Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954 By Paul C. Rosier, Darrell Robes Kipp

Great Plains Quarterly

As a Blackfeet tribal member researching my tribe for over twenty-five years through the medium of its language, I read Paul Rosier's book with trepidation because accurate accounting is not a hallmark of most historical analysis done on the tribe. Too often I detect research flaws based on notions contrary to our oral tradition, and I marvel at the distorted interpretations. Rosier's book is excruciatingly revealing, honest, and important. Not just to me, despite my hardened edge, but for the uninformed reader as well. The chronicle is powerfully laced with pages of stark reality, and wanton subterfuge. One of the …

Review Of The Woman Who Watches Over The World: A Native Memoir By Linda Hogan, Diane Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

Linda Hogan's memoir is centered in stories, beginning with the story of the book's title. In a museum shop Hogan bought a clay woman, "her stomach attached to an orange globe earth," that she had mailed to her home. The figurine arrived with broken legs and, Hogan reports, "she began to fall apart in other ways." Like the clay woman, Hogan has fallen apart in many ways, yet she is also watching over her own world and, by association, the wider world of those who share her heritage, her experiences, or her geography.

Hogan comments, "I sat down to write …

Review Of I Hear The Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions By Louis Owens, Lee Schweninger

Great Plains Quarterly

In I Hear the Train, novelist and scholar Louis Owens combines memoir, fiction, and criticism; stories, he calls them, written in an effort "to make sense of the otherwise uninhabitable world we must, of necessity, inhabit." He makes that sense, in large measure, by writing about himself and the importance of family. The "Reflections" are memoirs in which the author recalls his own struggles with inhabiting the world, recounting adolescence and young-adult experiences and describing having found and spent three days with his brother, a Vietnam vet, whom he had neither seen nor heard from in twenty-five years. After …

A Longitudinal Approach To Great Plains Migration, John C. Hudson

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of population and regional studies are familiar with the demographic "accounting" equation,

Population _t+x = Population _t + Births _x

-Deaths _x + Immigration _x

- Emigration _x

In other words, the size of the population at time t + x is equal to the population at time t plus the births, minus the deaths, plus the immigrants, minus the emigrants, during the interval of time x. This simple formula can be used to derive a variety of rates and statistics describing population change. The equation's main application is to describe short-term change in a population in terms …

Drawn By The Bison Late Prehistoric Native Migration Into The Central Plains, Lauren W. Ritterbush

Great Plains Quarterly

Popular images of the Great Plains frequently portray horse-mounted Indians engaged in dramatic bison hunts. The importance of these hunts is emphasized by the oft-mentioned dependence of the Plains Indians on bison. This animal served as a source of not only food but also materials for shelter, clothing, containers, and many other necessities of life. Pursuit of the vast bison herds (combined with the needs of the Indians' horses for pasturage) affected human patterns of subsistence, mobility, and settlement. The Lakota and Cheyenne, for instance, are described as relying heavily on bison meat for food and living a nomadic lifestyle …

Reasons For The Marginal Incorporation Of The Comanches By The Spanish, Martha Mccollough

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

When the Comanches, a Native American community originally from the Great Basin region, migrated to the Southern Plains in the early 1700s, they encountered Spanish colonies, missions, and military and administrative personnel as well as newly introduced trade items. Spain attempted to incorporate the Comanches into the region's emerging political economy through a variety of means including the use of treaties, coercive force, and economic inducements. Because of the Comanches' decentralized political organization, their conquest of the Apaches, and Spain's tenuous control over its northern frontier, the Comanches successfully retained control over their own articulation within the region's political economy. …

Watering The Plains: Political Dynamics Of River Preservation In Canada And The United States, Joan M. Blauwkamp, Peter J. Longo

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In this article we compare the Canadian Heritage Rivers System with the US Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and analyze case law in order to identify the best means of ensuring preservation of Great Plains rivers. We find that fear of federal dictates provides a powerful political weapon for opponents of river preservation policies. Therefore, we conclude that national officials should work with state, provincial, and local officials to develop cooperative plans that enable local residents to participate in river management decisions. Cooperative river management policies avoid the perception of federal government action as threatening to state sovereignty, thereby removing …

Great Plains Research Volume 12, Number 2, Fall 2002 - Table Of Contents

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Cover and table of contents

Western Harvester Ants’ Foraging Success And Nest Densities In Relation To Grazing Intensity, Shaharra Usnick, Richard Hart

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Western harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex occidentalis, are seed eaters that occur in short- and mid-grass prairies. Harvester ants are efficient seed predators but they may also be seed dispersers. We examined what ants collect to address that question. We also studied how different cattle grazing intensities affected harvester ant nest densities. Items collected by western harvester ant foragers returning to their nests were categorized as non-seeds, seeds, and nothing. Harvester ants collected large amounts of non-seeds (48%), followed by seeds (33%) and nothing (19%). Western harvester ants tolerate some environmental stress caused by grazing because nest densities were highest in …

Review Of Kansas Breeding Bird Atlas By William H. Busby And John L. Zimmerman, Paul A. Johnsgard

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Kansas has now joined the expanding group of Midwestern states for which breeding bird atlases have recently been published, including South Dakota (1995), Iowa (1996), Missouri (1997), and Nebraska (200 I). Atlases are also in preparation or in press for Oklahoma and Texas, which will soon help fill out distributional knowledge of the Great Plains avifauna in a way unimaginable when I was assembling regional data for my Birds of the Great Plains: The Breeding Species and Their Distribution (1979).

Review Of Voices Of A New Chicana/O History By Refugio Rochín And Dennis Valdes, James A. Garza

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The demographic changes affecting America's ethnic populations are a reminder that history is in constant flux. In particular, the Latina/o population is seeing its social and political influence grow, especially in the Midwest. How will mainstream America deal with this new reality? As politicians struggle over this issue, Chicana/o scholars are also finding that past definitions no longer fit today's academic environment. Voices of a New Chicanalo History, an informative and stimulating compilation of fourteen essays, represents this new historical debate. Edited by Refugio I. Rochfn and Dennis N. Valdes, the volume brings together a diverse group of Chicana/o …

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog Abundance And Distribution In The Great Plains Based On Historic And Contemporary Information, Craig Knowles, Jonathan Proctor, Steven Forest

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Recorded presettlement observations of black-tailed prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) are not adequate to fully determine their abundance and distribution. Early naturalists and explorers made only casual reports of prairie dogs on an opportunistic basis; their written records do not represent systematic surveys. Cumulative accounts of prairie dog control efforts, together with the known current prairie dog distribution in North Dakota and Montana, clearly show that most journalists failed to record prairie dog colonies. Also, they restricted their travels to a few common routes, and as a result only a very small and select portion of the landscape was …

Distribution And Abundance Of Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs In The Great Plains: A Historical Perspective, Dallas Virchow, Scott E. Hygnstrom

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

It is a common belief that the black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) was an extremely abundant species throughout the Great Plains prior to European settlement. We examined accounts from explorers, naturalists, and travelers in the Great Plains in the 19th and 20th centuries and found few that adequately document the relative abundance and distribution to support this view. Immense prairie dog colonies existed in the western Great Plains before Euro-American settlement, but it appears that the eastern Great Plains supported only localized populations. Historic accounts also indicate that the easternmost extent of the black-tailed prairie dog's range before …