Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Farm-Level Characteristics Of Southern Nebraska Farms/Ranches With Annually-Planted Crops, John M. Antle, Susan M. Capalbo, Christine N. Heggem, Richard T. Clark, Nancy Norton, Roger Selley

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

The information presented in this report represents data collected from farming and ranching operations in the southern two tiers of counties in Nebraska. This study was based on a random sample of 15 1 southern Nebraska farms that have annually-planted crop acreage. Information was obtained for the 1997 crop year. This data set is referred to as the MSU/UNL survey data.

From the MSU/UNL survey data, the average size of the farming operations in the survey, in 1997, was 1,3 16 acres. Of these, 856 acres were planted to annual crops, and the remaining 460 acres included 61 acres in …

Nebraska’S Rural Communities: Current Views And Strategies For The Future, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Results from the 1999 Nebraska Rural Poll indicated that the future of Nebraska’s rural communities is of continuing concern and interest. When asked their preferences for the future, the majority of rural Nebraskans indicated they would prefer to see the smallest communities continue to exist, an evenly dispersed rural population, and the traditional variety of businesses in rural communities. Yet, less than one-half expected these trends to actually occur in the future. Given that, how do rural Nebraskans feel about their community and the services available? Which economic development strategies do they feel would be effective in their community? Do …

Before You Say Yes: A Planning Guide For Speakers, Charles A. Francis, Heidi Carter, Cris Carusi, James W. King

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

We need guidelines to help us decide whether to accept invitations to speak, whether to a class on campus or a special interest group outside. As educators and workshop organizers, we could also use suggestions on how to approach potential speakers. This article describes a single-page format that can be used to guide the planning process. Essential elements include contact information, location and organization of the activity, audience, learning goals, expected content, conclusions, and evaluation. Use of this planning sheet can give organization to an often haphazard process of planning, and enhance the potential of achieving the learning goals of …

Effects Of Water Conditions On Clutch Size, Egg Volume, And Hatchling Mass Of Mallards And Gadwalls In The Prairie Pothole Region, Pamela Pietz, Gary Krapu, Deborah Buhl, David A. Brandt

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

We examined the relationship between local water conditions (measured as the percent of total area of basins covered by water) and clutch size, egg volume, and hatchling mass of Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and Gadwalls (A. strepera) on four study sites in the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota and Minnesota, 1988–1994. We also examined the relationship between pond density and clutch size of Mallards and Gadwalls, using data collected at another North Dakota site, 1966–1981. For Mallards, we found no relationships to be significant. For Gadwalls, clutch size increased with percent basin area wet and pond …

Quality Of Life Of Rural Nebraskans: 1996 - 2000, John C. Allen, Rebecca Filkins, Sam Cordes

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Nebraska’s economy has shown growth during recent years. However, the agricultural economy has not been faring as well in recent years. How have these changes affected rural Nebraskans? How do they perceive their quality of life? Do their perceptions differ by the size of their community, the region in which they live, or their occupation?

This report details results of 4,536 responses to the 2000 Nebraska Rural Poll, the fifth annual effort to take the pulse of rural Nebraskans. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their general well-being and their satisfaction with specific aspects of well-being. Trends are …

Review Of The Cherokees And Their Chiefs: In The Wake Of Empire By Stanley W. Hoig, Daniel Heath Justice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A popular history of the Cherokees, Hoig's book recounts, through vivid prose and detailed research from Euro-American records and scholarly sources, the diverse and troubled relationships between the Cherokee people and varied agents of colonialist expansion. Those who are largely unfamiliar with the voluminous number of academic texts about the history of British/US/Cherokee interaction will find the volume quite compelling. Those looking for more contemporary research, however, or for a strong Cherokee presence among the sources chosen will find The Cherokees and Their Chiefs something of a disappointment.

Hoig's greatest strength is as a dynamic storyteller. Writing with clarity and …

Review Of Reservation X: The Power Of Place In Aboriginal Contemporary Art Edited By Gerald Mcmaster, Kathleen E. Ash-Milby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The reservation (or "reserve" in Canada) is a place with multi-layered meanings to contemporary Native People. As editor Gerald McMaster states, "the reserve has been both sanctuary and prison." While symbolizing community, home, family and tradition, by its very nature (government imposed confinement) it simultaneously represents repression, poverty, and the social ills that follow. For a reader interested in the Great Plains, or any other region, Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art deftly illuminates these complex relationships through the work of seven artists and four authors.

The volume's first half is devoted to thought-provoking essays by …

Title And Contents- Summer 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 20/ Number 3 / Summer 2000

CONTENTS

A WEEK OF MUSIC AND DANCE: AN INTRODUCTION Randall Snyder

THIS WEEK AT THE OPERA HOUSE: POPULAR MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENT AT GREAT PLAINS OPERA HOUSES, 1887-1917 D. Layne Ehlers

POWERFUL FEELINGS RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY: LITERARY CRITICISM AND LAKOTA SOCIAL SONG POETRY R. D. Theisz

THE MUSICAL LANDSCAPE OF SINCLAIR ROSS'S AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE Philip R. Coleman-Hull

THE OMAHA GOSPEL COMPLEX IN HISTORICAL: PERSPECTIVE Tom Jack

BOOK REVIEWS

George W. Lyon Community Music in Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By FRANCES W. KAYE

Luke E. Lassiter The Power …

Review Of Buckskin And Buffalo: The Artistry Of The Plains Indians By Colin F. Taylor, Paul M. Raczka

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains has always been a unique ecosystem throughout whose history the various cycles of human habitation have had to adapt. In Buckskin and Buffalo Colin Taylor has provided us with a glimpse of how one period of human habitation, the zenith of Plains Indian culture from the early 1800s to reservation days, incorporated that ecosystem into its art forms.

It was a time when the rich artistic cultures of the Plains people were infused with new artistic materials and tools. The marriage of these new materials with already existing nature- orientated cultures produced an explosion of creativity and …

Review Of Traces On The Landscape By Kent Midgett, Harry W. Fritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kent Midgett arrived with his family in Hibbard, on the Wind-swept Plains of eastern Montana, late in 1914. His father, a physician, packed up and moved to Bridger in 1924. Here is one man's account of growing up during the homestead boom and bust On the Northern Plains in the early twentieth century. All of the standard elements of the agricultural tragedy are here-the fulsome promotional campaigns; the bumper crops and commodity prices of wartime; drought and other disasters after 1917; the fading of hope. Today, the town of Sumatra (where the family of six moved in 1917) has disappeared; …

Review Of The Invasion Of Indian Country In The Twentieth Century: American Capitalism And Tribal Natural Resources By Donald L. Fixico

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his preface, Donald Fixico asserts that Native American "tribes had a special relationship with the earth." Through six case studies of individuals or groups (Part One), he discusses how his "ancestors and other Indian people ... suffered at the hands of American capitalists in this age of greed, the twentieth century." Five essays on recent efforts to defend resources (Part Two) cover institutional strategies among tribal governments. Fixico concludes that "until capitalistic attitudes are corrected and the preservation of the earth's diminishing resources become a priority, we will continue to destroy ourselves." Most chapters examine experiences of Plains Indian …

Review Of The Power Of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography By Luke E. Lassiter, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his informative and innovative exploration of Kiowa music, Luke Lassiter focuses on intersubjective, phenomenological, and experiential aspects of Kiowa song. Employing collaborative ethnography, a method that "fully embraces dialogue in both ethnographic practice and ethnographic writing," he discloses the ways in which his own social interactions with Kiowa consultants have informed his ethnography.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Experience, Dialogue, and Ethnography," recounts Lassiter's early impressions of Plains Indians and the gradual transformation of his understanding. The second, "Powwows, the Gourd Dance, and Kiowa Song," offers his interpretation of the social worlds in which Kiowa …

Review Of The Lakota Ritual Of The Sweat Lodge: History And Contemporary Practice By Raymond A. Bucko, Martin Brokenleg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Native Americans, including the Lakota of the Great Plains, are mistrustful of anthropologists. For four centuries, white explorers, settlers, and scholars have defined Native American life, culture, and values. Because these cultural records are kept in writing, people from western cultures regard them as authoritative. The result is the current tendency for readers to trust the records of a white investigator more than the spoken word of a Lakota. The mistrust Lakotas have of anthropologists is the result not only of inaccurate accounts but also the assumption that the recording authority has a "true" understanding that is more accurate than …

Review Of Spirit Capture: Photographs From The National Museum Of The American Indian Edited By Tim Johnson, Mick Gidley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features.

First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection's editor has avoided reproducing too …

Review Of Charles M. Russell, Legacy: Printed And Published Works Of Monwna's Cowboy Artist Text By Larry Len Peterson, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Larry L. Peterson has for many years collected art by Charles M. Russell (1865-1926) as well as printed and published works of the "cowboy artist." A native of Montana where the artist lived most of his life, Peterson is highly knowledgeable about Russell's work and has published numerous articles on the subject in Russell's West, a periodical of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. As Peterson traces examples of the printed appearances of Russell's work in varied forms, he underscores how the artist's vision of the American West was not limited in its appeal to an …

A Week Of Music And Dance An Introduction, Randall Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the second week of April 1999, the Center for Great Plains Studies hosted The Great Plains Music & Dance Festival and Symposium. This undertaking, three years in the planning, co-chaired by Ron Bowlin and myself with suggestions of various committees of local advocates, resulted in a multidisciplinary event which showcased the diversity of our music and dance heritage in the Great Plains. Performances of Plains music and dance ranging from Northern and Southern Native Drums to Jazz, Folk, Gospel and Classical were featured at a variety of venues in Lincoln. This phase of the symposium culminated in a premier …

Review Of State Of Mind: Texas Literature And Culture By T Om Pilkington, Jose E. Limon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Those of us who teach college courses in Texas literature have need of a scholarly study-a critical survey-that would closely attend to its subject in a learned, critical, and theorize well-written manner; deal with this literature in an ample historical and cultural context; and the connection between literature and context in a manner that would at least gesture in the direction of recent developments in literary critical theory. Pilkington's book is superb in the first instance, disappoints in the second, and is almost wholly unresponsive in the third.

This is a clearly written, intelligent, and relatively comprehensive account of the …

Review Of Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros: A Celebration Of Nebraska's Mexican Heritage/Una Celebración De La Herencia Mexicana De Nebraska By Ralph F. Grajeda, Et Al, Juan R. García

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros is part of a grant funded project designed to collect and preserve the cultural heritage of Mexican Americans in Nebraska. The information presented is largely drawn from oral histories and interviews of residents living in Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha, and Scottsbluff.

The published volume consists of five parts. "Mexicans in Nebraska," by Ralph Grajeda, provides a general survey of Mexican immigration into the state. Much of the information covers the period before Wodd War II and focuses on the first two waves of immigration of Mexicans into the US and Nebraska. Although those familiar with the history …

Review Of Jazz Of The Southwest: An Oral History Of Western Swing By Jean A. Boyd, Cary Ginell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her preface to Jazz of the Southwest, Jean Boyd explains that she was only introduced to western swing in 1990. A musicologist at Baylor University's School of Music, Boyd is well-schooled in music theory, as evidenced by her frequent lapses into musicological jargon. But she is painfully unschooled not only in western swing's history, but the record industry in general during the period in which the genre thrived. Boyd's assumption that western swing is an offshoot of jazz is simplistic, yet she spends the entire book trying to prove this point rather than coming to a conclusion based …

Review Of Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art In The Midwest Edited By Barbara Brackman And Cathy Dwigans, Karen Janovy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Always eager to plunge into books with enticing epigraphs (such as Archibald MacLeish's "A world ends when its metaphor has died"), I was not disappointed with Brackman and Dwigans's Backyard Visionaries. Beautifully illustrated, it not only documents, with excellent notes, a kind of "visionary" art, much of which exists on site rather than in museums, but also highlights model preservation efforts by the Kansas Grassroots Art Association (KGAA) of historically significant outsider art. Elizabeth Broun's illuminating introduction states that this art, first coined "outsider" art in 1972, has found an "exceptional environment throughout the Midwest" since the …

The Omaha Gospel Complex In Historical Perspective, Tom Jack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this article, I document the introduction and development of gospel music within the African-American Christian community of Omaha, Nebraska. The 116 predominantly black congregations in Omaha represent twenty-five percent of the churches in a city where African-Americans comprise thirteen percent of the overall population.¹ Within these institutions the gospel music genre has been and continues to be a dynamic reflection of African-American spiritual values and aesthetic sensibilities. By focusing the research on perceptions and descriptions provided by the music's practitioners, an examination of this genre at the local level will shed insight into the development and dissemination of …

Notes And News- Summer 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Call For Papers: "Rhetoric On The Great Plains"

Sacred Lands: Plains Indian Seminar

Greatplains.Org

Omaha Indian Music

Association For Canadian Studies Colloquium

Northern Great Plains History Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920

Review Of New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian And American Landscapes By Elizabeth Johns, Andrew Sayers, And Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, With Amy Ellis, Julie K. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An exhibition of nineteenth-century landscape art from the United States and Australia (the latter a British colony until federation in 1901) is such an excellent idea one wonders why it has not been done before. Such an ambitious and challenging project, however, has some inherent dangers in collapsing historical differences for the sake of presentation. Assessing cultural productions must take into account distinct histories in these two "settler countries," especially in the creation of their respective national identities-as Lyn Spillman has already demonstrated in her excellent Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (1997).

New …

Review Of Contemporary American Indian Literatures And The Oral Tradition By Susan Berry Brill De Ramirez, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brill de Ramirez's work addresses at least two crucial issues that scholars of Native American literatures must consider every time they read: what cultural contexts are informing the texts, and what critical approaches to these contexts and texts will not perpetuate academic or intellectual colonialism. In Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), Greg Sarris explains that in addition to a careful consideration of American Indian cultural and historical contexts, a reader must also consider the history of her or his own readings. Slug Woman, an important precursor to Brill de Ramirez's study, proposes that …

Review Of A Sense Of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism In Canadian And American Writing Edited By Christian Riegel And Herb Wyile, Heidi L. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In their introduction to A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, the editors assert that for most North Americans, identity is "a complex mix of a feeling of community, a shared cultural, ethnic and social background, and an attachment to place-a mix that is much more localized than the feeling of being Canadian or being American." Great Plains studies rely upon regionalism and the assumption that national, provincial, and state boundaries can be transcended through a shared geographical region. As the editors write, "current global trends are investing the term [regionalism] with new significance, necessitating …

Review Of Community Music In Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By George W. Lyon, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you have any Alberta connections, you will not be able to resist paging through this engaging, photo-full book looking for people and places you know. I found my grandfather on page 43, but still can't make out if my grandmothers are in the background of some of the other scenes.

Most of Community Music in Alberta is given over to photographs of a stunning variety of music groups from the 1880s to the present. Not only are there the fiddlers, dance bands, brass bands, pipers, CFCN and CKUA radio groups, cowboy singers (including Wilf Carter), powwow drums, little theater …

Review Of Chokecherry Places: Essays From The High Plains By Merrill Gilfillan, Douglas Unger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For fifteen years, poet Merrill Gilfillan has been driving "in long misshapen circles" through the High Plains of the American West. The result is Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains, a collection not so much of essays as of poetic meditations on prairie landscape and fauna recalling in its intentions passages of Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Donne.

What is also impressive about this book winner of the 1999 Western States Book Award for non-fiction-is its lack of pretense, its avoidance of highly politicized cause or preservationist polemic so common in recent prose explorations of a sense …

The Musical Landscape Of Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House, Philip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his essay "Sinclair Ross in Letters and Conversation," David Stouck recounts Ross's humble reactions to the array of criticism given to his first and most famous novel, As For Me and My House:

"You understand the [Bendeys] perhaps better than I do, or at least did when I was writing. For when I was writing I was participating and when you participate you often don't understand or see. More was coming I suppose than I knew." In this same vein he has often remarked that critical articles about the novel amaze him-discuss ions of Chopin and George Sand, …

This Week At The Opera House Popular Musical Entertainment At Great Plains Opera Houses, 1887-1917, D. Layne Ehlers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Americans in the years immediately preceding the twentieth century clung to a naivete reminiscent of the manifest destiny days. Novels, newspaper accounts, and old-fashioned, rousing melodramas on the stage all displayed a predilection for an American way which showed that moral good, coupled with patience, would triumph, providing it remained within carefully proscribed social and ethical limits. "Home Sweet Home," the most popular song of its time, celebrated the simple virtues of hearth and family.

Nowhere was this vision of life more apparent than in the Great Plains. By 1877 the days when Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff welcomed trail-weary …

Powerful Feelings Recollected In Tranquility Literary Criticism And Lakota Social Song Poetry, R. D. Theisz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist William K. Powers, in his Beyond the Vision: Essays on American Indian Culture, laments that the discipline of ethnomusicology-and music pedagogy-with its emphasis on the vocal and instrumental "art music" traditions of musically literate peoples has been lax in accepting anthropological theory. Thus, Powers points out that ethnomusicology, where it is concerned with the music of oral, indigenous cultures, adheres to outdated theories on "primitive" music and displays a telling absence of ethnographic abilities.¹ Reflecting Powers' judgment, it seems to me that the conceptual seams between anthropology, ethnomusicology, and musicology are rather formidable.

At …