Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Biographical Directory Of Native American Painters Edited By Patrick D. Lester, Richard Conn

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is a long-needed and critically important reference work sure to be welcomed by the many scholars, collectors, artists, and others who will consult it frequently. The last work of this nature, Jeanne Snodgrass's American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory, was published in 1968, hence the importance and timeliness of Lester's Biographical Directory.

The body of the work (the actual Directory) is organized alphabetically by artists' names, each entry including biographical data, tribal affiliation, name in tribal language, and lists of awards, commissions, and works in public collections. If an artist works in more than one medium, the …

Review Of Indian School Days By Basil H. Johnston, Susan Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1939 Basil H. Johnston's mother told him he would soon be going on a short trip. The reasons for her seeming upset during preparations for his departure became clear to the ten-year-old Ojibway only when the agent came to collect him. Basil realized he was being taken to Spanish, a small village in northern Ontario and the site of the St. Peter Claver's Indian Residential School. Indian School Days renders the autobiographical remembrances of the author's years at the Jesuit boarding school.

Residential schools for Native American children were spread throughout Canada and the United States through the 1950s. …

Black Soldiers At Fort Hays, Kansas, 1867-1869 A Study In Civilian And Military Violence, James N. Leiker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians of the western army contend with many romanticized myths. Few of those myths, in recent years, have held the popular consciousness as has that of the army's first black regulars, known as "buffalo soldiers." By now, the origins of the segregated regiments are quite familiar. In 1866, with the nation's acting military force having dwindled to a fraction of its Civil War size, the Republican Congress encouraged the enlistment of newly freed slaves and northern free blacks. Assigned to remote western areas, black units played an instrumental role over the next few decades in opening the West for white …

Review Of They Call Me Agnes: A Crow Narrative Based On The Life Of Agnes Yellowtail Deernose By Fred W. Yoget, Assisted By Mary K. Mee, Marika Sandell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

They Call Me Agnes tells the life story of Agnes Yellowtail as narrated to anthropologist Fred Yoget and assisted in his work by Mary K. Mee. Yoget also includes information from other Crow informants and presents a chapter on Crow reservation culture based on Robert Lowie's classical ethnographical data. The last chapter discusses Crow traditional ceremonies and how they have changed during Agnes's life. In his introduction, Yoget gives details about where he has added material to each chapter and where it is Agnes's voice we are hearing.

Agnes Yellowtail was born in a tent during the Crow Indian Fair …

Review Of The Nature Of The Place: A Study Of Great Plains Fiction By Diane Dufva Quantic, Melody Graulich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Diane Quantic takes her title from Wright Morris: "Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion." Quantic's "opinion" is perhaps best conveyed on a t-shirt I once saw her wearing at a conference: "Kansas is the best kept secret in the United States."

I begin with this anecdote because Quantic has earned her authority by living her whole life in Kansas; I admire the way she establishes her relation to "place" in the book's first line: "My mother grew up in Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight …

Review Of The Dull Knifes Of Pine Ridge: A Lakota Odyssey By Joe Starita, Donald L. Parman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Joe Starita's book centers on five generations of the Dull Knife family from the 1870s until the present. The original Dull Knife was a Northern Cheyenne who, with Little Wolf, led his people north from Indian Territory in 1878. The flight became one of the more famous episodes of the Indian wars. His son, George Dull Knife, born in 1875, probably came north to the Pine Ridge reservation several years later and identified with the Lakota rather than the Northern Cheyenne. George worked in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and later served as a tribal policeman. His son, Guy, Sr., …

Review Of Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real By Carol Miles Petersen, Barbara W. Rippey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Nebraska author (1881-1954), believed that if people want to do something badly enough, they will find the time to do it. Carol Miles Petersen, her biographer, tells us that Aldrich wanted so much to write that care of a husband, four children, and a home failed to deter her. The early death of Aldrich's husband added an economic impetus to her initial drive. She published a dozen books and numerous short stories and articles in meeting her artistic and family responsibilities. Moreover, during depression years, she aided her community substantially by offering quiet financial help to the …

Notes And News- Winter 1997

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

CENTER FOR GREAT PLAINS STUDIES SYMPOSIA

FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT SEMINAR

PUBLICATIONS A WARDS

Review Of Voices Of The Plains Cree By Edward Ahenakew, Jennifer S. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Voices of the Plains Cree was first published in 1973 by McClelland & Stewart. As it has been out of print for some time, the Canadian Plains Research Center has rendered useful service in once again making this important book available in a new edition with striking and attractive cover artwork by Allen Sapp.

In the 1920s, Edward Ahenakew, a Saskatchewan Cree ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 1912, quietly began to write down the memories and legends told to him by Chief Thunderchild (Peyasiw-awasis, also known as Kapitikow), then living on Onion Lake Reserve (Saskatchewan). Thunderchild, a follower of …

Review Of Becoming And Remaining A People: Native American Religions On The Northern Plains By Howard L. Harrod, Lee Irwin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Primarily this is a book about pre-reservation religions among the Hidatsa and Mandan, with a final chapter on the Cheyenne and Crow. Its purpose, an important one, is to reveal Hidatsa and Mandan culture as dynamic and transformative, nourished by religious values that provided social continuity as well as a symbolic language for adaptation and innovation. Unlike the many books dealing with northern Plains religions as static, or locked into unchanging cycles of religious ritual, Becoming and Remaining a People clearly shows how northern Plains religious experience and interpretations shaped new patterns of identity and social reconstruction while providing a …

Review Of This Fragile Land: A Natural History Of The Nebraska Sandhills By Paul A. Johnsgard, Bob Ross

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This Fragile Land, though written for a popular audience, is not intended for children or for light bedtime reading. In language midway between academic discourse and good literary prose, Paul Johnsgard characterizes the plant and animal communities of the Sandhills thoroughly- and with humor and imagination.

Part One describes the "geology and historical geography" of the Sandhills region and its borders; it is the only part that might be tedious for some. In his preface, Johnsgard advises readers to begin with Part Two and skip-and-sample backward. In five chapters, he details the geographic relationships of species' habitats to one …

Review Of Born In The Country: A History Of Rural America By David B. Danbom, Michael W. Schuyler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

David B. Danbom, professor of history at North Dakota State University, Fargo, is widely respected as one of the nation's leading authorities on agricultural history. His purpose in writing this book, to provide a general history of rural America combining traditional political and economic history with the new social history, he accomplishes with admirable success. Born in the Country will quickly become a standard text in the field.

Danbom traces the history of agriculture from the nation's beginnings, when rural Americans dominated the nation, down to a present in which farmers and people living in rural areas have become a …

A Socioeconomic Portrait Of Prince Hall Masonry In Nebraska, 1900-1920, Dennis N. Mihelich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On 6 March 1775, a British military lodge of Freemasons initiated Prince Hall (his name, not a title) and fourteen other African Americans after the white colonial lodge at Boston had rejected their petition. Independence did not alter the attitude of white American Masons; thus, a separate black Masons' organization evolved. Hall secured a charter from the "mother" grand lodge in England and reconstituted his group as the African Grand Lodge of North America. Following his death in 1807 the fraternal order renamed itself in his honor.

Prior to the abolition of slavery Prince Hall Masonry spread slowly among the …

Allotment, Alcohol, And The Omahas, Benson Tong

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"The welfare of the Omaha is close to my heart ... I am living among them and I know what I am writing about," wrote Noah La Flesche in a 1916 letter to the Superintendent of the Omaha School, the field official in charge of the Omaha agency. In a passionate tone, La Flesche went on to plead: "If we had a man who would take the drunken Indian, fine him, put him in jail till he sobered up, drinking would not be so bad. This is going to ruin the Omaha. I ask you to help us ... we …

The Roasted And The Boiled: Food Composition And Heat Treatment With Special Emphasis On Pit-Hearth Cooking, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Heat treatment is one of the major ways humans change the composition and chemistry of food tissues, making them more digestible, less toxic, and more durable. This paper reviews salient features of food chemistry and food composition and how heat treatment, especially pit-hearth cooking, affects that composition. Ethnographic accounts of cooking indicate that traditional populations relied on pit-hearth cooking especially to alter the composition of foods high in either lipids or complex carbohydrates. Historically, pit hearths were also used to process large quantities of food. Various kinds of pit hearths figure prominently in the archaeological deposits of the American Great …

Review Of Sanumá Memories: Yanomami Ethnography In A Time Of Crisis. Alcida Rita Ramos. Madison: University Of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Xx, 346 Pp. (Paper)., Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

As I have done considerable research among the Yanomamö,1 it was with anticipation that I received notice of Alcida Ramos' publication of Sanumá Memories. This work is a useful contribution to the large and still expanding research on the Yanomamö, an Amazonian people who have become a classic case study for anthropology and the social sciences. They are probably the most widely read about tribal people in the world, largely a consequence of Napoleon Chagnon's immensely popular ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People (first published in 1968 and the most recent edition in 1992).

The Yanomamö have become a focal point …

Defining And Classifying Pilgrimages, Robert Stoddard

Geography Program: Faculty Publications

To make comparisons among the many forms of religious journeys, scholars need both an acceptable definition of the phenomenon called pilgrimages and a workable classification scheme that reveals significant differences. Following a discussion about the elements that should be incorporated into a definition of pilgrimages, a formal statement is presented. This provides a basis for separating those traveling activities that should be studied as pilgrimages from all other forms of human movement. Further differentiation among pilgrimages can be achieved by categorizing them into a few distinct classes. Several criteria that logically could be utilized for dividing pilgrimages into various types …

January 1997 - Staff Meetings

ALEC Committee Minutes

No abstract provided.

Domestication Of Dogs And Their Use On The Great Plains, Ruth Callahan

Nebraska Anthropologist

More than 12,000 years ago a bargain was struck between two species that not only benefited both parties, but changed their futures drastically. Whereas wolves and humans had once been independent hunters in competition with each other, now they were partners who shared the kill and helped each other survive in the harsh environment. We will never know which side initiated the pact, but the wolf was the first animal to cast its lot with humans and the evolutionary advantages that came with this choice were tremendous.

Factors Leading To The Uprisings At Wounded Knee In 1890 & 1973: The Other Story, Andrew Amiotte

Nebraska Anthropologist

Throughout history, the American Indians have experienced maltreatment by the invasion of outside cultures and by people with power. As the Indians have been forced to move westward by the U.S. government, many treaties have been drawn up as a promise that the tribes would never again be invaded. These broken promises influenced the placing of the indigenous people onto reservations. Also, the Indians were forced to abandon their native way of life.

This paper discusses why forcing the Lakota Sioux to live on reservations and to adopt an Anglo culture led to great misery. This new way of life …

Human Mate Selection Based On Developmental Stability As Signaled Through Physical Attractiveness: An Assessment Of The Traits Used To Determine Attractiveness And The Evolutionary Mechanisms For Their Development, Erin H. Kimmerle

Nebraska Anthropologist

What are the criteria used to select a mate? Study of this question on non-human subjects has shown many organisms choose mates based on assessments of health, youthfulness, and fertility, as signaled through certain physical characteristics. Investigations into the mating behaviors of humans, cross-cultural studies of attractiveness, and current medical research link features of attractiveness with health and support the evolutionary perspective that beauty is more than an arbitrary cultural creation. The characteristics which males and females find attractive in the opposite sex are largely the results of the evolution of sexual selection and serve to inform potential mates of …

Starbucks Vs. Equal Exchange: Assessing The Human Costs Of Economic Globalization, Lindsey M. Smith

Nebraska Anthropologist

This paper discusses the impact of economic globalization on human populations and their natural environment. Trends leading to globalization, such as multilateral and bilateral trade agreements which reduce trading barriers between countries, are discussed. According to the economic principle of comparative advantage, all countries which specialize in what they can produce most efficiently should benefit equally from fair trade. Developing countries must increasingly rely on cheap labor and low environmental standards to compete for foreign investment and capital in the global economy. Observers argue that the market is not free enough to conect the long-term damage associated with export policies …

Human Responses To Bison Nutritional Variability: An Illustration From The Central Plains, Chris Widga

Nebraska Anthropologist

The relation of prehistoric human groups to bison populations in the Central Plains has long been the subject of both speculation and debate. Recent research has shown that bison are relatively sensitive to changing environmental conditions (Bamforth, 1988; Bozell, 1995; Speth and Pany, 1978; Emerson, 1990). This sensitivity is visible in physiological and behavioral adaptations used by bison to deal with change. Ukewise, evidence for these adaptations is present in faunal assemblages from Central Plains archaeological sites. In order to determine the nature of these adaptive charaderistics, a model must be developed which goes beyond traditional presence/absence tabulations of faunal …

Pattern And Process In Biological Invasion, Diane L. Larson

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

A cohesive theory of biological invasion has been frustratingly elusive. If nothing else, Mark Williamson's book, Biological Invasions, has convinced me of the futility in looking for broad patterns among the widely disparate creatures that have invaded almost every conceivable environment.

Monogamy Vs. Polygyny In Rwanda: Round 1 - The White Fathers Round 2 - The 1994 Genocide, Clea Koff

Nebraska Anthropologist

The symbiotic relationship between European Christian missionaries and European colonizers in East Africa is well-documented (Opoku 1985:513; Uzukwu 1996:29). However, the colonial history of Rwanda reveals a collaboration between French Roman Catholic missionaries and the coexistent Belgian administration that ensured a profound transformation, not only of indigenous religious practice, but of the marriage pattern - from polygyny to monogamy. The Catholic missionaries in Rwanda, an order called the White Fathers, imported a model of ideal marriage that was an amalgam of Christian theology and their own Western European culture. The model was not immediately embraced by Rwandans and after twenty …

Prior Beliefs And Voter Turnout In The 1986 And 1988 Congressional Elections, Stephen P. Nicholson, Ross A. Miller

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The costs of political information differ between and among elections. In those elections where information costs are high, voters should rely on information from previous elections. Although research on voter choice has long recognized that voters use past information in their assessments of candidates, studies of voter turnout are solely concerned with information available in the current election. Specifically, the closeness of elections is a central concern in rational actor models of voter turnout. As such, these studies neglect the effects of prior electoral competitiveness on citizens’ decisions to vote. In this study we propose that actors rely on prior …

Cheyenne Autumn, By Mari Sandoz, Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Cheyenne Autumn is an unflinching historical portrait of a people confronting physical extermination and cultural annihilation at the hands of duplicitous government forces. This work is structurally a chapter-by-chapter chronicle of a Cheyenne outbreak starting in Oklahoma and ending in the surrender of Little Wolf and his followers hundreds of miles and six months later in Montana. The northern Cheyennes of the Yellowstone region are promised land, food, and protection in treaties signed by the U.S. Government. These agreements, however, are repeatedly and brutally broken by the government.

Hundreds of northern Cheyennes agree, under government coercion, to removal to Oklahoma …

Winter Counts As Possible Precursors To Writing, Petra Eccarius

Nebraska Anthropologist

Native Americans of the Great Plains did not have a formal system of writing. These groups did, however, have various types of graphical representation. One such example is the Siouan winter counts, pictures recorded once each winter on buffalo hide (or later on cloth) which served as mnemonic devices for a partial oral history and calendar of the group to which it belonged. Scholars often study the subject matter of these counts in order to gain historic or cultural information about Native groups. Despite the facts that only one important or unusual event is depicted each year, and that the …

Native Americans And Diabetes, Kristina K. Lee

Nebraska Anthropologist

Type II diabetes has reached epidemic proportions among Native Americans. It Is estimated that 12.2 percent of all Native Americans in the U.S. have Type II diabetes. This compares with 5.2 percent of the general U.S. population (Diabetes Statistics 1997). The highest rate of diabetes in the world is in the Pima Nation. Half of all Pima Indians age 35 and older have diabetes (West 1974). Diabetes causes severe health complications and is a major cause of
death for Native Americans.

Tibetan Fraternal Polyandry: A Review Of Its Advantages And Breakdown, Jeff Willett

Nebraska Anthropologist

The fraternal polyandry marriage relationship of Tibet is widely considered
to be a means of preventing the division of a family's resources among its male heirs. As a family resource preservation strategy, Tibetan polyandry accomplishes the same goal of the European stem family system, but in a very different way. Researchers have suggested that polyandry developed in Tibet, because it provides a household with enough male laborers to fully exploit the marginal agricultural lands in the Himalayas, that it serves as a means of population control, or that it serves as a way of reducing tax obligations to feudal Tibetan …