Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of The Chouteaus; First Family Of The Fur Trade By Stan Hoig, B. Pierre Lebeau

Great Plains Quarterly

The importance of Saint Louis French merchants in the fur trade and the expansion of the American West during the first half of the nineteenth century is little known in spite of articles and monographs from the 1930s to the 1980s by historians such as John Francis McDermott, William E. Foley, and C. David Rice. A small number of articles by different authors have appeared in journals and anthologies. Shirley Christian published Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier in 2004, a work addressed to the general public.

Stan Hoig, …

Review Of Defamiliarizing The Aboriginal: Cultural Practices And Decolonization In Canada. By Julia V. Emberley., Laura Peers

Great Plains Quarterly

This book examines how "representational technologies," including photography and archival material, were used to establish colonial control over Aboriginal families in Canada. Case studies include a critique of photographer Mary Schaffer's images of Aboriginal people in the Rocky Mountains, an analysis of an RCMP file concerning the disappearance of an Inuit woman and children, and a discussion of prairie writer Rudy Wiebe's retelling of Yvonne Johnson's life. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal is a subtle addition to literature on the mechanisms of cultural representation and their dynamics within colonialism, placing these issues especially well within the framework of postcolonial and feminist politics. …

Review Of Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties To Contemporary Times. By Neal Mcleod, Bret Nickels

Great Plains Quarterly

Within contemporary Aboriginal discourse, there is a growing tendency to ignore the multilayered histories of various Aboriginal communities in favor of a more simplified discourse based on tribal specific nationalism. Cree Narrative Memory, an important new book, ignores this movement towards essentialism and tackles the multilayered histories of the nehiyawak (Cree People) of western Canada. The author contributes a detailed, visionary study of Cree discourse, exploring the little considered ambiguous genealogy and narrative irony of Plains Cree identity, a central factor in the book's fresh perspectives, analysis, and conclusions.

Though many books draw upon oral history and storytelling, few have …

Review Of Carol Shields And The Extra-Ordinary. Edited By Marta Dvorak And Manina Jones, Alex Ramon

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection, which emerges from papers given at the Carol Shields colloquium held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in March 2003, ranks alongside Edward Eden and Dee Goertz's Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction (2003) as a significant addition to Shields scholarship. As its title suggests, the focus of the volume is Shields's multifarious engagement with-and subversion of-categories of "ordinariness" and "extraordinariness" in her fiction, although some of the thirteen essays address this theme rather tangentially.

Like Narrative Hunger, the collection opens with a previously unpublished essay written by Shields herself, in this case ''A View from …

Review Of Russell Lee Photographs; Images From The Russell Lee Photograph Collection At The Center For American History. By Russell Lee, Connie Todd

Great Plains Quarterly

Russell Lee, more than any of his compadres in the Farm Security Administration (FSA), created the visual history and thus our collective memory of the Great Depression; and it is fitting that the University of Texas Press in its "Focus on American History Series" has published a long-overdue book of Lee's images from the Russell Lee photography collection at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for American History, particularly since the Art Department at UT hired Lee in the mid-1960s to be its first professor of photography.

The late John Szarkowski, legendary director of photography at the Museum of …

Review Of Behind The Man: John Laurie, Ruth Gorman, And The Indian Vote In Canada. By Ruth Gorman., Laurie Meijer Drees

Great Plains Quarterly

Ruth Gorman was a powerful person. When I encountered her in the early 1990s at her home in Calgary I was immediately impressed with her indomitable spirit. At that time she was engrossed in writing a biography of her dear friend John Laurie. Her writing task was complex, and yet she was clearly driven to complete it. The end result of her tremendous effort is Behind the Man, part biography of John Laurie, part personal memoir, and part history of midcentury Alberta and Laurie and Gorman's work advocating civil rights for Canada's Indian peoples. Frits Pannekoek and his editorial …

Review Of Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions Edited By John J. Murphy And Merrill Maguire Skaggs, John N. Swift

Great Plains Quarterly

In 2005 Drew University's Library opened its newly developed Willa Cather Collection to a national Colloquium of Cather scholars. At the request of the Colloquium's organizer, the late Merrill Maguire Skaggs, each selected some interesting object-a manuscript fragment, an exchange of letters, an illustrationas the point of departure for further research, analysis, or speculation. Willa Cather: New Facts, New Glimpses, Revisions, a set of twenty brief essays and a meticulously annotated "Willa Cather Collection Finding Aid," is the project's result.

Unsurprisingly, the essays present a broad, disorderly range of approach and subject matter. They include few very startling discoveries: …

Review Of Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social And Cultural History. Edited By John W. Storey And Mary L. Kelley, Tom Wagy

Great Plains Quarterly

"Given such a large body of scholarship," editors John W. Storey and Mary L. Kelley admit, "another study of Texas seems hardly necessary." Nevertheless, they contend, Twentieth Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History (a collection of fifteen essays) fills a weakness in the Lone Star State's history bibliography, arguing that social and cultural subjects have received "short shrift" in survey texts. Moreover, Storey and Kelly justify their volume because "it focuses solely on the past century, bringing the story up-to-date."

All students of Texas's past will enjoy this collection. Summary histories of Mexican Texans, blacks, women, literature, education, and …

Review Of Kiowa Humanity And The Invasion Of The State By Jacki Thompson Rand, Nathan Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Focusing on the Southern Plains in the nineteenth century, Jacki Rand proposes a study on Kiowa responses to military invasion and the reservation system as a colonized people reacting against a colonizing agent. Additionally, Rand alludes to her investigation yielding new insight as Kiowa reactions to colonialism were in essence covert strategies of adaptation and maintaining traditional cultural values in the face of repeated onslaught. For some, however, this argument will fall somewhat short of these goals.

One of the difficulties in assessing the contribution of Rand's study is determining its projected audience. She begins her narrative with a jargoned …

Review Of The Line From Here To There: A Storyteller's Scottish West Texas By Rosanna Taylor Herndon, Allan O. Kownslar

Great Plains Quarterly

Memoirs are very popular these days, and this is a good one. Rosanna Taylor Herndon, a retired communications professor from Hardin-Simmons University and a professional storyteller, combines her storytelling with a collection of eighteen anecdotes about her Scottish family members in West Texas primarily during the Great Depression. She reveals the poverty people endured and the compassion they exhibited toward one another and others in similar situations. Each story comprises a unique setting, character development, and action regarding life during that time in the southern Great Plains.

Among the examples Herndon offers is "The Panhandle Is Coming," which recounts the …

"Daughters Of British Blood" Or "Hordes Of Men Of Alien Race" The Homesteads-For-Women Campaign In Western Canada, Sarah Carter

Great Plains Quarterly

In May 1910 Mildred Williams, a young teacher in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, made headlines across Western Canada for her pluck and stamina as she waited for twelve days and nights on a chair on the stairs outside the door of the land office in Saskatoon to claim a homestead (see Fig. 1). She was determined to file on a half-section (320 acres) of valuable land near Kindersley. Williams put up with a great deal of inconvenience during her days and nights on the stairs. On the second day she was challenged by a man who wanted the same property and who …

Review Of "Lynching To Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence," By Cynthia Skove Nevels, Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century the growing population of Brazos County, Texas included about equal numbers of white and black southerners. That division contributed to tense political campaigns between Democrats and Republicans as well as acts of political and racial violence. Among new settlers came Bohemian, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Anglos did not immediately accept them as white because of cultural differences. The immigrants sought white status in several ways, including racial violence.

In 1896 a mob seized three African Americans from jail and hanged them. Two had been accused of assaulting a white girl. The …

Review Of "North American Indians In The Great War." By Susan Applegate Krouse, Thomas A. Britten

Great Plains Quarterly

Anthropologist Susan Applegate Krouse employs the records of Joseph Kossuth Dixon to shed light on the experiences of American Indian servicemen during the First World War. A former Baptist preacher, Dixon waged a twodecade- long campaign before and after WWI to preserve a record of Indian cultures and traditions before Native Americans "vanished" as distinctive peoples. To this end, Dixon traveled extensively to photograph and film reservation Indians, at times choreographing or staging scenes that fit his somewhat romanticized view of indigenous life. On the eve of the U.S. entry into WWI, he argued for the creation of segregated Indian …

Review Of "The Cypress Hills: An Island By Itself." By Walter Hildebrandt And Brian Hubner, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly

The Cypress Hills, rising as outliers in the northern portion of the Missouri Coteau and dominating the mixed xeric grasslands of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, have a vast human story of their own. They are certainly worthy of their own history book. This new edition of Hildebrandt and Hubner's 1994 book has been "rewritten and reshaped" to retell the story of the prehistory, aboriginal, early trade, and mounted police history of the region. Originally serving as historians and guides of the Fort Walsh National Historic Site, the authors were well placed to provide it. The Cypress Hills presents a …

Review Of "Forty Acres And A Fool: How To Live In The Country And Still Keep Your Sanity." By Roger Welsch, Gwendolyn K. Meister

Great Plains Quarterly

These recent books by longtime Nebraska author, folklorist, and humorist Roger Welsch examine life in the Great Plains from two quite different perspectives. Forty Acres and a Fool, ostensibly a how-to book on moving to the country, is written in a personal, conversational style from the start. In the introduction Welsch relates the story of his own physical (and mental) relocation to Dannebrog, a village of 352 in central Nebraska. Although the book offers practical advice on everything from moving buildings to fitting in with the social life of one's chosen rural community, it feels essentially like sitting down …

Review Of "Nuclear Nebraska: The Remarkable Story Of The Little County That Couldn't Be Bought." By Susan Cragin., Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly

For nearly twenty-five years after Congress passed the 1980 Federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, Nebraska was torn by controversy over where a waste dump should be spotted in the state. The final act came in 2005, when Nebraska sent $146 million in damages to the five-state Central Compact Commission in charge of constructing the facility. Nothing was built.

Susan Cragin's book is a highly readable, well-researched, and very one-sided look at the uproar that cost all those millions of dollars, left a small Great Plains county irredeemably split, and caused years of newspaper headlines, angry meetings and hearings, and …

Review Of "Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonne." Edited By B. Byron Price., Joan Carpenter Troccoli

Great Plains Quarterly

No one painted the majestic mountains of Montana more splendidly than Charles M. Russell, but most of the action in his art, played out among the cowboys of the open range and the Native peoples of the Northern Plains, unfolds on the flat. Thanks to the comprehensive electronic catalogue of Russell's paintings, drawings, watercolors, models in mixed mediums, and illustrated letters available with this print publication, the reader can verify these assertions without tipping a single book off the library shelf.

Catalogues raisonnes have always stimulated the discovery of lost works and the reattribution and redating of others, and such …

Review Of "White Man's Paper Trail: Grand Councils And Treaty-Making On The Central Plains." By Stan Hoig, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a strange book, in part because the author does not seem to recognize the massive amount of scholarship available on the topic of Indian treaties that has accumulated in the last thirty years. Mostly limited to works published before 1970, its bibliography highlights the problems arising from minimal familiarity with recent research.

The book itself claims to be a unique narrative about the treaty councils of the Central Plains. In reality, it is not unique, and its coverage spans an area from Texas to Montana. The Southern Plains are a particular emphasis and fit the author's expertise. The …

Jim, Antonia, And The Wolves Displacement In Cather's My Antonia, Robin Cohen

Great Plains Quarterly

In one of the most frequently noted incidents in Willa Cather's My Antonia, Russian immigrant Pavel reveals on his deathbed that, when driving his friend's wedding party sledge, he saved his own life and companion Peter's by throwing the bride and groom to the attacking wolves. Antonia and Jim are fascinated by this story, and readers are haunted and intrigued by it. The tale holds the obvious appeal (both for the children and Cather's reader) of the drama of the incident, the color of its remote foreign setting, and the morbid satisfaction of learning the mysterious past of the …

Review Of "The Choctaws In Oklahoma: From Tribe To Nation, 1855-1970." By Clara Sue Kidwell, Robert Keith Collins

Great Plains Quarterly

Scholars of anthropology (particularly historical anthropology), history, and Native American studies interested in Choctaw history, cultural changes, everyday life choices, and contributions to American culture should find The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World important new contributions to the historical literature articulated by strong Choctaw voices. And readers interested in the complexities of Choctaw life in the Southern Plains, how Choctaws interacted with the region's other Indigenous groups (e.g., Kiowas and Comanches), and the inconsistencies between federal policies and Choctaw lived realities over time will be …

Notes And News- Winter 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

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Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 1 / Winter 2009

THE METHODISTS' GREAT 1869 CAMP MEETING AND ABORIGINAL CONSERVATION STRATEGIES IN THE NORTH SASKATCHEWAN RIVER VALLEY

"YOU HAVE TO BE INVOLVED ... TO PLAY A PART IN IT": ASSESSING KAINAI ATTITUDES ABOUT VOTING IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

JIM, ANTONIA, AND THE WOLVES: DISPLACEMENT IN CATHER'S MY ANTONIA

REVIEW ESSAY: WHAT'S CHOCTAW HISTORY-AND WHO GETS TO SAY?

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "William Clark: Indian Diplomat." By Jay H. Buckley., University Of California, Los Angeles And Autry Institute For The Study Of The American West

Great Plains Quarterly

For decades, radio commentator Paul Harvey broadcast a program called "The Rest of the Story." Six times a week, Harvey recounted stories that put a surprising twist on familiar episodes. Often the rest of the story involved constructing epilogues that followed the careers of well-known persons after they had left the spotlight. In some ways Jay Buckley's study of William Clark can be seen as a contribution to Harvey's series. Although the book includes chapters on Clark's earlier life and his cocaptaincy of the Corps of Discovery, threequarters of it involves what Clark did after he came back from that …