Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Dark Storm Moving West, By Barbara Belyea, Arn Keeling

Great Plains Quarterly

In the freshet of scholarly and popular studies accompanying the recent bicentennials of Lewis and Clark's and David Thompson's westward explorations, Dark Storm Moving West forms an eddy of reflection on the practical, communicative, and philosophical challenges of understanding Euro-American exploration in western North America. English professor turned exploration historian Barbara Belyea eschews traditional narratives or grand theses in favor of dense rumination on particular episodes, personalities, and questions. Swirling and riffled at the surface, these waters yet find more subtle coherences in their depths than Belyea herself admits.

Her essays are focused loosely on the figure of Peter Fidler, …

Review Of Native America, Discovered And Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, And Manifest Destiny. By Robert J. Miller, Jenry Morsman

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent decades, scholars have reshaped our understanding of conquest, and as a result the idea of conquest is an unsettling one. Robert J. Miller's original and important work should launch a similar transformation for the idea of discovery. Associate Professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School and Chief Justice, Court of Appeals, Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Community of Oregon, Miller persuasively argues that the principle of international law known as the Doctrine of Discovery provided the legal rationale and framework for the westward expansion of the United States. It, too, he argues, accounts for …

Review Of Reclaiming Charles Weidman (1901-1975): An American Dancer's Life And Legacy By Jonette Lancos, Ronald J. Zank

Great Plains Quarterly

Through her extensive study, Jonette Lancos rectifies the historical neglect of modern dance pioneer and Nebraska native Charles Weidman. Perhaps overshadowed by the greater attention accorded his partner and collaborator Doris Humphrey, with whom Weidman established the Humphrey-Weidman Company and School, Weidman has not been the focus of a critical biography until now. Without denying the importance of Humphrey's influence, Lancos seeks to examine other influences on Weidman's work and to explore his individual achievements.

Lancos begins with an overview of Weidman's career, framed by excerpts from his essay written as a ninth-grader in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then Weidman's family history …

Deathscapes, Topocide, Domicide The Plains In Contemporary Print Media, Christina E. Dando

Great Plains Quarterly

The American print media are a powerful mechanism for communicating information about places and environment to the American public. When it comes to a landscape such as the Great Plains, experienced by many Americans as either sleep-through land in a car or flyover land in a plane, the print media may be their only real source of information about this landscape, excluding 30 second soundbites which occasionally appear in electronic media. Often perceived as monotonous or dull, the Plains has been overlaid with powerful images, of garden or desert, of Dust Bowl or Buffalo Commons. But recent media coverage of …

Review Of Chevato: The Story Of The Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann. By William Chebahtah And Nancy Mcgown Minor, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola

Great Plains Quarterly

This fascinating book foregrounds the oral history of Chevato (Billy Chiwat), a Lipan Apache who in May 1870 captured eleven-yearold Herman Lehmann near Fredericksburg, Texas. Orphaned when young, Chevato joined the Mescalero Apaches, who were the ones actually responsible for the kidnapping of Herman and his brother Willie. In middle age, through the influence of the powerful Comanche Quanah Parker, Chevato became a Comanche and moved to Oklahoma where he lived until his death in 1931.

Non-Native captivity narratives, which have been a familiar part of American culture for centuries, usually focus on the crystallizing events of captivity and do …

Review Of African Creeks: Estelvste And The Creek Nation. By Gary Zellar, Robbie Ethridge

Great Plains Quarterly

Estelvste, or "black people," in the Creek Indian language, are the subjects of this well-written, absorbing story of the people of African descent whose lot in life cast them with the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama and, after Indian Removal, present- day Oklahoma. Gary Zellar refers to them as African Creeks, distinguishing this particular population from both African Americans, Euro-American Creeks, and Indian Creeks. Such distinctions are necessary to the history of the Creek Indians because, after European contact, Creek lives became irreversibly and forever blended with those of the immigrant populations, yet the Creeks themselves adhered …

Review Of Yard Art And Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions Of Home By Jill Nokes With Pat Jasper, Judith Mcwillie

Great Plains Quarterly

In Yard Art and Handmade Places, Jill Nokes collaborates with architect/photographer Krista Whitson and advisor/folklorist Pat Jasper to celebrate unique and resourceful Texans who enhance nature, honor personal and regional histories, and improvise in the midst of constant, sometimes cataclysmic, change. Nokes is a professional conservationist and landscape designer (she authored How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest with Kathryn Miller Brown in 2001) and, since most of the book's practitioners are avid gardeners as well as builders, her expertise makes for a rare and palpable synergy between author and subject. Early on, she lets the …

Review Of Speak Like Singing: Classics Of Native American Literature. By Kenneth Lincoln, James Ruppert

Great Plains Quarterly

Kenneth Lincoln's most recent book follows his others in style and content. Here he is concerned with outlining the fusions of contemporary Native American literature and oral tradition. Starting with sections on song, poetry, and lyric, he suggests that he will steer a course between the extremes of imperialism and essentialism. Some readers will appreciate his imaginative, suggestive, free-flowing discussion of oral and literary impulses from Beowulf to the poetry of Sherwin Bitsui. The central chapters focus on what he calls "crossing texts" by some of the best-known Native writers, and the idea of fusion is his guiding principle. Yet …

Review Of A Call To Action: An Introduction To Education, Philosophy, And Native North America By Curry Stephenson Malott, Malia Villegas

Great Plains Quarterly

In A Call to Action, Curry Stephenson Malott appeals to North American educators to acknowledge their essential role in the ongoing struggle for sustainable and ethical ways of living as humans. Malott joins a rising chorus of scholars who warn about a singular focus on the conflict between Indigenous and Western epistemologies (e.g., Glen Aikenhead's "Integrating Western and Aboriginal Sciences: Cross-Cultural Science Teaching" in Research in Science Education, 2001; Ray Barnhardt and A. O. Kawagley's "Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing" in Anthropology and Education Quarterly 2005; and Ladislaus Semali and J. L.Kincheloe's editors' …

Changing Perceptions Of Homesteading As A Policy Of Public Domain Disposal, Richard Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

The inspiring story of homesteaders claiming free land and realizing their dreams became one of the enduring narratives of American history. But scholars who have studied homesteading have often been much more ambivalent, even harshly negative, about how successful it was in practice. While the public often views our history differently from scholars, in this case the disparity appears both substantial and persistent. Perhaps it is time to revisit homesteading and reassess whether homesteading really was a good idea or not.

Certainly homesteading once powerfully fired the American imagination. The promise of free land was such a startling idea that …

Review Of Navigating The Missouri: Steamboating On Nature's Highway, 1819-1935 By William E. Lass, Ken Robison

Great Plains Quarterly

For more than forty years, William E. Lass's pathbreaking A History of Steamboating on the Upper Missouri served as the authoritative history of the Upper Missouri. Now, Lass has culminated his career by extending his important study to the entire Missouri River and its navigable tributaries, the premier river corridor in the trans-Mississippi West.

From St. Louis to Fort Benton, the Missouri River served as a natural highway into the vast North American West. Lass places the progress of steamboating on the Missouri River in the context of the western movement, fueled by the surge in American nationalism and the …

A Prairie Parable The 1933 Bates Tragedy, Bill Walser

Great Plains Quarterly

It was one of the more harrowing episodes of the Great Depression. Ted and Rose Bates had failed in business in Glidden, Saskatchewan, in 1932 and again on the west coast of Canada the following year. When they were subsequently turned down for relief assistance twice, first in Vancouver and then in Saskatoon, because they did not meet the local residency requirements, the couple decided to end their lives in a remote rural schoolyard, taking their eightyear- old son, Jackie, with them rather than face the shame of returning home to Glidden as a relief case. But it was only …

Review Of Myth Of The Hanging Tree: Stories Of Crime And Punishment In Territorial New Mexico By Robert J. Torrez, Mark A. Allan

Great Plains Quarterly

New Mexico is a state where regions and cultures collide. Partly situated in the western Great Plains, the lynchings and legal executions that have taken place in the former territory and current state illustrate tensions between the cultures residing therein. Robert J. Torrez, former New Mexico State Historian, ably captures the influence of the Anglos' "Judge Lynch" in the region formerly inhabited by Native Americans and later settled first by the Spanish and then the Anglo-Americans.

In the opening third of the book, Torrez provides an overview of hangings and capital punishment in the area. Concentrating on the territorial days, …

Review Of The Importance Of Being Monogamous: Marriage And Nation Building In Western Canada To 1915 By Sarah Carter, Jean Friesen

Great Plains Quarterly

Sarah Carter's The Importance of Being Monogamous is a timely study of Canada's efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to impose monogamy on its western frontier in communities long used to fur trade marriage by the custom of the country. Today the status of plural marriages is a contentious issue facing some jurisdictions in North America, including British Columbia. Some European societies have also struggled with the legal issues stemming from migration from regions where polygamy is firmly grounded in both faith and law. Carter's new book offers a rich, well-documented historical context for those involved in such …

Review Of How Cities Won The West: Four Centuries Of Urban Change In Western North America. By Carl Abbott, Timothy Mahoney

Great Plains Quarterly

This impressive survey of western urban history demonstrates How Cities Won the West. Its original conceptualization and persuasive argument are supported by an impressive amount of evidence. It should be considered as the "last stand" among urban historians who still feel the need to argue for the central role of urbanization in the development of the West.

Carl Abbott demonstrates that in the nineteenth century several kinds of towns and cities-raw outposts, gateways, industrial towns, irrigation towns (seeking to be the center of an "Inland Empire"), and tourist centers-competed for central roles that they believed would tip the balance of …

Review Of The Nez Perces In The Indian Territory: Nimiipuu Survival. By J. Diane Pearson, Alan Marshall

Great Plains Quarterly

The Nimiipuu are most associated with the Columbia Basin rather than the Great Plains. Yet some Nimiipuu groups and their western allies lived for a year or more in the Northern Plains during the early to mid-1800s. There they followed a bison-hunting life and linked the region to the Columbia River trading network. Nimiipuu were so much a part of the region that they were signatories to the United States' 1855 Treaty with the Blackfeet negotiated by Isaac I. Stevens.

Nimiipuu knowledge of the northern Great Plains decided the "escape" route from their homelands that was the Nez Perce War …

Review Of Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader. By Paul N. Beck, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly

Inkpaduta, the renowned Dakota leader, has for years been viewed by history in a negative light, a savage who wantonly perpetuated the infamous Spirit Lake Massacre in 1857. Following the Dakota War in Minnesota in 1862, Inkpaduta made his way west among Nakota and finally Lakota brethren and in so doing became the scourge of the Plains, gaining a dark reputation wherever he went. Inkpaduta ended his career of resistance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn at either the age of sixty-one or seventy-six, depending on which disputed birth date one chooses.

Paul Beck has written the most complete …

Review Of To Live's To Fly: The Ballad Of The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt. By John Kruth A Deeper Blue: The Life And Music Of Townes Van Zandt By Robert Earl Hardy, Chuck Vollan

Great Plains Quarterly

Townes Van Zandt was a founding member of the modern Texas singer-songwriter tradition and influenced or played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Norah Jones. His spare, evocative lyrics, coupled with his beautiful, articulate guitar playing, developed a particularly loyal and eclectic fan base. His songs have been covered most famously by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Emmylou Harris, but also by a host of great and lesser-known performers. He was a major influence on the "Outlaw" Country movement.

Van Zandt wrestled with inner demons. His eccentricities, mental illness, and the resulting heavy substance abuse, combined with often poorly produced …

Title And Contents- Fall 2009

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 4 / Fall 2009

"DAUGHTERS OF BRITISH BLOOD" OR "HORDES OF MEN OF ALIEN RACE"; THE HOMESTEADS-FOR-WOMEN CAMPAIGN IN WESTERN CANADA

PARALLEL TRACKS, SAME TERMINUS; THE ROLE OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEWSPAPERS AND RAILROADS IN THE SETTLEMENT OF NEBRASKA

"REJOICING IN THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE"; THE IMAGE OF THE WESTERN LANDSCAPE DURING THE FUR TRADE

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

"You Have To Be Involved ... To Play A Part In It" Assessing Kainai Attitudes About Voting In Canadian Elections, Yale D. Belanger

Great Plains Quarterly

Two days prior to the federal election on June 28, 2004, the Lethbridge Herald ran an article in which the renowned Cree leader and former Member of Parliament Elijah Harper (Churchill electoral district in Manitoba, 1993-97) publicly implored First Nations people in Canada to participate in the forthcoming vote. Citing the recent demographic shift showing a dramatic increase in the number of young First Nations people nationally and their potential ability to influence provincial and federal electoral results, Harper proclaimed that "Native people have a positive role to play in this process." Referring to the endemic lack of voter turnout …

Review Of "Memories Of The Branch Davidians: The Autobiography Of David Koresh's Mother," By Bonnie Haldeman, W. Michael Ashcraft

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1993 federal government agents besieged and then attacked the compound of buildings at Mount Carmel, outside of Waco, Texas, that housed members of a religious movement called the Branch Davidians (a splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventists), led by Vernon Howell, who renamed himself David Koresh. Catherine Wessinger, a noted scholar of cults or new religions, has produced much of the essential scholarship that has appeared in the wake of the Waco disaster. This book is part of her ongoing contribution to our understanding of Waco.

Wessinger interviewed Bonnie Haldeman extensively in 2004, resulting in the present volume, which …

Review Of "Picturing A Different West: Vision, Illustration, And The Tradition Of Cather And Austin," By Janis P. Stout, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly

Janis Stout's credentials are impeccable: as the author of biographies {of Cather and Katherine Anne Porter} and of critical studies of American women novelists, and as denizen of the West and Southwest, she knows her topic. Starting from what she terms Willa Cather's and Mary Austin's "highly visual prose," Stout builds upon an argument about gender in the West made by Cather scholar Susan Rosowski in her 1999 book, Birthing a Nation. Stout posits that Austin and Cather encountered a West already pictorially determined by the monumental imagery of white, Anglo-Saxon, adventuresome, imperialist, violent, rugged, and most of all …

Review Of "Banned In Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915-1966," By Gerald R. Butters Jr., Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1915 to 1966, Kansas maintained an active film censorship board, empowered by BOOK REVIEWS 73 the legislature to review each film that might be shown in the state. The board could accept the film, remove scenes or titles (and, when pictures began to talk, objectionable language), or reject the film entirely-hence the title of Butters's book.

In 1920, the Kansas Board of Review first published its official standards. These included the positive: a film should be wholesome, and should not ridicule any religious sect or race of people. But the "shall nots" quickly asserted themselves: no debasing of morals, …

Review Of "Frontier Farewell: The 18705 And The End Of The Old West," By Garrett Wilson, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly

You might just want to buy two copies-one for yourself, and one for a friend. This book by a Regina lawyer turned writer tells the story of the Canadian prairie West from the arrival of the first European explorers to 1881, although most of the book deals with the period beginning in 1869, and five of the twenty-two chapters deal with the events surrounding the time that Sitting Bull and several thousand other Sioux spent in Canada. The book was obviously written with a popular audience in mind, but it makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the history of …

Review Of "Jazz Mavericks Of The Lone Star State." By Dave Oliphant, Jean A. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly

Jazz Mavericks of the Lone Star State is a collection of sixteen essays that can be read according to interest rather than order. They cover a wide range of jazz-related topics, from important jazz musicians to important jazz discographies; Dave Oliphant is emphatic throughout about the important contributions of Texas-born jazz musicians to every phase of jazz. I have the same concern now that I did when reading Oliphant's earlier book, Texan Jazz (1996), namely that he deals less with jazz in Texas than with Texas-born jazz musicians who left the state to work in top bands. Nevertheless, this collection …

Review Of "This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, And The New Deal." By Sarah T. Phillips, Brian C. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In this sophisticated reinterpretation, Sarah T. Phillips traces the history and impact of New Deal conservation policy. She argues persuasively that rural conservation programs deserve a prominent place in New Deal historiography because they significantly shaped the New Deal state and because they were integral to the New Deal's campaign for economic recovery. Her work is sufficiently broad and innovative to invite criticism at multiple points on evidentiary grounds, but the book is consistently engaging.

Phillips shows that during the 1920s, eastern land use planners and politicians, along with progressives in the USDA, advocated planned and coordinated use of natural …

Review Of "Landscapes Of Colorado: Mountains And Plains." By Ann Scarlett Daley And Michael Paglia, Rose Glaser Fredrick

Great Plains Quarterly

Landscapes of Colorado: Mountains and Plains, with a historical overview by Ann Scarlett Daley, the book's curator, and text by Michael Paglia, is a handsome survey of contemporary landscape painters and photographers working in the state. One could argue with a choice here and there. For example, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, European installation artists who have lived in New York since 1964 and created just one major work for Colorado in 1972, Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, with one more in the planning stages for 2011, are said to have "a long commitment to Colorado." Though their work is seminal, …

Review Of "Charles Goodnight: Father Of The Texas Panhandle," By William T. Hagan, West Texas A&M University

Great Plains Quarterly

In tackling Charles Goodnight, William Hagan successfully condenses an epic life story into a concise form-one of the requirements of University of Oklahoma Press's Western Biographies Series. Hagan's biography is wellpaced, smoothly written, and engaging. It's a story well told, but not a revisionist history. Even as he points out the way in which Goodnight has reached Western hero status, Hagan does not question or challenge the grand narrative of the pioneer West that provides the basis for Goodnight's iconic position.

In the course of telling Goodnight's story, however, Hagan corrects a number of legendary errors-notably that Goodnight was first …

Review Of "Cather Studies 7: Willa Cather As Cultural Icon," Edited By Guy Reynolds, Susan Kress

Great Plains Quarterly

Since its founding in 1990, Cather Studies has offered seven occasions for the publication of a volume devoted to Willa Cather scholarship. Of late, the series's editors have focused on a theme; in volume 7, editor Guy Reynolds, director of the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, offers an introduction and twenty essays by both established Cather scholars and relative newcomers relating directly or indirectly to the matter of Willa Cather as cultural icon. Several essayists provide

Several essayists provide provocative definitions of what it means to have reached the status of icon. For Elsa Nettels, "Writers become icons …

Review Of "So This Is The World & Here I Am In It," By Di Brandt, Tanis Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly

When Di Brandt speaks about poetryand its political dimensions, people listen, sometimes with their mouths agape, at her audacity and at her long looping ecoerotic sentences. Brandt's literary, ecocritical, and philosophical stances are well represented in So this is the world, as are her poetics, emphasized here through her reading of the prairie as both aesthetic and consciousness, a local that has much to teach us about the global. The collection is bracketed by two luminous essays-"This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie" and the title essay, "So this is the world and here I am in …