Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics And Activism Since 1900. Edited By Daniel M. Cobb And Loretta Fowler, Donna Langston

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite the degree of American government domination, American Indian activists have managed to create a legacy of change. Beyond Red Power is a must-read for anyone wishing to explore the rich tradition of American Indian politics. The volume brings together historians, anthologists, and legal and media studies scholars. A number of pieces focus on northern and southern Great Plains tribes.

How has a small demographic group that lives in the midst of a dominant society with little commitment to treaty rights managed to ensure political survival and cultural revitalization? This text traces over fifty years of activist and tribal strategies …

Review Of Out Of The Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, And Encounters With The Land. By Rinda West, Tom Lynch

Great Plains Quarterly

The postmodern era of critical theory has not been kind to Carl Jung. As Rinda West suggests, many postmodern critics denigrated Jung's notions of the collective unconscious and of archetypes as "essentialist and Eurocentric." Drawing on recent ideas in ecopsychology and neurobiology, however, West seeks to rehabilitate Jung for the post-postmodern era. She proposes that, based on current understandings in such fields as the biology of cognition, these ideas of Jung serve "as a way of acknowledging the power of our biological history and of talking about powerful tendencies to respond in certain situations common in human life."

Such a …

Review Of Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants In Two Cities By Hans Werner, Anke Ortlepp

Great Plains Quarterly

In his Imagined Homes, Hans Werner compares the acculturation experience of ethnic Germans from Poland and the Soviet Union who settled in two migration waves in what at first glance seem to be very different cities: Winnipeg, Canada, and Bielefeld, Germany. A closer look, however, reveals that the two cities had much in common. Both were medium-sized urban centers that had integrated newcomers before. The mentalities of their inhabitants were shaped as much by Cold War thinking as by a capitalistic outlook.

Still, Werner shows that although the migrants who came to Winnipeg in the 1950s and to Bielefeld …

Review Of Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating The Study Of Canadian Literature Edited By Smaro Kamboureli And Roy Miki, J'Nan Morse Sellery

Great Plains Quarterly

Encompassing an approach to the study of Canadian -literature that resulted in a conference held in Vancouver in 2005, this collection of a preface and thirteen chapters begins with Diana Brydon's keynote address setting up the "superordinates"-Literature, Institutions, and Citizenship-to explore a discourse on Canadian literature's future. That process leads toward "our national literature in global contexts and in dialogue with Indigenous concerns." In effect, Trans.Can.Lit. means translation, transcontinental railroad, travel, trance, and globalization.

Lee Maracle's chapter on Salish thinkers and orators who help their people to see "Ourselves Through Story vs. Western Models" criticizes the Institutions of the diaspora …

Review Of Historic Native Peoples Of Texas By William C. Foster, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas has traditionally been viewed as an expansive landscape occupied by a relatively small and widely scattered Indigenous population. Modern studies by Todd Smith, Robert Ricklis, Nancy Hickerson, Mariah Wade, MartIn Salinas, and Morris Foster have questioned this simplistic view by focusing upon the larger stories of Caddo, Wichita, Jumano, Tonkawa, Coahuiltecan, Karankawa, Comanche and other groups who occupied parts of Texas for a long period of time. Now William Foster attempts to synthesize the broader picture for all Indigenous peoples who lived within the state boundaries between 1528 and 1728. This long period, beginning with Narvaez's beleaguered expedition landing …

Review Of The Comanche Empire. By Pekka Hamalainen, Mariah F. Wade

Great Plains Quarterly

The Comanche Empire is an important and well-researched book that traces the development of the Comanche nation in the eastern and western borders of the Greater Southwest from the early eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Segmented into eight thematic chapters, this work explores the Comanches' sources of inward power and power over others, but privileges the Comanche perspective to place the author's conclusions within a historical context. Hamalainen's treatment of the complex relationships between the Comanches and other European and Native American societies is unique, particularly as it clarifies the social and trade mechanisms the Comanches established and nurtured …

Review Of The Long Journey Of A Forgotten People: Metis Identities And Family Histories Edited By Ute Lischke And David T. Mcnab; The Western Metis: Profile Of A People Edited By Patrick C. Douaud, Mike Evans

Great Plains Quarterly

The recent publication of Long Journey and Western Metis is indicative of the burgeoning interest in Metis studies; there are a remarkable number of scholars, new and old, now publishing in the area. It seems likely that this burst of activity is related to the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Powley, 2003, S.c.c. 43 (http://www.canliLorg/en/ca/scc/ doc/2003/2003scc43/2003scc43.html) dealing with the complex issues of Metis identity and rights.

Though the impetus for the publications might be linked to a common legal event, the publications themselves are very different: The Western Metis is a collection well rooted in an …

Cultural Survival And The Omaha Way Eunice Woodhull Stabler's Legacy Of Preservation On The Twentieth,Century Plains, Elaine M. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly

In the summer of 2004 I pulled into the rock and gravel driveway of a small blue home in Walthill, Nebraska, a community in the northern part of the Omaha Indian reservation. Feeling nervous about the large and unavoidable sign reading "BEWARE OF DOG," I knocked on the screen door. I was welcomed with wild barking from inside before I heard a man's voice yell, "Rambo! Hush up! Rambo, get down!" Startled, I nearly dropped my books and tape recorder. The door swung open. I expected to be faced with a Doberman/German shepherd/ pit bull mix; instead, I looked down …

Parallel Tracks, Same Terminus The Role Of Nineteenth, Century Newspapers And Railroads In The Settlement Of Nebraska, Charlyne Berens, Nancy Mitchell

Great Plains Quarterly

Nebraskans of the early twenty-first century have had few encounters with railroads. Passenger trains are nearly extinct, and freights run over only a few main lines. But without the railroads that began to crisscross Nebraska in the 1860s, it may have taken years for significant settlement to reach throughout the territory that became a state in 1867. As history unfolded, Nebraska became a state more rapidly than expected. Against a backdrop of threats from competing railroads, extreme weather conditions, and remnants of Civil War politics, two key institutions led settlers into the new state: the railroads and the newspapers. The …

Review Of The Steamboat Montana And The Opening Of The West: History. Excavation, And Architecture. By Annalies Corbin And Bradley A. Rogers, Michael Allen

Great Plains Quarterly

In recent decades, a group of maritime historical archeologists has, through meticulous examination of sunken ships, enhanced existing work by traditional archeologists and historians. Eastern Carolina University's History Department has built North America's strongest program in maritime archeology. It was an ECU team, supported by a score of public {and two} private groups, that gathered the data for this book about the nineteenth-century Missouri River steamboat Montana. Coauthors Annalies Corbin and Bradley A. Rogers write, "The Montana's history and subsequent archeological investigation can be utilized as a case study for understanding and appreciating the development of the trans-Mississippi …

Review Of Buffalo Bill On Stage. By Sandra K. Sagala, Robert Bonner

Great Plains Quarterly

Of the twelve (!) serious historical or biographical studies devoted to Buffalo Bill Cody so far this century, two of them we owe to Sandra Sagala. The title under review here is a revision of her self-publish.ed book from 2002 titled Buffalo Bill, Actor, where she set out to follow Cody as he put together a career on theater stages across the country playing himself in a series of dramas and creating a name as an entertainer in the years prior to his famous Wild West show. This new book does not follow Cody's itineraries as closely as the …

Review Of Does People Do It?: A Memoir. By Fred Harris, Kenny L. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

U.S. Senator Robert S. Kerr-often called the "uncrowned king of the Senate"-died in 1963. In a special election the next year, Fred Harris, a Democratic state senator, surprisingly defeated highly popular football coach Bud Wilkinson to serve out the rest of Kerr's term. Reelected in 1966 and remaining a senator until 1973, the young and energetic Harris allied with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. As senator, he pushed legislation to aid agricultural interests in Oklahoma and the Southern Plains, called for reforms to alleviate racism, introduced bills supporting various American Indian groups, and served on the Kerner Commission, which studied …

Review Of Stricken Field: The Little Bighorn Since 1876 By Jerome A. Greene, Thomas R. Buecker

Great Plains Quarterly

Interest in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly known as Custer's Last Stand, has not abated over the last century. It is said that the only other battle in American history with more written about it is Gettysburg. True to form with other historic sites, the history of the Little Bighorn battlefield after the battle ended forms a compelling part of its total story.

Any site that holds such a prominent place in the American {and international} psyche warrants both an informative and accurate history. In Stricken Field, Jerome A. Greene, retired National Parks Service research historian, rises …

Review Of Means Of Transit: A Slightly Embellished Memoir. By Teresa Miller, Joy Castro

Great Plains Quarterly

In Means of Transit, the narrative is always on the move. For aspiring writer Teresa Miller, her hometown of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, was a trap to be escaped, and the Plains were the boring backdrop of restless road trips with her grandmother. Craving the excitement of New York, Miller managed to break free (in her fifties) only as far as Tulsa.

Miller is an endearing narrator, gamely revealing her own pratfalls, and, as a generous enthusiast of literature, she eventually published two novels and founded a book festival and television show in order to "reel in the horizon." But the narrative's …

Review Of The Nebraska-Kansas Act Of 1854. Edited By John R. Wunder And Joann M. Ross, Gary L. Cheatham

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the most important actions affecting the settlement of the Plains was the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas Act, which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In examining the passage of the bill and its aftermath, The Nebraska-Kansas Act of 1854 brings into clear focus many of the events related to this legislation. Although the law was officially called "An Act to Organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas," it was often referred to as "the Nebraska bill."

Collectively, the eight essays in this slender volume look at the national debate over the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas Act, the …

Review Of Voices From Haskell: Indian Students Between Two Worlds, 1884-1928 By Myriam Vuckovic, Michael C. Coleman

Great Plains Quarterly

"I did not send Her there to be an Irish washerwoman," wrote the angry Indian father of a student forced to work in the Haskell school laundry in 1888. Such expressive words-especially striking to an Irish reviewer-characterize this major study of the Indian boarding school at Lawrence, Kansas. Founded in 1884, it is the only such institution to evolve into a four-year university, Haskell Indian Nations University. Myriam Vuckovic draws wonderfully well on Indian evidence: letters and other texts by students, reminiscences by ex-students, and contemporaneous correspondence by kin. Opinions of educators are not ignored either. The result is an …

Review Of Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle Artists In The 1940s. By Scott Grant Barker And Jane Myers, Katie Robinson-Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

This stunning catalogue investigates the adventurous accomplishments of a too-littleknown group that became known as the Fort Worth Circle. These artists shunned the typical Texas "bluebonnet school" styles of late impressionism and landscapes. Instead, they looked to European modernism for form-and inward for subject matter. The two essays-by cultural historian Scott Grant Barker and Jane Myers, Amon Carter Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings-are wonderfully paired. Barker offers a thoroughly researched account of the origins and exhibition history of these forward thinking artists, rich with anecdote and archival research. His expertise in the Circle is perhaps unparalleled. Myers delves into …

Review Of The Great Plains During World War Ii By R. Douglas Hurt, Greg Hall

Great Plains Quarterly

The historiography of the American West during the Second World War is still largely dominated by the works of Gerald D. Nash. As impressive as his work is, it does have one Illajor flaw: its neglect of the Great Plains, a major sector of the West. In order to correct this imbalance, Douglas Hurt presents a multifaceted history of the region during the war. The Great Plains during World War II is a thorough analysis of the period from the war's beginning to its conclusion.

Hurt fills his study with the voices of the people of the shortgrass country as …

Review Of Bertram Goodhue: His Life And Residential Architecture. By Romy Wyllie, Benet Haller

Great Plains Quarterly

Romy Wyllie's Bertram Goodhue is a richlyillustrated and well-researched exploration of Goodhue's architectural work. Using a large number of historic and current photos, floor plans, and architectural renderings, Wyllie covers much of the same ground as Richard Oliver in his 1983 Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, but with a greater emphasis on his residential work. Oliver's book covers nearly all of Goodhue's nonresidential projects and five completed and five proposed residences. Wyllie describes twenty of Goodhue's completed residential projects and six of his unbuilt home designs in great detail. She discusses some of his significant nonresidential projects, particularly as they affected …

Review Of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories By Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Margaret Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly

In this fascinating, ambitious, and wellresearched book, dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy analyzes three main topics. First she compares the history of U.S. and Canadian government attempts to suppress or transform Indigenous dance between the 1880s and the 1930s and charts the persistence of Native American dance in the face of such pressures. In the second section, she examines how modern dance pioneers such as Ted Shawn and Martha Graham infused modern dance with Indigenous themes. Although Shawn and Graham visited Indian peoples and observed their dance traditions, they ultimately made primitivist use of Indian materials for their own purposes …

Review Of Seeding Civil War: Kansas In The National News, 1854-1858. By Craig Miner, Bruce R. Kahler

Great Plains Quarterly

Recently several historians have helped us better understand the central role that Kansas Territory (1854-61) played in polarizing the North and South. Gunja SenGupta has analyzed the complex motives involved in antislavery and pro-slavery immigration to Kansas. Thomas Goodrich emphasizes the bleeding in "Bleeding Kansas" by portraying the era's violent characters and episodes. The sesquicentennial commemoration of the territory witnessed books on the doctrine of popular sovereignty by Nicole Etcheson and on the U.S. Army's peacekeeping efforts by Tony Mullis. Two essay collections have allowed these and other scholars to elaborate on the myriad issues involved, one edited by Virgil …

Review Of One Step Over The Line: Toward A History Of Women In The North American Wests. Edited By Elizabeth Jameson And Sheila Mcmanus, Renee M. Laegreid

Great Plains Quarterly

Ever since western women's history emerged as a distinct field of study in the 1980s, collaborative efforts have produced some of the best and most innovative works in the discipline. One Step over the Line continues this fine tradition. Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus's anthology, based on scholarship presented at the 2002 "Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women's History" conference, explores the complex role the nation-state plays in the lives of women on both sides of the politically real, physically invisible, yet historically porous u.S.-Canadian boarder. With essays from a wide array of scholars, the volume's exploration of the …

Review Of Exiles And Pioneers: Eastern Indians In The Transmississippi West. By John P. Bowes, Tracy Neal Leavelle

Great Plains Quarterly

In Exiles and Pioneers, John Bowes examines the dynamic histories of the nineteenth-century Shawnees, Delawares, Potawatomis, and Wyandots as they struggled to find a stable place in an aggressively expanding nation. Bowes acknowledges their status as exiles forced from cherished homelands during the era of Indian removal, but he also argues that members of these Native communities acted as pioneers in the Trans-Mississippi West. Already in motion before passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, they traveled west-sometimes voluntarily, often by force-where they built and rebuift their communities in Missouri, Kansas, and Indian Territory. Bowes contends that "the …

Review Of Divining Margaret Laurence: A Study Of Her Complete Writings By Nora Foster Stovel, Lyall H. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly

Neil Besner is right to judge Nora Foster Stovel's Divining highly: it "ranges across all of Laurence's work ... intelligently and accessibly," as he says on the jacket. Before I augment his praise I must note a couple of blemishes, if Stovel will accept the soft impeachment of an admirer. Malcolm Ross did not teach the future Margaret Laurence or anyone else at United College (now the University of Winnipeg): I was a student with Peggy Wemyss in Ross's stunning "Seventeenth-Century Thought" on the Fort Garry campus of the University of Manitoba (and in spite of the uncorrected typo of …

Review Of The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, And Photographs Of The Prairie. Edited By Annick Smith And Susan O'Connor, Jim Reese

Great Plains Quarterly

There's a postcard you can buy at a lot of gas stations in Wyoming that shows a man holding onto a fence post for dear life as he's about to be blown into the great wide open. I believe it says, "Welcome to Wyoming. We grow a lot of wind here!" It's a funny postcard, but also a serious reminder of the climatic vagaries one experiences on the prairie. "It's this ache of the wind blowing over open land," as M. L. Smoker writes in The Wide Open, that continues to call us back or hold us here in …

Review Of The Death Of Raymond Yellow Thunder And Other True Stories From The Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns By Stew Magnuson, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Journalists of late have often been at the vanguard of recent history, using their particular research methodology, which is more comfortable with the elusive nature of the near past, to beat historians to the punch. This has been particularly true of American Indian history .. Part-time journalist Peter Matthiessen was among the first to tackle the history of tumult on Pine Ridge Reservation during the 1970s, including the Dick Wilson presidency, the siege of Wounded Knee, and the Leonard Peltier trials. Journalist-turned-literary-scholar Robert Allen Warrior and journalist Paul Chaat Smith were quick to examine the Red Power era more broadly, …

Review Of A Texas Journey: The Centennial Photographs Of Polly Smith By Evelyn Barker, Carol Roark

Great Plains Quarterly

Polly Smith showed her love for Texas through the lens of her Graflex camera. The photographs Smith made to publicize the state for the 1936 Centennial Exposition portray a positive image of Texas's business and industry, everyday life, and natural scenes. Although she began her work in late 1935, about the same time the Farm Security Administration photographers started to document the United States during the Great Depression, Smith's photographs sought to entice people to come to Texas, not to document the plight of those suffering from the economic disaster or benefiting from Roosevelt's government programs. Yet, even though they …

Review Of Arc Of The Medicine Line: Mapping The World's Longest Undefended Border Across The Western Plains By Tony Rees, Molly P. Rozum

Great Plains Quarterly

By 1872 Britain, the United States, and the Dominion of Canada had many reasons to map officially the international boundary along the 49th parallel, a line that Native Americans would come to associate with "medicine" for its power to halt the pursuit of law. Britain and the U.S. both desired to resolve lingering issues as Canada embraced independence. {The northern survey party was officially the British North American Boundary Commission.} While the U.S. Northern Boundary Commission advanced the Northern Pacific Railroad, Canada gathered information to plan and build a transcontinental railroad. With the line they drew astronomically, these surveyors, according …

Review Of Give Me Eighty Men: Women And The Myth Of The Fetterman Fight By Shannon D. Smith, Ronald Schultz

Great Plains Quarterly

Known as the Battle of a Hundred Slain to the Lakota and the Fetterman Massacre to most other Americans, the 1866 battle has been as mythic as the Battle of the Little Big Horn that followed it by a decade. The story is a simple one: Captain William Judd Fetterman viewed his superior, Colonel Henry B. Carrington, as a overcautious coward in dealing with Indian affairs. Seeing an opportunity to defeat a large gtoup of Lakota warriors in northern Wyoming territory, Fetterman disobeyed his orders and attacked what he thought was a small party of Lakotas in the Peno Valley. …

Review Of Going West!: Quilts And Community By Roderick Kiracofe And Sandi Fox, Janneken Smucker

Great Plains Quarterly

Located at the convergence of three major overland trails, Nebraska became the new home to many settlers and the quilts they carried westward in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generations later, some of these settlers' descendants gifted surviving quilts to local historical societies and museums. Drawing on information collected as part of the Nebraska State Quilt Guild's "Quilt Preservation Project," independent curator Sandi Fox researched the quilts tucked away in these cultural institutions. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery hosted the resulting exhibit, "Going West: Quilts and Community," from October 2007 through January 2008. The exhibit's catalog, Going …