Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Notes And News- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

In Memoriam

Acsus Award And Fellowship

Frederick C. Luebke Award

The Past And Promise Of Environmental History

Rural Women's Studies Association Conference

Clements-Degolyer Library Grant

Review Of The Margin Speaks: A Study Of Margaret Laurence And Robert Kroetsch From A Post-Colonial Point Of View By Gunilla Florby, Mary K. Kirtz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Between the literature of "First World" nations like the United States and the literature of "Third World" nations like those in the Caribbean lie those of the "Second World." These are countries, like Canada and Australia, often glibly defined as having "First World" standards of living but "Third World" political clout and frequently ignored on the world stage. As Margaret Atwood noted wryly in a conversation with Victor Levy-Beaulieu, "it was said that Canadian literature didn't exist, that Canadian identity didn't exist, but when you wrote a novel, the Americans and the British said, 'This is too Canadian for us.'" …

Review Of The Icelandic Voice In Canadian Letters: The Contribution Of Icelandic-Canadian Writers To Canadian Literature By Daisy L. Neijmann, Gudrun B. Gudsteins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Daisy Neijmann's The Icelandic Voice in Canadian Letters is the first comprehensive study of the impressive literary output, in Icelandic and English, of the Icelandic diaspora in Canada. Briefly outlining the relevant historical and literary background, Neijmann explains that in the ninth and tenth centuries Iceland was settled "mostly, but not exclusively," by "Norwegians who came either directly from Norway or from other Viking settlements in the British Isles and elsewhere." She then proceeds with an overview of the Northern European heritage of literature and lore that the settlers of Iceland originally brought with them, its blossoming in Medieval Iceland …

Review Of People Places: Saskatchewan And Its Names By Bill Barry, T. D. Regehr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bill Barry has collected a vast amount of information on the more than 25,000 place names in Saskatchewan and made it accessible in three publications. There is, first, a comprehensive computer database, arranged alphabetically but also sortable by location, date, or class of entry, available from the author and in many Saskatchewan libraries. Barry has always had a particular interest in a thematic approach to the study of place names, however, and People Places: Saskatchewan and Its Names provides much interesting and personalized information on the naming of many, but certainly not all of the places identified in the computer …

Review Of The Philosophy Of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea In British North America By A. A. Den Otter, Keith L. Bryant Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Canadian Pacific Railway looms large in the history of Canada. As politicians, spokesmen for the British government, the railway's promoters, and business leaders in Toronto and Montreal touted the concept of a transcontinental line from Halifax on the Atlantic to Vancouver on the Pacific, Canadians came to believe that this private enterprise represented the national interest. The railway, its backers contended, would promote a sense of national purpose and unity, provide access to the vast reaches of the western prairies, and ensure the transnational exchange of goods and ideas. A rising sense of nationalism embraced a new technology to …

Review Of Selected Letters Of Margaret Laurence And Adele Wiseman Edited By John Lennox And Ruth Panofsky, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For various reasons, a great many more of Margaret Laurence's letters to Adele Wiseman survive than those in the opposite direction; consequently this collection gives better insight into Laurence's life and voice and work than Wiseman's. Laurence's is definitely a life and voice and work meriting insights. Wiseman is not entirely lacking, though we learn more about the details of her everyday life than of her writing or inner concerns.

What these letters demonstrate most clearly is how uncertain Laurence was about her own writing and how misjudged both writers were by critics and, at times, even their own editors. …

Personal Essay Margaret Laurence's Long Journey Home "I Love The Damn Country, That's The Trouble", Lyall H. Powers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The subtitle comes from a letter Margaret Laurence wrote to Al Purdy on 31 October 1968, when she was still vacillating over her second reconciliation with her husband.! She was also looking ahead to her return to Canada to be Writer-in Residence at the University of Toronto for the academic year 1969-70, and vacillating over that as well. There is evident reluctance in her confession to Purdy about her attitude to Canada. Resistance to any favorable attitude to that country began early in her and accounts for two persistent features of her life and career as she struggled to establish …

Review Of The Life Of Margaret Laurence By James King, Walter E. Swayze

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Advance publicity for James King's biography of the best-loved author in the history of Canadian literature aroused hostility among many readers who had been eager for the book to appear. With its emphasis on the revelation of Laurence's suicide and on her marital stresses, her sexual drive, and her drinking, the promotional campaign recalled the conclusion of William Watson's brilliant essay "The Punishment of Genius" (1890): "Such is the lot of the modern man of genius; living, he may escape the poisoned arrow; but dead, he is a banquet for the ghoul."

The book itself proves to be less sensational …

Review Of The Mythology Of Native North America By David Leeming And Jake Page, Thomas H. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The authors' admirable aim is to make the Native mythology of North America as accessible as that of Ancient Greece and Judea to an audience more or less ignorant of all three. To do this they anthologize themselves, taking twenty-five myths {out of a total of seventy-five} from their own works. The reader will wish to know first of all who the authors are, what they have written previously, and from what other sources they draw their material. David Leeming is a professor of English; Jake Page was an editor of a popular science magazine. They have written together on …

Review Of An Archaeology Of The Soul: North American Indian Belief And Ritual By Robert L. Hall, Robin Ridington

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This rich and complex book reminds me of Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, with one big difference: Hall is a distinguished practicing archaeologist. He knows about the symbolic and ceremonial life of Native America from firsthand experience with its archaeological, ethno-historical, and ethnographic record. Archaeologists look to the earth for their information but look down upon it in order to discover meaningful patterns. Hall surveys the Native American symbolic vocabulary with an eagle's eye, discovering connections among such diverse symbols and practices as sacred poles, calumets, atlatl weights, spirit release ceremonies, and Hopewell interaction spheres.

Hall, whose …

Review Of The Inhabited Prairie Photographs By Terry Evans, James J. Penuel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The land provides constant fascination to artists: from seashore to mountain, desert, and prairie the land inspires. It is also raw material for the photographer's arranging eye. In this third book of photographs, Terry Evans offers fifty black-and-white images of central Kansas taken from the air and at ground level, images showing us that the land can be anything from the bosom of nature to the throne of majesty, sacred space, fearsome predator, or garbage dump.

The images reveal an inhabited prairie. There are farms, highways, industrial and military installations. They tease us with details, structures, patterns, lines, and curves. …

Review Of Kate M. Cleary: A Literary Biography With Selected Works By Susanne K. George, Sharon M. Harris

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Sometimes it seemed to her that she could endure everything save the silence." Thus begins Kate McPhelim Cleary's 1893 short story, "Feet of Clay"; like many of her best stories, it captures Plains settlers'-and Cleary's-pervasive sense of isolation in the harsh environment of the Midwest at the turn of the century. Having moved nine years earlier from Chicago to Hubbell, Nebraska, Cleary in her life and writings adds to our growing understanding of middle-class homesteaders who migrated to the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, and to our recognition of the important contributions of Midwestern women writers to nineteenth-century US …

Book Notes- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Wind River Adventures: My Life in Frontier Wyoming. By Edward J. Farlow

Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western. Edited by Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson

A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West. By John D. McDermott

Growing Up in Manitoba, 1924-1941. By Harold H. Draper

Comanches and Mennonites on the Oklahoma Plains: A. J. and Magladena Becker and the Post Oak Mission. By Marvin E. Kroeker

The Law Comes to Texas: The Texas Rangers, 1870-1901. By Frederick Wilkins

Sweetie Ladd's Historic Fort Worth. Paintings by Sweetie Ladd …

Review Of Land Of Many Hands: Women In The American West By Harriet Sigerman, Margaret D. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Harriet Sigerman attempts to synthesize recent scholarship on women in the American West into a narrative history. The product of her efforts is a visually attractive book that will undoubtedly appeal to general readers. For scholars, however, it falls short of offering a new interpretation of women's history in the American West.

In her opening chapter Sigerman discusses Native American women's traditional roles, the arrival of the Spanish into the West and their effect on the Native population, and the impact of Anglo-American settlement on Native American and Spanish/Mexican women. With so much to cover in one chapter, she tends …

Title And Contents- Summer 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 19/ Number 3/ Summer 1999

Contents

Introduction: The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)

Margaret Laurence's "Album" Songs: Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings

Poetic Redress: Her Body, Her House In The Fire-Dwellers

"A Town Of The Mind": Margaret Laurence's Mythical Microcosm Of Manawaka

Personal Essay: Margaret Laurence's Long Journey Home: "I Love The Damn Country, That's The Trouble"

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes And News

Review Of Indians In The United States And Canada: A Comparative History By Roger L. Nichols, Russel Lawrence Barsh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On the first page of this encyclopedic essay on North American Indian history, the reader learns that there were "no empires or kingdoms" among aboriginal Americans. This remark is difficult to reconcile with the growing archaeological evidence of regional territorial struggles among the Mississippian city-states that sheltered a majority of the continent's indigenous population. More importantly, it implies from the outset that history began when Europeans introduced complexity and conflict. Pre-Columbian ideologies, memories, and political alignments are therefore essentially irrelevant to an understanding of post-invasion events. Nichols's work is a minefield of similarly pat generalizations.

A comparative analysis of the …

Review Of Magic Lies-; The Art Of W.O. Mitchell Edited By Sheila Latham And David Latham, Ken Mitchell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Western Canadian novelist W. O. Mitchell died in March 1998, dramatically punctuating the appearance of this handsome book that sets out to determine the significance of his life's work. For fifty years W. O. "Bill" Mitchell has been a dominant icon of writing in Canada. This thick collection of literary essays, reminiscences, and anecdotes attempts to redress the relative absence of critical commentary the writer has received.

The book is uneven and often contradictory, as one might expect from an assembly of academics, relatives, former students, and theater colleagues. But as the Lathams say in their introduction, "The popularity of …

Review Of Challenging Territory: The Writing Of Margaret Laurence Edited By Christian Riegel, Jaqueline Mcleod-Rogers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I approached this book with the hope that my past interest in reading, teaching, and writing about Margaret Laurence, coupled with my current interests in rhetoric and composition, would enable me to respond to new critical perspectives. The "Introduction" to the volume encouraged this hope by profiling articles with familiar themes embedded in a postmodern context of open-minded pluralism.

Yet in explaining the volume's purpose, editor Christian Riegel tends to over-emphasize novelty at the expense of continuity, describing essays that go beyond revisionist readings to "stake out critical territory, charting critical space never before traced" (xvii). Much of his claim …

Review Of Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place By Louis Owens

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Mixedblood Messages, novelist and critic Louis Owens combines literary and film criticism with personal memoir and environmental writing. The "core subject in this book is writing by authors identified as mixedblood," he explains, and the collection "is concerned with two major issues: questions of mixed heritage ... and the way in which we relate to the natural world."

In the first of the book's four sections, Owens addresses some difficult questions, perhaps the most challenging of which deals with authenticity: if "the Indian must conform to an identity imposed from the outside" in order to be seen, what …

Review Of Wright Morris Revisited By Joseph J. Wydeven, Helen Winter Stauffer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A major American writer, author of thirty novels, Wright Morris is highly regarded by critics, but some readers find his work difficult. Morris himself felt that a full understanding of any of his novels required a thorough reading of them all. His style, too, is sometimes deliberately enigmatic; he did not believe in a tidy closure to the problems he introduced. Joseph J. Wydeven discusses these and other perplexities in Wright Morris Revisited, aptly titled, as the last Twayne study of Morris was published in 1964.

A number of Morris's books are set in Nebraska, where he was born. …

Poetic Redress Her Body, Her House In The Fire, Dwellers, Debra Dudek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Canadian women's position of being a colony within a colony enables women writers to be both separate from and united to a larger Canadian identity. Margaret Laurence's Manawaka texts, and The Fire-Dwellers in particular, construct feminist and nationalist myths that provide women with versions of themselves so they might recognize, and therefore strategize, methods of empowerment. Furthermore, The Fire-Dwellers is a novel that is concerned with issues of modernity. This novel contains a modernist aesthetic that is based upon a rejection of dominant structures and is defined by stylistic and ideological features which share concerns with feminist aesthetics in their …

Margaret Laurence's ''Album'' Songs Divining For Missing Links And Deeper Meanings, Wes Mantooth

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While Margaret Laurence's artistic legacy rests primarily, and rightly so, on her output of novels, her memoirs and published letters reveal tantalizing glimpses into a much less known, and yet not unrelated, aspect of her artistic interests-a lifelong passion for music, which included a desire to explore song-writing as a creative outlet. Drawing on these memoirs and letters, along with my own primary research, I have tried to sketch a portrait of Laurence's musical life, with a particular focus on how her musical interests coalesced in The Diviners' "Album"-four songs included in the text of The Diviners, compiled …

Introduction The Prairie Fiction Of Margaret Laurence (1926,1987), Charlene Porsild

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I first read Margaret Laurence in secondary school in Gibbons, Alberta, a place similar in many ways to Margaret Laurence's hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba, the place she called Manawaka in her fiction and about which she wrote so much. I continued to read and to study Laurence as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Later, I dragged along my dog-eared copies of A Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and {my favorite} The Diviners as my life's journey took me to Ottawa, Ontario; Boulder, Colorado; Vancouver, British Columbia; and most recently, Lincoln, Nebraska.

The …

Review Of The Brandon Teena Story Produced And Directed By Susan Muska And Greta Olafsdottir, June Perry Levine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

CRIME AND RESPONSIBILITY

The Brandon Teena Story, Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir's recently released documentary, addresses the circumstances of a triple murder that occurred on the last day of December 1993 in a rural farmhouse in southeastern Nebraska. The crime received national media coverage because one of its victims, the principal target of the attack, was a young woman who had, for some time, been living as a man. The two other victims, a young man and woman, were killed because they were witnesses. The murderers were quickly apprehended and tried, one sentenced to life in prison, the other …

Review Of Profiles In Dissent: The Shaping Of Radical Thought In The Canadian West By Harry Gutkin And Mildred Gutkin, James Naylor

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The social explosion of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was the product of various combustibles, both material and ideological. In this collective biography of ten arrested strike leaders, Harry and Mildred Gutkin explore the ideas and experiences that led individuals to play prominent roles in the strike. This is an effective approach, allowing the authors to trace individually the various strands of social radicalism that crossed in the spring of 1919 and to follow their post-strike trajectories. Some of the subjects are familiar, such as future Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) leader J. S. Woodsworth. Others have received far too …

Review Of Billy The Kid: His Life And Legend By Jon Tuska, Richard W. Etulain

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jon Tuska is a leading authority on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War. In fact, in the opening chapter of this reprinted book (originally published by Greenwood Press in 1994), Tuska exhibits his tenacious pursuit of nearly every fact about these much-researched subjects. This one-hundred-page section, illustrating Tuska's diligence, will be particularly useful to all specialists and general readers. Unfortunately, however, the author's flawed approach to his subject seriously limits the book's overall value.

Most of all, T uska attempts to provide a sound historical chronology of the major events of Billy the Kid's life and the Lincoln …

Review Of The Social Gospel Of E. Nicholas Comfort: Founder Of The Oklahoma School Of Religion By Robert C. Cottrell, Leslie Hewes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Early in the autumn of 1924, when I attended my first Saturday night open house at the First Presbyterian Church in Norman, Oklahoma, the newly appointed student pastor, Nick Comfort, made me feel at home by saying, "We are both freshmen." Next year, after I had satisfied most freshman requirements, I enrolled in a course on comparative religion at the University of Oklahoma taught by Rev. Comfort.

The social gospel, as pointed out by Cottrell repeatedly, emphasized the "fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man." As espoused by Comfort, the gospel was egalitarian, without color barriers, non-violent, nonsectarian, and based …

Review Of Comparing Cowboys And Frontiers By Richard W. Slatta, Thomas D. Hall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The goal of this collection is to encourage the comparative study of frontiers and social history. The first part, six chapters, focuses on "Topics" for comparisons, while the second part, four chapters, discusses how to do comparative history and critically evaluates much recent work. Slatta begins with a comparative discussion of the Venezuelan Llanos, southern Chile, the Pampas, Brazil, and the Great Plains of North America, suggesting that a frontier is a membrane metaphor through which objects, people, and ideas pass in both directions.

Slatta then discusses how indigenous peoples quickly adopted feral (or sometimes stolen) horses, which led to …

Review Of Updating The Literary West Sponsored By The Western Literature Association, Barbara Howard-Meldrum

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When A Literary History of the American West (LHAW) appeared in 1987, it legitimized the field of western American literary studies, defining a tradition and a canon. Yet even as that lengthy volume was completed, the indefiniteness of its title-A, not The-called for a sequel. Updating the Literary West (ULW) provides that necessary sequel, not simply updating but in significant ways reconstructing the West's literary history.

The central core of the new volume provides most of the updating. Some of the authors given individual chapters in LHAW reappear with discussions of their recent works and reviews …

Book Notes- Spring 1999

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

BOOK NOTES

Fort Riley and Its Neighbors: Military Money and Economic Growth, 1853-1895. By William A. Dobak

The Surrender and Death of Crazy Horse: A Source Book About a Tragic Episode in Lakota History. Volume XXI of the Frontier Military Series. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff

The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado. By Robert Adams

William H. Emory: Soldier-Scientist. By L. David Norris, James C. Milligan, and Odie B. Faulk

Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth

Of Earth and Elders: Visions and Voices …