Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: In-Between Places, Brewster E. Fitz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title of this collection of eleven essays comes from Glancy's paraphrase of William Heyen's definition of poetry as "language of things that can't be gotten to. It lives in the in-between places." The title also refers to Glancy's moving in between places on the Great Plains and to her writing as a mixed-blood. Glancy's style is personal, elusive, allusive, parodying, and fragmentary. It's a style that requires patience and an open mind, a style she attributes to "patterns" of the structure of the Cherokee language that remain in her.

"Just Following The Buffalo": Origins Of A Montana Métis Community, Martha Harroun Foster

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By 1879 the vast buffalo herds were all but gone from the Great Plains. Many of the remaining animals had moved south from the Milk River of northern Montana and Alberta into the Judith Basin of central Montana. In these rich grasslands, for a few more years, life went on as it had for centuries. Following the buffalo came many Indian bands, as well as Métis who had been hunting on the Milk River for decades. A buffalo~based economy had brought prosperity to the Native people of the Plains. The animals provided essential food and materials in addition to products …

Book Review: Barbed Wire: An Ecology Of Modernity, Alan Krell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The first years of this century were "barbed" in more ways than one. Three books were published in quick succession on barbed wire: the first by Olivier Razac, then by me, and, most recently, by Reviel Netz. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity builds on Netz's sagacious essay written for the London Review of Books (July 20, 2000).

Book Review: Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, And Reform, David Rich Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Lucy Maddox explores issues of race and progressive reform in the early twentieth century by examining how American Indians positioned themselves to claim a place and a voice in American public life. Maddox focuses on "Indian intellectuals," individuals who wrote and spoke publicly about pan-Indian issues arising from federal wardship, and who organized the Society of American Indians (SAl) as a space for disseminating that Indian voice. Responding to an American public that could not comprehend Indian culture and history outside their own mythic and racialized images (often expressed in pageants depicting a savage or vanishing race), this generation of …

Book Review: History's Shadow: Native Americans And Historical Consciousness In The Nineteenth Century, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this polished work of intellectual history, Steven Conn charts a series of trajectories in European American approaches to conceiving of Native Americans during the nineteenth century. He does this through four interior chapters on images of Indians in American art, the study of Indian languages, archaeology, and the emergence of anthropology. These are framed by two chapters that introduce and amplify the book's general theme of "Native Americans and the problem of history."

Book Review: The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis In A Canadian Family, 1660 -1900, Frits Pannekoek

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The current historiography of the Great Plains Metis finds its roots in the work of Sylvia Van Kirk, Jennifer Brown, Jacqueline Petersen, and to a lesser degree John Foster. These and other contributions have been outlined in my "Metis Studies: The Development of a Field and New Directions" in From Rupert's Land to Canada: Essays in Honor of John E Foster (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2001).

Book Review: The Cherokee Nation: A History, James W. Parins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an important book if only for the reason that it will make many reconsider what they think they know about the Cherokees. Their early history, like that of any people, is obscured in the dimness of the past. While some of the early story may be reconstructed through surviving myth and modern theory, much uncertainty clouds origins and early migration patterns. After white contact and the chronicles and accounts of traders, missionaries, and adventurers are written, the veil isn't entirely lifted. Many written records pose more questions than they answer. For example, when the British first came upon …

Book Review: Teaching In Eden: Lessons From Cedar Point, Gregg Siewert

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Judging from the title, one might expect this book to offer some resolution to America's ongoing debate regarding the teaching of evolution, creationism, and intelligent design. It is, instead, Janovy's attempt to shake higher education by the shoulders and bring it to its senses, asking that university instruction shift its focus from content to larger questions of process and values (for want of a better term: liberal arts and sciences). As Janovy states, "I contend that the arts and sciences ideals - breadth of understanding, courage to explore anywhere, patience with disagreement - are the best antidotes to our current …

Review Essay: Encyclopedia Of The Great Plains, William Ferris

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

How proud Ellison would be to see his work and that of so many other distinguished artists, writers, and musicians recognized in the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. The Great Plains roots of Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Cornel West, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, and Jay McShann make emphatic the region's importance in African American history and culture. Like their counterparts in the American South, these artists migrated to Chicago and New York where they became leaders in the nation's cultural life.

Book Review: The Red Man's On The Warpath: The Image Of The "Indian" And The Second World War, Robert Alexander Innes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

R. Scott Sheffield's study of the images used by bureaucrats and journalists provides an in-depth examination of Anglo-Canadians' perceptions of First Nations people and how these perceptions affected Indian policies.

Book Review: Women Of The Northern Plains: Gender And Settlement On The Homestead Frontier, 1870- 1930, Angel Kwolek-Folland

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Focusing on the history of North Dakota farm women from the years of settlement and community-building to the transition to an industrial, consumer economy, Handy-Marchello argues that North Dakota farm marriages of necessity were economic partnerships throughout this period.

"These Is My Words" . . . Or Are They?: Constructing Western Women's Lives In Two Contemporary Novels, Jenneifer Dawes Adkison

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In analyzing Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek, and Turner's These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories, I explore how questions of authenticity can help us to understand and situate these novels as well as how these texts playfully reinvent the "authentic" western.

German Heritage And Culture In Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Reid's discussion of the formal properties of Erdrich's work helps explain the author's popular appeal. Mewing easily between urban and rural settings, between reservation culture and mainstream culture, Erdrich has been evoking the various sets of social and historical circumstances that define the lives of contemporary Native Americans in the Great Plains. In The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Erdrich turns her attention explicitly to her own part-German ancestry and fictionalizes it, thereby bringing a n element of both thematic and autobiographical relevance into prominence.

Book Review: Indians In Unexpected Places, William Bauer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his first book, Playing Indian (1998), Philip Deloria examined the ways that non-Indians used American Indian images to create their own identity. In his latest book, Deloria looks at the American Indians who challenged the assumptions that often informed those representations. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, American Indians appeared in places where non-Indians did not expect to find them-on football fields, in beauty parlors, in Cadillacs. As Indians entered these unexpected places, they challenged notions of modernity, tradition, and the conventional role many people had created for them. Ultimately, though, they failed to change America's …

Book Review: Writing Out Of Place: Regionalism, Women, And American Literary Culture, Kathleen Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although it has everything to do with location, nineteenth-century American literary regionalism is nor "about" natural geographic boundaries, according to Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. That is, issues of vantage point, marginalization, and gender and racial positioning are crucial to this literature, and the lens of feminist standpoint theory brings it sharply into focus. In contrast, the habit of categorizing by setting - Sarah Orne Jewett and the Maine coast or Mary Austin in the California desert - suggests geographic determinism and distracts us from what these writers might have in common: regionalism as "a discourse or a mode elf …

Book Review; The Garden Of Art: Vic Cicansky, Sculptor, Ruth Chambers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Don Kerr's The Garden of Art: Vic Cicansky, Sculptor reviews the career and practice of one of Saskatchewan's must important visual artists. Although paperback and inexpensive, the book includes an illustrated text followed by sixty-four pages of full-color photographs that provide a retrospective of Cicansky's work. The author describes Cicansky's sculptures and his working process and records relevant details of his life.

Book Review: Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story Of George Bent - Caught Between The Worlds Of The Indian And The White Man, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the last two decades of his life Bent became a prolific letter-writer as well; more than five hundred of his letters survive in various archives. His chief correspondents were Grinnell, with whom he collaborated in shaping the foundational texts of Cheyenne history and ethnography, and George Hyde, who also worked with Grinnell and supplied him with a great deal of information gleaned from his own far more extensive correspondence with Brent. Bent's letters to Hyde became the basis for Hyde's Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters (essentially completed by 1916, hut not published until 1968), which Halfbreed …

Book Review: Conversations With Texas Writers, Don B. Graham

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book contains fifty interviews with "Texas" writers, including one "interview" with a dead writer, the pulp hero Robert E. Howard (author of the Conan books, etc.). It's actually Howard's biographer who's interviewed, which is odd and conveys a significance that's unwarranted. The book is also a bit Austin-centric, as twenty of the authors live in the capital city.

Book Review: Charles M. Russell: The Storyteller's Art, Jim Hoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Charles M. Russell: The Storyteller's Art, by shedding light on Russell's ability to create narrative in writing, has the added advantage of contributing critical insight into his painting as well.

Book Review: Alien Heart: The Life And Work Of Margaret Laurence, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The best introduction to Margaret Laurence will always be the writings of Margaret Laurence, especially the five Manawaka books, the three published volumes of her correspondence, and her memoir. But after one has become acquainted with that complex, vulnerable, wise, generous, and conflicted woman/writer, Alien Heart is a good source for recapitulation and further detail. Without blinking at or emphasizing Margaret's drinking and sometimes self-destructive relationships, Powers strongly recalls her kindness, her passion, her idiom, and her "place to stand upon."

Migration Out Of 1930s Rural Eastern Oklahoma: Insights For Climate Change Research, Robert Mcleman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

I undertook an investigation of how rural populations responded to a period of adverse climatic conditions in rural eastern Oklahoma during the 1930s, with particular interest in those households that adapted by migrating to rural California. This is not the first time that 19305 Oklahoma has been the subject of research into how people and communities adapt to difficult environmental conditions. In the wake of a 1985 conference entitled "Social Adaptation to Semi-Arid Environments" at the Center for Great Plains Studies in Lincoln, Great Plains Quarterly presented a series of papers by well-known scholars exploring human-environment interactions that gave rise …

Book Review: Standing Bear Is A Person: The True Story Of A Native American's Quest For Justice, Kyle C. Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Poncas still remember the events surrounding the 1879 verdict that first recognized Constitutionally protected Native rights. Descendants--some only one generation removed from the forced march that preceded the trial--continue to live on the Great Plains and share the stories of the long walk to Indian Territory. Unfortunately, this text docs not attempt to incorporate contemporary Native voices that can enrich such an important historical narrative.

Review Of Remington Schuyler's West: Artistic Visions Of Cowboys And Indians Compiled And With Preface And Introduction By Henry W. Hamilton And Jean Tyree Hamilton, Marie Watkins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Henry W. Hamilton and Jean Tyree Hamilton's Remington Schuyler's West establishes their friend Remington Schuyler (1884-1955) in the annals of American illustration and introduces his long forgotten work to a new public. This amply illustrated book is a pleasant read for anyone who appreciates popular culture, particularly regarding Western subjects.

Organized into three parts, the book opens with the Hamiltons' brief biography of Schuyler (illustrator, writer, associate of the Boy Scout movement, and instructor of illustration). Although written for a general audience, more could have been added here since biographical details round out the picture of Schuyler in the context …

Review Of Not Just Any Land: A Personal And Literary Journey Into The American Grasslands By John Price, Walter Isle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Price reads and travels his way into the grasslands, the prairies, in his fine new book. He reads four landscape writers-Dan O'Brien, Linda Hasselstrom, William Least Heat-Moon, and Mary Swander-who "commit to a place in such social and ecological peril" as the grasslands. Price also travels to each writer's "place" to talk and try to get a better sense of the ways each has "become native" to a particular geography. Those journeys are also Price's own immersion in the grasslands in hopes of discovering how he himself can be native.

In South Dakota, he reads Dan O'Brien's Equinox (1997) …

"Vanishing" Indians? Cultural Persistence On Display At The Omaha World's Fair Of 1898, Josh Clough

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nebraska's Indian population exploded in the summer of 1898, but it was not due to natural increase. More than 500 Indians representing twenty-three tribes came to Omaha as part of the United States Indian Bureau's exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. During their three-month stay at the world's fair, Indians engaged in dancing, feasting, visiting, and earned money performing sham battles. In doing so they demonstrated not only the vibrancy and resilience of Native American cultures, but also the ineffectiveness of the government's assimilation policy. The Indian Bureau spent $40,000 for the Indian Congress (as this gathering of Native peoples came …

Review Of Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story Of Survival By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Norma C. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Allison Hedge Coke's intimate narrative details her journey through suffering to wholeness. Her story will inspire anyone who has faced adversity. Hedge Coke was the "extra girl" whom her schizophrenic mother said she had "hated since the day she was born." The author suffered depression and suicide attempts, drug and alcohol addiction, rape and physical assaults, discrimination and poverty.

At the same time, Hedge Coke's insight is luminous: "congenital memory that of belonging by nature to landscapes runs the deepest of all the rivers of the earth." Her book remembers many landscapes-from North Carolina, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) homeland, to Texas, …

Review Of Before Lewis And Clark: The Story Of The Chouteaus, The French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier By Shirley Christian, C. David Rice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Shirley Christian's account of the St. Louis Chouteau family's activities and contributions on the trans-Mississippi frontier in the century between 1763 and 1865 breaks little new ground, but its publication does coincide nicely with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Historians will find much that is familiar combined with a sympathetic presentation of the principal figures of the Chouteau clan: Pierre Laclede; his successors, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau Sr.; and Pierre Chouteau Jr. and A. P. Chouteau of the third generation. The general reader will encounter a condensed version of the scholarly work of many decades and glimpse …

Table Of Contents- Spring 2005

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 25 / Number 2 / Spring 2005

CONTENTS

"VANISHING" INDIANS?: CULTURAL PERSISTENCE ON DISPLAY AT THE OMAHA WORLD'S FAIR OF 1898

ADVERSARIES AND ALLIES: RIVAL NATIONAL SUFFRAGE GROUPS AND THE 1882 NEBRASKA WOMAN SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGN

WITHER THE FRUITED PLAIN: THE LONG EXPEDITION AND THE DESCRIPTION OF THE "GREAT AMERICAN DESERT"

REVIEW ESSAY: DIFFERENT WAYS OF VIEWING A MONUMENT

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK NOTES

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of The Great Sioux Uprising: Rebellion On The Plains, August-September 1862 By Jerry Keenan, Paul N. Beck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With only eighty-nine pages of text, Jerry Keenan's The Great Sioux Uprising was not meant to be the definitive work on the Minnesota's Dakota War of 1862, but rather an overview of the conflict for the general public. As such, the book is a worthy effort. Keenan, the author of several volumes dealing with the Indian wars in the West, adequately covers the issues and events of the war.

Keenan, writing in an easy, reader-friendly style, first gives brief biographical sketches of the various individuals involved in the conflict, followed by a good general overview of the various reasons for …

Review Of High River And The Times: An Alberta Community And Its Weekly Newspaper, 1905-1966 By Paul Voisey, Bert Deyell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Paul Voisey investigates the town's storyteller rather than the story of High River. Dismissing postmodernist media theories of communication as too abstract, Voisey opts for informal textual analysis: his personal interpretation. The pages of the High River Times, supplemented with personal papers of the proprietors and archives at the Glenbow Museum, evidence a cycle common to small town prairie history: boosterism, economic hardship, reappraisal, and reactionary rural idealism.

The Times initially declares the potential of High River in term of progress, says Voisey; the local weekly newspaper becomes a publicity agent for speculators, governments, and railways. But economic and …