Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, Sandy Grande

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As Anne Waters notes, her volume is the first published collection of essays on American Indian philosophy written by American Indians with PhDs in philosophy. As such, it is a landmark, a significant juncture in the continual evolution of Native intellectual life. While all contributors share a common academic interest in philosophy, they vary greatly in their disciplinary and tribal affiliations, providing a broad range of topics, approaches, and methodologies.

Book Review: The Plains Sioux And U.S. Colonialism From Lewis And Clark To Wounded Knee, Carole Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Colonialism becomes the lens through which Jeffrey Ostler both analyzes and interprets the history of the Plains Sioux. His account begins in 1803 when the United States claimed sovereignty over Sioux lands through the Louisiana Purchase and extends through the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), which Ostler interprets as an anticolonial response to the reservation system. Expansion of geographic boundaries and economic interests led the United States to claim dominion over the tribes in the West, and this, in turn, led to conflict, conquest, and eventual control over the tribal nations. In examining this dynamic of contact and conquest, Ostler concentrates …

Title And Contents- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 24/ Number 2 / Spring 2004

CONTENTS

RANGERS, MOUNTIES, AND THE SUBJUGATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, 1870-1885 Andrew R. Graybill

"THIS STRANGE WHITE WORLD": RACE AND PLACE IN ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Michael K. Johnson

CANADA'S CAMPAIGN FOR IMMIGRANTS AND THE IMAGES IN CANADA WEST MAGAZINE Laura A. Detre

BOOK REVIEWS

Susan J. Rosowski, ed. Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination By STEVEN TROUT

Simona Bertacco Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch By CAROL L. BERAN

William Kloefkorn Restoring the Burnt Child: A Primer By DAVID PICHASKE

Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, …

Review Of Restoring The Burnt Child: A Primer By William Kloefkom, David Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Kloefkom's second book of memoirs is a blueprint for restoring lives scorched by the fires of fundamentalist Christianity, WCTU crusaders, cigarettes and whiskey, kitchen matches, sore throats, and thermonuclear explosions. The twelve chapters cover Kloefkom's life from age nine, when he torched the family kitchen, to age thirteen, when he delivered news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subscribers of the Wichita Beacon. The book fleshes out stories and personalities already familiar to readers of his poetry: parents and grandparents; life in Attica, Kansas; the slaughter of swallows and rabbits on grandfather's farm; landmarks like Turtle Rock and town marks …

Review Of Children Of The Western Plains: The Nineteenth Century Experience By Marilyn Irvin Holt, Rosemary G. Palmer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The small but growing collection of literature on children in the nineteenth-century American West has been expanded with Marilyn Holt's book about youngsters who migrated to the Great Plains during the 1800s. Children of the Western Plains examines the attention adults paid to young settlers as well as these youngsters' own sense of involvement in the Plains experience. Recognizing the diversity of residents, Holt considers the lives of native-born white, European immigrant, and African American children who contributed to the settlement process. Included in these numbers are military, missionary, and government employee dependents. The author examines young settlers' experiences within …

Review Of Out Of Place: The Writings Of Robert Kroetsch By Simona Bertacco, Carol L. Beran

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The 1965 Johnny Cash rendition of E.T. Rouse's "Orange Blossom Special" includes the line, "I don't care if I do die do die do die do die do die." Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue (1986) echoes the line. In Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch, Simona Bertacco says the passage shows how Kroetsch pushes "'words out of meaning'" and "makes language abandon ... its conventional function to become intransitive and intensive." Kroetsch, however, increases the number of repetitions and ends on the wrong word in the sequence, throwing the allusion into doubly new territory as it moves from …

Review Of The Native Americans Of The Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799 By Maria F. Wade, F. Todd Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although this book promises to examine the Indians who lived in West Texas between the late sixteenth century to the end of the 1700s, most of the work-and the main original contribution the author makes-deals with two Spanish expeditions of exploration that occurred in the late seventeenth century. The author, an ethnohistorian, has provided a new translation of the 1675 expedition of Fernando del Bosque and Fr. Juan Larios, which left the northern Mexican town of Monclova in April, crossed the Rio Grande, and entered the Edwards Plateau before returning to its point of origin in June. In addition to …

Review Of Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont And The Course Of American Empire By Tom Chaffin, Robert J. Chandler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Who was John Charles Fremont (1813-1890)? Tom Chaffin attempts to map his mind's terrain, but Fremont reveals little. More crucial than lack of personal papers is Fremont's character: Chaffin declares his writings to be "duplicitous apologia."

Chaffin, therefore, travels well-worn paths. Ferol Egan's Fremont: Explorer for a Restless Nation (1977,1985) comes to mind. While lacking Egan's richness of detail, Chaffin presents a fuller life. Where Egan dotes on "the great love affair" between Fremont and wife Jessie, Chaffin details Fremont's self-destructive womanizing. By 1856, he reports, a "growing distance" between the couple quickly became "a chill."

Some events defy explanation. …

Review Of Archbishop A.-A. Tache Of St. Boniface: The "Good Fight" And The Illusive Vision By Raymond J. A. Hue!, Robert Choquette

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Alexandre Tache, one of the very first Canadians to join the French Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate who arrived in Canada in 1841, was sent to work in Canada's Northwest in 1845 where he became second bishop of St. Boniface in 1853, and later archbishop. He remained there until his death in 1894, a half-century during which the region was transformed from a vast hunting emporium for furs to a refuge for tens of thousands of Canadian, American, and European settlers brought into the area after 1860 on the rapidly expanding tracks of American and then Canadian railways. Tache built …

Review Of Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination Edited By Susan J. Rosowski, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In "A Guided Tour of Ecocriticism with Excursions to Catherland," one of the many fine essays contained in this new volume of Cather Studies, Cheryl Glotfelty remarks, "If the last decade of Cather [scholarship] has been the 'gender and sexuality' period, the new millennium may well begin with a fruitful ecocritical decade." It is ironic, given this prediction, that not all of the sixteen essays presented in Cather Studies 5 fall within the emerging field of ecocriticism. Indeed, the most impressive piece in the collection, Charles Johanningsmeier's "Unmasking Willa Cather's 'Mortal Enemy,'" is a tour de force of old-fashioned …

Rangers, Mounties, And The Subjugation Of Indigenous Peoples, 1870 .. 1885, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. The rapid environmental degradation of this area had the ·effect of driving the bison to the extreme Northern and Southern Plains, where white hide-hunters slaughtered the animals.¹ By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation.²

The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, …

Review Of Coacoochee's Bones: A Seminole Saga By Susan A. Miller, Alcione M. Amos

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Coacoochee' s Bones Susan Miller tells the outstanding story of an outstanding leader in an outstanding manner. The repeated use of "outstanding" is necessary because Miller has produced a unique work on the history of the Seminole people, not just Coacoochee. The narrative is written from the point of view of a Seminole, with insights an outsider wouldn't have. Furthermore, she makes judicious use of primary historical Seminole, Mexican, and US sources and of published material, enhanced with knowledge garnered from anthropological studies. The result is a highly informative and readable book.

Miller does not shrink from taking stands …

Review Of Real Indians: Identity And The Survival Of Native America By Eva Marie Garroutte, Terry P. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Cherokee sociologist Eva Garroutte has fashioned a genuine contribution to the study of the American Indian in the United States. Herself a mixed-race person of Caucasian and Indian heritage, she focuses on the always troublesome and often controversial issue of Indian identity, one that pervades the consciousness of all Native Americans, and not a few non-Native folks. Her straightforward narrative is informed by published and unpublished sources in law, history, social science, and literature and enhanced by numerous in-depth interviews with Indian and non-Indian people. What results constitutes the single comprehensive book-length examination of "Indian-ness" in print.

Great Plains tribal …

Review Of Invisible Natives: Myth And Identity In The American Western By Armando Jose Prats, Peter N. Peregrine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The relationship between the Great Plains and the Hollywood Western has always been a strange one. The "classic" era of the Hollywood Western, the period between roughly 1864 and 1887, is also the "classic" era of the Great Plains-the era of the pioneer, the gunslinger, the cattleman, and, of course, the Indian fighter. Oddly, the Great Plains are rarely featured prominently in Hollywood Westerns; rather, it is the desert Southwest that is most often depicted. The flowing grasslands and wooded river valleys upon which the events of the "classic" era of the Western unfolded are often shown as rocky wastelands. …

Notes And News- Spring 2004

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Frederick C. Luebke Award

Call For Papers: "Education On The Great Plains"

Homestead Heritage Center

The Prairies: Lost And Found

Review Of The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude To Indian Reform By Valerie Sherer Mathes And Richard Lowitt, Sidney L. Harring

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Standing Bear v. George Crook, an 1879 case brought in the Federal District Court in Omaha, is today little more than a footnote in United States Indian law. Yet this case, like thousands of other cases that American Indians brought to US courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an important effort by one group of Indians to define their relationship with the United States through law. The Ponca story is among the best known, but certainly no more tragic than many of the other Indian cases.

The Ponca's lands were given to the Lakota, without their …

Review Of Prairie Peddlers: The Syrian-Lebanese In North Dakota By William C. Sherman, Paul Whitney, And John Guerrero, Philip M. Kayal

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This remarkable ethnographic study of the Syrian-Lebanese in North Dakota is unique. The data and information are original, never mind that the voices heard are nearly those of the early settlers, certainly those of their children. The authors use the records of the late 1930s (early 1940s) Federal Writers Projects and the Works Progress Administration to understand the reasons for Arab migration to North Dakota and the Great Plains, their employment practices, life styles (marriage patterns, culinary habits), and religious traditions, their distribution, settlements, institutions (or lack thereof), and finally their near total assimilation.

If it were homesteading that attracted …

Review Of The Bizarre Careers Of John R. Brinkley By R. Alton Lee, Bob Mccoy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

R. Alton Lee has produced an engaging book that details the full life of John R. Brinkley. As someone interested in quackery in the US, I already knew Brinkley as an exemplar of this genre, but there is much more to him. He was a complex man who carried many labels, some contradictory: quack, caring healer; devoted family man, liar and con-man; would be Governor, community booster, and radio station entrepreneur, the latter as a way to promote mail-order sales of his medical remedies and also to draw in patients to his hospital.

Lee's biography is an informative and entertaining …

Review Of Native Voices: American Indian Identity And Resistance Edited By Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, And David E. Wilkins, Beth R. Ritter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From our current vantage point, the true legacy of Vine Deloria Jr.'s scholarship and activism can neither be fully measured nor overstated. We know with certainty, however, that the landscape of Native American scholarship has been permanently altered-for the best. Native Voices honors Deloria's contributions through the presentation of original Native scholarship inspired by his model. As its editors observe, "Deloria has influenced a whole generation of younger Indian scholars to be self-consciously indigenous thinkers-to reclaim an American Indian intellectual tradition, along with a political activism rooted in the oral traditions of our peoples and the wisdom of our elders …

Review Of Lynching In Colorado, 1859-1919 By Stephen J. Leonard, Jesse T. Moore Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The term lynching likely conjures up in the minds of most Americans images of robed and hooded white men in the states of the Old Confederacy taking the law into their own hands to punish black males accused of violating white womanhood. Groups known as Regulators "enforced the law" in South Carolina as early as 1790. Lynching remained a form of punishment in Southern states until well into the twentieth century, despite the fact that most residents of the region frowned upon it.

Judge Lynch's powerful ghost prowled Colorado for more than half a century, "in part because he could …

Canada's Campaign For Immigrants And The Images In Canada West Magazine, Laura A. Detre

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the major challenges that Canadian government officials felt they faced at the end of the nineteenth century was the development of the prairie West. By this time there were large urban centers in eastern Canada, but many Canadians worried that they had not truly ensured the future existence of their country. They hoped that filling the middle, the province of Manitoba and the region that would become the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, with prosperous, white, family farmers would support the industrialized cities of the East. To do this the government engaged in a systematic program to encourage …

"This Strange White World" Race And Place In Era Bell Thompson's American Daughter, Michael K. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography American Daughter (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow-miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks of snow drifted against wooden snow fences .... All day long we rode through the silent fields of snow, a cold depression spreading over us." Thompson's realistic winter landscape descriptions also allegorically represent the social situation of herself and her family. The phrase "this strange white world," which …

Book Review: Woman Walking Ahead: In Search Of Catherine Weldon And Sitting Bull, Glenda Riley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

There are many ways of presenting historical events and persons, including narrative and analysis, or the use of a variety of approaches. In this ingenious and personal book, Eileen Pollack fleshes out historical evidence with informed speculation and with details of her quest for data. Such methodology makes possible the recreation of bits of history that otherwise go unremarked.

Book Review: Galvanized Yankees On The Upper Missouri: The Face Of Loyalty, Vance E. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Visitors to Fort Rice State Historic Site have little idea of the drama that took place there during the first few years after its construction in 1864. The site's historical marker contains no mention of the important task rendered by former Confederate soldiers who became known as "the Galvanized Yankees."

Book Review: Wyoming Trucks, True Love, And The Weather Channel: A Woman's Adventure, Laura E. Casari

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kennedy's subtitle is apt, for her book narrates the education of a biologist who becomes a second-generation environmentalist, or at least what she calls a second-generation environmentalist. As a consultant, she often works in the Plains states assessing the compliance of public drinking water programs with EPA regulations. Some of these regulations are based on research done in graduate school by field experts one college generation before hers-now often field experts on teams with her. One such site she describes in the Painted Creek, near Phoenix, which she visits once yearly, and where she shows us with an artist's eye …

A Dakota Boomtown: Sioux Falls, 1877-1880, Gary D. Olsen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The "Dakota boom" is a label historians have almost universally adopted to describe the period of settlement in Dakota Territory be, tween the years 1878 and 1887. The term "boom" has been applied to this period largely because of the volume of land claimed and the rapid increase in Dakota Territory's population that occurred during those years. Most accounts of this time period have treated the Dakota boom as a rural phenomenon, and certainly its main manifestation was the rapid claiming of land by immigrant and American would, be farm owners in the plains of Dakota Territory and adjacent areas. …

Book Review: Marriage, Violence, And The Nation In The American Literary West, Christine Bold

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"If the West tells us anything," says William Handley, "it is that stories have powerful consequences." This book reads western stories anew, not as familiar tales of individualism but as family dramas with newly thought-provoking consequences for the "nation's racial future." Handley argues that twentieth-century western literature is more preoccupied with marriage than with the frontier. Marriage serves as an analogy for US national unity while also exposing the uncontainable violence at the heart of nation-building. These stories demonstrate that, having destroyed the racial and ethnic "others" against whom the nation defined itself, "imperialism brings its guns home."

Book Review: Reading "The Virginian" In The New West, Forrest G. Robinson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Virginian is here to stay. For most of the first century of its life, critics gave their attention to what they found on the novel's face: the rugged hero, conquest, a reinvigorated national identity, the triumph of patriarchal law and of good over evil. It was a tale out of Turner. This timely new volume confirms and elaborates recent, revisionist moves to overturn the consensus reading and replace it with interrogations of the novel's competing, even contradictory perspectives in matters of race, class, and gender. Once the embodiment of a faith in the American character and mission, The Virginian …

Book Review: The Real Rosebud: The Triumph Of A Lakota Woman, Norma C. Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Weinberg's narrative shows how quickly life changed for Lakota people during the course of a century. Yellow Robe lived as a traditional Brule. Though his son, Chauncey, grew up in that world, Chauncey's adult life in Rapid City was very different from his youth. Rosebud, Chauncey's daughter, left the land of her ancestors in 1927 to spend most of her life in New York City. Yet each valued being Lakota.

Book Review: Around The Sacred Fire: Native Religious Activism In The Red Power Era, Francis Guth

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This important book details the continent-wide, including Great Plains, efforts of Native Americans in the 1970s and 1980s to revive and unify Native spirituality and bring it to terms with Christianity. The subtitle alerts us that these efforts were largely overshadowed by more militant "Red Power" movements.