Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Comanche Society; Before The Reservation By Gerald Betty, Daniel J. Gelo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

While the merging of historical and anthropological outlooks has been a productive trend in Plains Indian studies, there are pitfalls. For one, the authority inherent in an accurate chronology or lively narrative can mask basic errors in social analysis. Sometimes historians have difficulty in properly employing the terms and principles of social organization so carefully wrought in the neighbor discipline. Readers get an epic infused with mistaken ethnology, resulting in a setback rather than advance in understanding.

So it is with Gerald Betty's Comanche Society. The work attempts to recast the history of Comanche expansion via chapters on kinship, …

Review Of Studies In American Indian Art: A Memorial Tribute To Norman Feder Edited By Christian F. Feest, Bill Anthes

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Norman Feder (1930-1995), a pioneer in the field of Native American art history and material culture, began his career in a community of amateur collectors and "artifakers" (Feder's term for serious hobbyists who produced high-quality reproductions of Indian crafts). His periodical, American Indian Hobbyist (begun in 1954 and renamed American Indian Tradition in 1960), spawned many careers in anthropology and Native American history. Later, Feder's professional experience included positions at the Denver Art Museum, the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, and major exhibitions and catalogs at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Feder served …

Review Of The Nature Of Native American Poetry By Norma C. Wilson, Andrew Wiget

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For the reader new to the field, perhaps attracted by an encounter with an individual poem or poet, Wilson's book offers genuine insights into the relationship among history, biography, and Native American poetry. Readers more familiar with contemporary Native American poetry will find good thematic readings that fall somewhere between an overview and appreciation on the one hand, and hard academic criticism on the other.

The book's introduction attempts to locate the emergence of Native American poetry in English as an articulation of a special relationship to the land and a partial response to the traumas of Native American history. …

Review Of Dreams And Thunder: Stories, Poems, And The Sun Dance Opera By Zitkala-Sa, Susan Bernardin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) marks a milestone in the scholarship of this crucial figure in Native literary and intellectual history. Meticulously researched, editor Jane Hafen's compilation advances our understanding of this Yankton Sioux writer, activist, and artist, about whom little has been documented. Hafen located a range of her writings in a variety of archives, from early poems written at Earlham College to Iktomi stories and the opera she created in collaboration with William Hanson in 1913.

In her introduction, Hafen provides the most accurate biographical overview of Gertrude Bonnin to date, showing …

Review Of Performing The American Frontier, 1870-1906 By Roger A. Hall, Sarah J. Blackstone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Roger Hall's engagingly written study of frontier drama provides a good overview of the topic. Covering the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of cinema, the book surveys how eastern audiences reacted to frontier depictions, examining these reactions against the backdrop of contemporary debates about national policies affecting the settlement of the West. Hall has limited his discussion to plays produced in New York, which allows him to take advantage of a wealth of theatrical documents, including reviews printed in New York newspapers and trade papers of the day. He takes into account the often …

Review Of West Of The American Dream: An Encounter With Texas By Paul Christensen, Roger Jones

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1974, fresh from his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, poet and critic Paul Christensen set out for his first teaching job, in College Station, Texas, at Texas A&M. Eastern by education and temperament, and as yet unsteeped in Texas culture, Texas literature, or Texas landscape, Christensen was somewhat uncertain about what to expect in his new setting. Almost thirty years later, however (and still at Texas A&M), Christensen now looks back on the years and on his own experiences in West of the American Dream, a rich, wide-ranging, evocative work combining his critical eye for the …

Review Of Beauty, Honor, And Tradition: The Legacy Of Plains Indian Shirts By Joseph D. Horse Capture And George P. Horse Capture, Imre Nagy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The study of Plains Indian art is currently in a transitive stage. Because of the enthusiasm of several non-Native researchers and scholars in the eighties and nineties-like Norman Feder, Dennis Lessard, Richard Conn, John C. Ewers (just to name those who have already passed away)-the appreciation of Plains Indian beadwork and quillwork almost reached the highest levels of connoisseurship, and prices for these pieces rose to the stars. At the same time, our knowledge of tribal or regional styles clarified to a certain degree, and our vision became less obscured by centuryold misconceptions. The presence of Native American scholarship also …

Review Of Anti-Indianism In Modern America: A Voice From Tatekeya's Earth By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jacki Thompson-Rand

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The fertile mind of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has produced essays, lectures, and papers on an array of issues confronting Native America, a selection of them presented here. Writing from a Dakota-centered view, Cook-Lynn provides analysis and commentary on oppression that arises and takes shape out of language, knowledge production, and "misrepresentations of Indian people on the part of individuals and institutions. Literature, federal Indian policies, the academy, American Indian Studies, scholarly theoretical trends, and art are indices to Anti-Indian ism in America.

Cook-Lynn's authoritative assessment of the state of Native American Literary Studies provides insight into her appreciation of the complications …

Come To The "Champagne Air" Changing Promotional Images Of The Kansas Climate, 1854 -1900, Karen De Bres

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Euro-American settlers poured into Kansas during the second half of the nineteenth century, and there they encountered a hostile and unpredictable climate. Rainfall patterns were erratic, and the extremes of temperature were both demanding and daunting. Countering these conditions, or at least tempering them, became a task for a variety of individuals and organizations. The work was straightforward: to transform the image of Kansas in order to attract prospective immigrants. As historian Carl Becker wrote, this was not easy: Until 1895 the whole history of the state was a series of disasters, and always something new, extreme, bizarre, until the …

Review Of Racial Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, And Mexicans In Western America, 1848-1890 By Arnoldo De Leon, Sucheng Chan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Arnoldo De Leon wrote this book to fill a gap in the existing literature on the American West that either "overlooks or is mindless about the contributions of Africans, Chinese, and Mexicans to the frontier experience." In his view, the presence of these nonwhite groups made the region a racial as well as a psychological frontier. In a short text of only 107 pages, he argues, in chapter 1, that these groups came because the frontier offered them opportunities not available in their homelands (though "homeland" is not entirely applicable to American-born blacks). That is, their motive for migrating to …

Review Of Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers Of The World And Agricultural Laborers In The American West, 1905-1930 By Greg Hall, William G. Robbins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

America's most vibrant symbol of militant unionism in the twentieth century remains the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) , the radical labor organization whose renown was literally larger than life. The union's strikes, work slow-downs, and suspected sabotage frightened employers, worried conservative labor groups, and eventually convinced the federal government to crush the loosely structured organization shortly after the United States entered the European war in 1917. Greg Hall centers his argument on the union's remarkable, if short-lived, resurgence following the end of the First World War. The Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU), the IWW's strongest affiliate, enjoyed an …

Review Of Hidden Worlds: Revisiting The Mennonite Migrants Of The 1870s By Royden Loewen, Kimberly D. Schmidt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What Russian Mennonite child has not heard the stories of the massive migration from Russia to the New World? The oft-repeated tales recount how large congregations collectively moved from Russia's steppes to North America's Plains. According to the stories, great-grandparents were in search of religious freedom and good land. They brought turkey-red wheat, recreated their farmland villages, and transformed the Plains into a breadbasket, just as they had transformed Catherine the Great's steppes from a Cossack wilderness into villages and productive farmland. Why revisit this story so ingrained in the collective memory of a people? Even outsider historians, such as …

Review Of Brown V. Board Of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone And Its Troubled Legacy By James T. Patterson, Kristin Leigh Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rendered during the postwar consensus period, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision struck at the core of de jure segregation. Recognizing the American educational system as a "great equalizer," Thurgood Marshall and other advocates insisted that the "separate but equal" doctrine codified by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case needed to be overturned to ensure opportunities for African Americans. Marshall found an ally in Chief Justice Earl Warren and his supporters on the Supreme Court who based their decision in the Brown case on the social science research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Gunnar Myrdal. Their findings …

"The Greatest Evil" Interpretations Of Indian Prohibition Laws, 1832-1953, Jill E. Martin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Highway 407 in Shannon County South Dakota crosses the Pine Ridge Reservation and, like the reservation, ends at the Nebraska border. When the road turns into Nebraska Highway 87 you enter the unincorporated town of Whiteclay. What also changes, besides the highway numbers, is the legal sale of alcohol. The Ogallala Sioux prohibit alcohol on their land, but this prohibition ends in Whiteclay. Seven liquor stores in this town of 30 residents, all of whom are Anglo-American, sell more than four million cans of beer each year. The two-mile stretch of road between Pine Ridge and Whiteclay is a path …

Title And Contents- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 23/ Number 1 / Winter 2003

CONTENTS

"AT THE HEAD OF THE ABORIGINAL REMNANT": CHEROKEE CONSTRUCTION OF A "CIVILIZED" INDIAN IDENTITY DURING THE LAKOTA CRISIS OF 1876 Paul Kelton

WAVING "A BOUGH OF CHALLENGE": FORESTRY ON THE KANSAS GRASSLANDS, 1868-1915 Brian Allen Drake

"THE GREATEST EVIL": INTERPRETATIONS OF INDIAN PROHIBITION LAWS, 1832-1953 Jill E. Martin

BOOK REVIEWS

Scott E. Casper and Lucinda M. Long, eds. Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850-2000 By WALTER NUGENT

Jo Ella Powell Exley Frontier Blood: The Saga of the Parker Family By THOMAS W. KAVANAGH

Royden Loewen Hidden Worlds: …

Waving "A Bough Of Challenge" Forestry On The Kansas Grasslands, 1868-1915, Brian Allen Drake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kansas is legendary for geographical monotony, for a landscape allegedly so absent of trees and relief that the state has become the butt of national jokes and a cultural synonym for flat. Kansas is not really flat; tilted might be a better description, for the state rises some 3,300 feet in elevation along the 400-mile stretch between Kansas City and Kanorado. Kansas is lacking in substantial tree cover, though, especially in its western third. US Forest Service researchers noted in 1999 that forests covered slightly less than 3 percent of the state, concentrated mostly in the northeast and southeast corners. …

Review Of Moving Stories: Migration And The American West, 1850-2000. Edited By Scott E. Casper And Lucinda M. Long, Walter Nugent

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This well-written, well-illustrated anthology will gladden the hearts of students of the American West, not least because nine of the eleven authors are young-doctoral candidates or assistant professors. There is hope for Western studies. Five are historians, six trained in and teach literature, but most cross disciplinary boundaries quite easily. The geographical scope of the essays stretches well beyond the Great Plains, but the reader will land squarely between the Missouri and Montana in much of the volume.

Theresa Strouth Gaul introduces the writings of three Pennsylvania sisters named Stewart who crossed the Overland Trail to Oregon in 1853 and …

Notes And News- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News

Call For Papers

Textbook Seeking Great Plains Scholars

International Willa Cather Seminar

Mari Sandoz Center

Review Of Frontier Blood: The Saga Of The Parker Family By Jo Ella Powell Exley, Thomas W. Kavanagh

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These are the stories of four generations of one family that moved West with the frontier, and of one individual who emerged from the meeting of the frontier with the people who were already there. Elder John Parker, born in Maryland in 1758, had a son, Daniel, in Virginia in 1781. Daniel's son James W. was born in Georgia in 1797, and another, Silas, was born in Tennessee in 1804. James W.'s daughter, Rachel, was born in Illinois in 1819, as was Silas's daughter Cynthia Ann in 1826 and his son John in 1829. Cynthia Ann's son, Quanah, was born …

Review Of Riot And Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War And Its Legacy By James S. Hirsch, Hannibal B. Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Riot and Remembrance, James S. Hirsch, an ace reporter formerly affiliated with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, adds his dispassionate voice to the swelling volumes on one of America's most obscure, ignominious racial conflicts: the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. As Hirsch points out, even many native Tulsans knew nothing of the Riot until recent years, the silence surrounding the catastrophe having been deafening. Not only did the Riot escape local civic discourse, it garnered only scant mention-if any mention at all-in state-mandated textbooks.

Why now? Why Tulsa? The answers to both questions turn …

Review Of The Middle Of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come To Our Town By Mary Pipher, Rochelle L. Dalla

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Identity," writes Pipher, "is no longer based on territory. The world community is small and interconnected. We can learn from this to be kinder and more appreciative of life. And we can learn the importance of understanding the perspectives of all our neighbors in our global village." Philosophically poignant, The Middle of Everywhere presents rich, descriptive narratives of hope, courage, tragedy and resilience through the life-stories of refugees and immigrants, from Bosnia to the Sudan, struggling to create "home" in Lincoln, Nebraska. Significantly, although refugee experiences in one particular Midwestern city are highlighted, one can imagine that any community of …

Book Notes- Winter 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Book Notes

Niddrie of the North-West: Memoirs of a Pioneer Canadian Missionary

A Prairie Mosaic: An Atlas of Central Nebraska's Land, Culture and Nature

The Oregon Trail: A Photographic Journey

Canyons of the Texas High Plains

Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume One: The Authors

The University of Manitoba: An Illustrated History

Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews

Review Of The Methodist Church On The Prairies, 1896- 1914 By George Emery, Sandra Beardsall

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Mission efforts in Canada's Midwest played a major part in the development of both the mainline Protestant churches and the young Canadian nation itself. It was on the prairies that Protestants cut their teeth on the interdenominational cooperation that would eventually create Canada's largest Protestant church, The United Church of Canada. And it was in the multifarious ethnic stew of the Canadian Plains that the churches attempted most zealously to forge "Christian Canadian citizens" out of both First Nations populations and immigrants of all stripes. Despite this significant history, there has been no recent monograph focusing on Methodism in this …

Review Of Learning To Be An Anthropologist And Remaining "Native": Selected Writings By Beatrice Medicine, Edited With Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Thomas P. Myers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This engaging compendium of essays chronicles the professional contributions of Dr. Beatrice Medicine, a Lakota raised on the Standing Rock Reservation. She earned a B.S. degree from South Dakota State University in 1945 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 1983 after many years as a professional anthropologist. She has served as an academic anthropologist at no less than ten universities since retiring in 1988 and also worked as an applied anthropologist during this time. As a Native American who remains an active participant in her Native culture, she brings to her work a cultural perspective infrequently …

Review Of The Indian Association Of Alberta: A History Of Political Action By Laurie Meijer Drees, Joe Sawchuk

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Native political organizations occupy a unique and important place in the Canadian political arena, whether on the national, provincial, or regional level. They offer a forum where both Native leaders and mainstream politicians can confer and, perhaps even more importantly, be seen to be conferring. This book is a study of one of the most influential of these organizations, the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA), from its beginning in 1939 as an organization devoted to regional and com~ unity issues to the 1960s, when it led the fight against the Trudeau government's "White Paper."

One of the volume's strengths is …

At The Head Of The Aboriginal Remnant: Cherokee Construction Of A "Civilized" Indian Identity During The Lakota Crisis Of 1876, Paul Kelton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1876 the bilingual Cherokee diplomat and lawyer William Penn Adair expressed great pride in the level of "civilization" that his nation had achieved. Defining civilization as commercial agriculture, literacy, Christianity, and republican government, Adair believed that his society had reached a sophistication that equaled and in certain areas surpassed that of the United States. Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Territories, the diplomat claimed that his people produced surpluses of "every agricultural product that is raised in the neighboring States of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas." Schools in the Indian Territory, he added, produced a vast …

Review Of F. P. Grove In Europe And Canada: Translated Lives By Klaus Martens, Irene Gammel

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Canada's leading prairie author Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) had a predilection for strong and silent heroes: the unforgettable Niels Lindstedt in Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Abe Spalding in Fruits of the Earth (1933), John Elliot in Our Daily Bread (1928). Grove's fictional landscape was a multicultural potpourri of immigrants from Sweden, Iceland, Germany, and Russia with new-world men and women transforming the prairie wilderness into fertile and flourishing settlements. Yet Grove, aka German author and translator Felix Paul Greve, was also a literary con man who led his audience down the garden path in a fictionalized autobiography, In Search …

Review Of Letters From The Dust Bowl By Caroline Henderson, Brian Q. Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1907, Caroline Boa, a thirty-year-old school teacher and graduate of Mount Holyoke College, filed on a quarter section in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The following year she married Will Henderson, a one-time cowboy, well-digger, and would-be rancher. For the next fifty-seven years the couple farmed their homestead, although Caroline also taught school for three years in another community and later spent two years working on a master's degree.

Henderson is best known for her "Letters from the Dust Bowl," published by Atlantic Monthly in 1936, one of dozens of articles she wrote for popular magazines between 1913 and 1937. In …

Review Of Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions By Joseph Epes Brown With Emily Cousins, Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This volume passes on to readers some of the teachings of the late scholar and educator Joseph Epes Brown. In consultation with Brown's wife Elenita Brown and daughter Marina Brown Weatherly, writer and editor Emily Cousins has produced a clear and succinct synthesis of what Brown taught his classes at the University of Montana about Native American concepts of the sacred. She accomplishes this through the complex task of blending some of his class lecture notes, published articles, and conference talks with recollections from his students and quotations from published Native American sources.

Following Brown's example in his lectures, Cousins …

Review Of Plain Speaking: Essays On Aboriginal Peoples And The Prairie Edited By Patrick Douaud And Bruce Dawson, L. Brooks Hill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Primarily derived from a March 2001 conference held in Regina, Saskatchewan, these essays present diverse perspectives on various connections between First Nations and Metis peoples and the Canadian Plains. Designed to create a more holistic perspective, the conference and this companion book used a wide variety of presentational formats to capture the diversity of past and present connections between Aboriginal Peoples and the prairies. The twelve articles range from traditional academic reports to autobiographical commentaries, photo essays, and transcribed interviews from an Elders' roundtable.

Essential to this collection is the confrontation of modernism with traditionalism. In his article Neal McLeod …