Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill To Larry Mcmurtry By Richard W. Etulain, Roger Welsch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Telling Western Stories Richard Etulain has produced one of those rare combinations of a book that would make an excellent text for any class in Western literature and at the same time a well-written history easily enjoyed simply as a book of general interest. Etulain actually treats ideas and images more than stories, although it is, he argues, through stories that the ideas and images of the American West have been molded this past century and a half.

That is the essence of Etulain's narrative: there is not an absolute history, a clear reality, that determines how we see …

Review Of Warriors Of The King: Prairie Indians In World War 1 By James Dempsey, Bill Waiser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Dempsey estimates that some four hundred Indians from Western Canada served during the Great War (1914-18). That he can't be more precise is a consequence of the surviving military documents-the Canadian government did not keep accurate enlistment records for Aboriginal peoples. This problem, however, has not prevented Dempsey from piecing together the story of Western Canada's soldier Indians in World War One. In fact, he has provided an insightful account of how supposed Indian racial attributes played differently on the battlefield and the home front.

Warriors of the King opens with a contradiction. Dempsey describes how the Canadian government, …

Review Of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics And The Male Homosexual Literary TraditionBy John P. Anders & Willa Cather And The Politics Of Criticism By Joan Acocella, Deborah Carlin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

PLAIN TRUTHS AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN NEW CATHER CRITICISM

One wonders what Cather, arguably one of the country's finest novelists and an astute observer of human nature, would make of the tendency among critics of her work to choose opposing sides as earnestly and pugnaciously as they have throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Are the stakes really so high? Are Cather and her work such contested terrain that we need to expend so much energy and, indeed, rancor in defending our interpretive claims? Must others be wrong because we (however these affiliations are constituted) are so clearly …

Review Of A Reader's Guide To The Novels Of Louise Erdrich By Peter G. Beidler And Gay Barton & The Chippewa Landscape Of Louise Erdrich Edited By Allan Chavkin, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Both of these recent publications support Professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs observation that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the author most studied in recent literary criticism of American Indian literatures (Chavkin 182). While Erdrich may be the object of much study and discussion, the accuracy and usefulness vary widely.

The stronger of the two books, Peter Beidler and Gay Barton's A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, carefully presents time lines, genealogies, geographic identifications, and character definitions. As a study guide, the approach thoroughly clarifies, delineates, and cross-references the complicated relationships among Erdrich's characters, places, and …

Review Of Earth Songs, Moon Dreams: Paintings By American Indian Women By Patricia Janis Broder, Mary Jo Watson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With the first book devoted exclusively to women's painting, Patricia Janis Broder addresses a deficiency in Native American art history. Women's arts-painting, or any of their myriad art forms-became an area of serious inquiry after 1960 that has yet to be sufficiently served by scholars.

Broder's introduction explains the importance of the role of women, their arts, styles, and subjects. Mentioned are individuals and "schools" that form the context and modes of contemporary women's art. The author has selected artists' paintings that she determined have "cultural, historical, and aesthetic merit." There are ninety featured artists representing fifty-seven communities. Each artist's …

The Price Of Patriotism Alberta Cattlemen And The Loss Of The American Market, 1942-48, Max Foran

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most controversial episodes in the history of the western Canadian cattle industry occurred during the years 1942-48 when the Canadian government imposed an embargo on Canadian cattle entering the United States. This unprecedented measure was a reaction to the extraordinary demands of the national war effort, and was accepted conditionally by the cattle industry as a necessary patriotic gesture. However, official wartime policies respecting this embargo, and its retention beyond the war until late 1948 were neither anticipated nor appreciated by western Canadian stockmen. Their efforts to restore a market deemed crucial to their industry's survival, and …

Review Of Making A Real Killing: Rocky Flats And The Nuclear West By Len Ackland, Michael A. Amundson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Between 1951 and 1989, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver processed more than a hundred and fifty tons of plutonium while manufacturing more than 70,000 nuclear bombs as part of America's Cold War nuclear deterrence policy. In the name of national security, the bomb factory also provided good blue-collar jobs to more than 23,000 people during its operation and contributed millions of dollars to the Colorado economy. But at what cost? As author Len Ackland clearly suggests, Rocky Flats also created extremely unsafe working conditions for many of its employees and caused billion dollar damage to the …

Review Of Buffalo Jump: A Woman's Travels By Rita Moir, Sharon Butala

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Buffalo Jump is a surprisingly good little book. I say "surprising" because it's such an unassuming, small paperback, as if its publisher didn't expect much of it; as a result, the reader may expect the same. Thankfully, I was wrong. It's a memoir, a travel document, a story about families, and a story about stories. It's a song of praise for the writer's mother and grandmother- in fact, for prairie women in general and the hardships of their lives in those generations. Unfortunately, it loses power because it tries to do so much, while nevertheless managing to be nearly always …

Review Of Woman Of The Plains: The]Ournals And Stories Of Nellie M. Perry Edited By Sandra Gail Teichmann, Maureen E. Reed

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Sandra Teichmann discovered a charming piece, of Anglo women's regional literary tradition when a librarian introduced her to a descendant of Nellie M. Perry in 1996. "Miss Nellie," as Teichmann came to know her, traveled from Iowa to visit her brother George in the Texas Panhandle's Ochiltree County in 1888. Perry, a schoolteacher, wrote lively, polished, and frequently witty narratives about this and other trips to Ochiltree (now Perryton), where she herself settled in 1916. Perry's narratives and short fiction came into the possession of her descendant, who eagerly shared them with Teichmann.

The editor does not indicate (and perhaps …

Review Of Land Of Enchantment, Land Of Conflict: New Mexico In English-Language Fiction By David L. Caffey, David King Dunaway

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nearly seventy-five years ago, in The Phantom Herd, novelist Bertha Bower summed up the tension between the presentation of the West and its reality. A movie director and crew are sent out from Hollywood to New Mexico to film a western. Halfway through, the director's disgusted crew demands more realism. The director complains that the problem isn't his but the audience's: the only West he can tell is "served hot and strong and reeking with the smoke of black powder." These images still plague us today in the West-in television dramas and in sometimes dangerous school yards .

David …

Review Of Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism By Craig S. Womack, Daniel Justice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The struggle of Native scholars to develop a distinctly Native literary criticism-one that draws from tribal histories, stories, and traditions, rather than accepting Eurocentric and often racist standards of critical and artistic sophistication-has seen varied degrees of success since the late 1970s. In 1994, Osage scholar Robert Allen Warrior published Tribal Secrets, which called for Indian scholarship centered in Indian lives and world views. Now, at the edge of the colonizers' millennium, easily one of the most nuanced, respectful, and penetrating examples of such scholarship has appeared in Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism.

Womack, who …

Review Of Ladonna Harris: A Comanche Life By La Donna Harris, Barbara Torralba-Hobson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This autobiographical account of La Donna Harris, a Comanche woman from rural southwest Oklahoma, describes an individual who by all accounts was not initially a candidate for the activist life she has led. As one reads her life's story, however, one understands how Harris has been able to take part in shaping the political agenda for American Indian issues in the 1960s and beyond. Stockel does not write Harris's story but rather edits it, allowing Harris free rein to give her perspective on life as an American Indian woman.

In the initial chapters I became intrigued with the history of …

Review Of The Changing Presentation Of The American Indian: Museums And Native Cultures By W. Richard West Et Al., Russell Thornton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of six papers with an introduction and appendices is drawn from a 1995 symposium convened at the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in New York City to examine how "Indians and their cultures have been represented by museums in North America." The authors all have some degree of experience in museums and in the presentation of American Indian exhibits. Some are Native; some are not.

How American Indian cultures have been presented by museums over the years as well as new directions these presentations are taking are difficult tasks to consider in slightly …

Review Of Termination Revisited: American Indians On The Trail To Self-Determination, 1933-1953 By Kenneth R. Philp, Warren Metcalf

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As the title suggests, Termination Revisited evaluates the short-lived policy to terminate the trust relationship between the federal government and Indian tribes. In keeping with his earlier work on this subject, Philp contends that termination grew out of the functional shortcomings of the Indian Reorganization Act, which failed to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse Indian population. After World War II, Indian advocates clamored for a new direction in policy, and BIA Commissioner Dillon S. Myer sought to provide it in the form of termination. Philp argues that Myer's authoritarian tendencies and bureaucratic ineptitude undercut the position of like-minded …

Review Of Cowgirls: Commemorating The Women Of The West Photography By David R. Stoecklein, Joyce Gibson-Roach

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A cowgirl, her face and form obscured in work garb, is featured on the jacket of a book of lavish photography about the modern cowgirl. Nothing, however, is concealed between the covers. Cowgirls, mostly young, fairly blaze across the pages. If all, in reality, are not glamorous, the photographer's art makes them appear so. Fine horses accompany every cowgirl. One token male appears on the last page.

The author says his intent is to tell some of the story of the modern West through his photography. The photos themselves are often filtered through ethereal dust. Some cowgirls are posed provocatively, …

Women's Sense Of Place On The American High Plains, Cary W. Dewit

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The plight of women on the American Great Plains is a familiar one to anyone who has explored the region's history. Account after account exists of women during the early years of Euro-American settlement who suffered hardship, persevered, and triumphed, or who succumbed to homesickness, lost their children or husbands, and sometimes descended into madness.² The women's historical situation on the Plains has also been popularized in fiction and dramatized or romanticized in dozens of films.³ But what of today's Plains women?

Few sources describe women's contemporary experience of Plains life. Some works have given us a glimpse …

Review Of Susan La Flesche Picotte, M.D.: Omaha Indian Leader And Reformer By Benson Tong, Malea Powell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This first full-length biography of Susan La Flesche Picotte represents an important contribution to Great Plains and Native American studies. Tong is an accomplished cultural historian, carefully outlining the cultural and historical contexts, both nationally and regionally, for Picotte's short but accomplished life. Born, as Hastings points out, "into the Omaha Nation in a tepee in 1865," La Flesche Picotte became the first American Indian woman to become a physician (1889) and then spent most of her adult life working among the Omahas as physician, temperance reformer, religious missionary, and land claims advocate. She died 16 September 1916, at the …

Review Of Singing For A Spirit: A Portrait Of The Dakota Sioux By Vine Deloria Jr, George E. Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an engaging account of one of the more prominent Yankton Sioux families by the family's most prominent contemporary scion. Saswe and Tipi Sapa (Frank and Philip Deloria) were Vine Deloria Jr.'s great grandfather and grandfather. While Saswe had been an important medicine man and a chief, his son, Tipi Sapa, followed his father's late life conversion to Christianity and became an Episcopal priest, a vocation followed in turn by his son, Vine Deloria Sr. Philip Deloria became one of the most celebrated Episcopal priests of his day, earning church-wide fame, and one of only three Americans whose statues …

Managing The Farm, Educating The Farmer O Pioneers! And The New Agriculture, William Conlogue

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most studies of Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) comment on Alexandra Bergson's mystic relationship with the land and on the land's positive response to her love, on the "perfect harmony in nature" at the novel's center, or on its country versus city elements.² In such interpretations, Alexandra is an ideal farmer, one whose literary roots stretch back to Virgil's Eclogues.³ Although these readings work well, they remain incomplete because they ignore a crucial element: the novel's celebration of an agriculture modeled on urban industrialism. Though Cather herself may have had "the dimmest possible view of literature with …

Early Civil Rights Activism In Topeka, Kansas, Prior To The 1954 Brown Case, Jean Van Delinder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

On an early spring day in the city of Topeka, Kansas, a father walked his child to their neighborhood school. His child was refused admission and was instructed to attend one reserved for "colored children." The parent filed a lawsuit and sued the Topeka Board of Education, demanding that his child be received and instructed at that school, regardless of race. The case went to the Kansas State Supreme Court where it became a precedent for maintaining school segregation in Topeka and other cities in Kansas. The year was 1902. Despite its outcome, this lawsuit illustrates the local-level issues and …

Review Of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women On Texas Cotton Farms, 1900 - 1940 By Rebecca Sharpless, Barbara Handy-Marchello

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The examination of farm women's experiences offers new perspectives on American agricultural communities. Rebecca Sharpless adds to our knowledge with this book on the women who worked the cotton fields of the east Texas Blackland Prairies in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The six chapters about family relations, housekeeping, food production, field work, communities, and the decline of the rural population spare no detail of poverty, racial discrimination, or the hopeful but constant and unrewarding migration of tenant families. Written with warmth, Sharpless's account is not at all romantic or sentimental. The organization suggests patterns that framed …

The Picture Changes Stylistic Variation In Sitting Bull's Biographies, Barbara Risch

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Until the 1800s Indian warriors of the Plains recorded significant heroic events from their adventures and pursuits in pictographs, on hide. Then, during the nineteenth century, these pictographs began to be produced on paper as well. About the same time that paper was coming into use, canvas and muslin became available, and the drawings that had formerly been composed on hide began to appear on these new materials. Typically, Indian men made use of discarded or captured ledgers, memorandum books, or rosters to render their exploit narratives; the representation of such events on these materials is referred to as ledger …

Index- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Index

Great Plains Quarterly Fall 2000

A-Z (8 pages)

Review Of Wild West Shows By Paul Reddin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The latest historian to chronicle the phenomenon, Paul Reddin postulates a wild west show continuum from the artist George Catlin to Buffalo Bill, and then from the Miller Brothers' 101 Wild West Show to the early silent cowboy films of Tom Mix. With clear, precise writing, impeccable research in several languages, and voluminous endnotes, Reddin has produced a Wild West tour de force that sets a standard for interpretive history of the public presentation of the frontier, Native Americans, and the Great Plains to enthusiastic American and European audiences.

Wild West Shows is the work of a mature, contemplative historian …

"Drainage, Drainage, Drainage" Creating Natural Disasters In Southeastern Nebraska, William Keith Guthrie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In May 1950 the Little Nemaha River valley in the southeastern quadrant of Nebraska suffered a record-breaking flood. For a short time at the town of Syracuse, the Little Nemaha River, which drained a watershed of 218 square miles, had an estimated discharge of 225,000 cubic feet per second. This was larger than any flood recorded since 1928 on the Missouri River at Omaha, which drained a watershed of 322,000 square miles! During this storm and flood twenty-three people lost their lives, fourteen in the Little Nemaha Valley. As night came on, floodwaters swept a commercial bus off a highway …

Review Of A National Crime: The Canadian Government And The Residential School System, 1879-1986 By John S. Milloy, Agnes Grant

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The recent proliferation of commentary on residential schools leaves one question unanswered: Did no one know what was happening? The assumption is that if someone had known, it would have been prevented.

Milloy's book answers this question, clearly and unequivocally. Federal bureaucrats knew what was happening. They knew that children were being mistreated; they knew that no real education was taking place, and they understood the impact this system was having on its survivors. The daily horrors the children experienced can justly be laid at the door of the churches, but the ultimate responsibility lies with the federal government which …

Review Of Landscapes Of The New West: Gender And Geography In Contemporary Women's Writing By Krista Comer, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Claiming the New Western History as its most enabling context, Comer's study traces the genealogy of recent female regionalist writing, locating its roots in the civil rights movement, feminism, and postmodernism. This is an obvious challenge to those who claim Western regionalism as the very antidote to postmodernism. Moreover, by including writers of color in her discussion, Comer questions the idea that Western regionalism is only a "white thing."

Through issues of gender, landscape, and geography, Comer focuses in each of her chapters on a different kind of landscape-urban, wild, erotic, national. The Great Plains do not seem to fit …

Review Of Displays Of Power: Memory And Amnesia In The American Museum By Steven C. Dubin, Willard L. Boyd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Displays of Power describes the movement of museums from mausoleums to centers of controversy during the period from 1969 to 1999. In his prologue and epilogue, Steven Dubin gives his general observations about the nature of this paradigm shift and the reasons for it, in essence attributing the transformation to the coming of the culture wars to museum exhibits. The younger culture warriors of the 1960s are now the older curators, educators, and exhibit designers in museums. Claiming expertness, they are the anonymous voice of power behind the museum oracle. Nowadays, however, oracles are questioned. In an increasingly democratic society, …

Review Of The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity In The Press, 1820-90 By John M. Coward, Barbara Cloud

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John M. Coward's study of newspapers and Native Americans could have been just another "how the press covered" description of newspaper content. Fortunately, Coward has produced an expert analysis of the complex interactions among reality, culture, and the newspapers that influenced public perceptions of Native Americans in the nineteenth century.

Using the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, Sitting Bull, and other case studies, Coward illustrates how Native Americans were disadvantaged by the intersection of Euro-American community attitudes with the development of journalistic practices. He shows how white settlers' love-hate relationship with Indians was both reinforced and exacerbated by …

Title And Contents- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 20/ Number 4 / Fall 2000

CONTENTS

THE PICTURE CHANGES: STYLISTIC VARIATION IN SITTING BULL'S BIOGRAPHIES Barbara Risch

CONTESTING TRADITION AND COMBATING INTOLERANCE: A HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT IN KANSAS Aaron K. Ketchell

"drainage, drainage, DRAINAGE": CREATING NATURAL DISASTERS IN SOUTHEASTERN NEBRASKA William Keith Guthrie

GREAT PLAINS PRAGMATIST: AARON DOUGLAS AND THE ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST Audrey Thompson

Book Reviews

John M. Coward The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press By BARBARA CLOUD

Paul Reddin Wild West Shows By ANDREW GULLIFORD

Douglas Waitley William Henry Jackson: Framing the Frontier By PETER BACON HALES

John Warfield …