Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Message From The Director- Fall 2000, James Stubbendieck

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR

The Center for Great Plains Studies recently completed moving into its new building located between the south edge of the University of Nebraska campus and downtown Lincoln. For the first time in many years, all of the faculty, staff, and programs of the Center are in the same physical structure. The galleries of our Great Plains Art Collection are expanded in size and in a much more accessible location. Center office and work space are more than tripled providing many opportunities for new programs. Plains Song Review, an interdisciplinary undergraduate literary journal, will be published …

Contesting Tradition And Combating Intolerance A History Of Free Thought In Kansas, Aaron K. Ketchell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Diversity is the hallmark of freethought in Kansas, for freethinkers were never a homogeneous body. The movement was not only religious, or for that matter, anti-religious, although the majority of social and political issues that it addressed had religious grounding. No one specific organized group dominated historical Kansas freethinking. Instead, individuals in the form of editors of various newspapers, journals, and book series became the landmarks by which the course of the movement's history may be most easily traced. Although the attitudes of freethinkers toward religion are the primary concern of this essay, it must be remembered that freethinkers had …

Review Of Winnipeg: A Prairie Portrait By Martin Cash, Geoffrey C. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The purpose of this attractively produced book, a 125th anniversary project of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, is to celebrate the city at the threshold of the new millennium. Its author, a business writer for a local newspaper, is supported by a collaborative team that includes two writer-reporters and two photographers. The text, snappy and essentially journalistic in character, is organized into two main parts. The first ten chapters offer brief overviews of Winnipeg's history and contemporary aspects of the city's business activities, financial services, communications, arts, educational resources, healthcare facilities, recreational opportunities, and wider social fabric. The second part …

Review Of Crazy Horse By Larry Mcmurtry, Joseph C. Porter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our finest living novelist of the American West, Larry McMurtry, portrays one of the West's most notable historic figures in Crazy Horse. Two commemorations frame this readable survey biography: one, the Korczak Ziolkowski mountain sculpture of Crazy Horse; the other, a medallion struck by the government rewarding Little Big Man's apparent complicity in killing him. Who was this "American Sphinx, the loner who inspired the largest sculpture on Planet Earth?" McMurtry further asks what Crazy Horse meant "to his people in his lifetime, and also what he has come to mean to generations of Sioux in our own century …

Review Of William Henry Jackson: Framing The Frontier By Douglas Waitley, Peter Bacon Hales

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Certain markers have traditionally distinguished the professional from the amateur historian, prominent among them a quality of skepticism about the nature of sources and the facts they might reveal. In the National Archives reading rooms, one will still see women and men opening boxes with an air of anticipation restrained by severity of manner; they may remove the yellowed diary-book from the archival case with shaking hands, but they will almost immediately subject its paper, its vellum cover, and even the handwriting within, to a certain suspicious inspection before turning to the content. At the largest and most critical level …

Great Plains Pragmatist: Aaron Douglas And The Art Of Social Protest, Audrey Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

No abstract provided.

Notes And News- Fall 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Politics And Values On The Plains

Missouri Valley History Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

Bibliography On North American Indians, For K-12

Call For Papers: "Rhetoric On The Great Plains"

Review Of No More Free Markets Or Free Beer: The Progressive Era In Nebraska, 1900-1924 By Burton W. Folsom Jr., Harl A. Dalstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1920 German Catholic voters in Saint Helena, Cedar County, cast seventy percent of their ballots for Marie Weekes, the Nonpartisan League candidate for Congress and a supporter of prohibition. What had driven beer-loving, anti-woman suffrage German-Americans to vote for the female candidate of an agrarian radical organization? Such major changes in Nebraska's political life are the subject of this book.

As its title suggests, Burton Folsom emphasizes the triumph of governmental socio-economic intervention over the principles of laissez faire. In a well-balanced, highly readable narrative, he analyzes the values of]. Sterling Morton, William Jennings Bryan, and George W. Norris-the …

Review Of The Politics Of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee And The Struggle For Indian Sovereignty By Mario Gonzalez And Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Rolland Dewing

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an insider's account of the attempt of the Oglala and Minneconjou tribes to establish the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre as a national American monument. The preface states, "This book is neither historiography, biography nor autobiography. It is what might be called a mixed genre, informal anecdotal writing of social and political history." The authors suggest this format is an attempt to present history in a more conversational and anecdotal way, allowing the story to be told against a background of federal laws and historical events that will give the reader a better understanding of Sioux …

Review Of Celluloid Indians: Native Americans And Film By Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Michael Hilger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

So far as I know, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick is the first person of American Indian heritage to write a book about the portrayal of Indians in film. Her special commitment to the American Indian community manifests itself in her careful analysis of American Indian historical issues in the chapters on film history and in her attention to parallel images in literature, especially literature by Native Americans. Complementing her unique perspective is a strong knowledge of contemporary film theory and criticism, which enables her to read selected films in ways that diverge from readings found in previous books on this topic.

Beginning …

Review Of The Indian Southwest: 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis And Reinvention By Gary Clayton Anderson, David La Vere

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is the most lucid and detailed examination of the political economy of the Southern Plains. At the center of that economy roamed the buffalo; but once Europeans arrived, horses, cattle, firearms, captives, and manufactured goods helped power it. Bonds of kinship and reciprocity drew all peoples in and around the Southern Plains into it, including Pueblos and Spaniards in New Mexico; Spaniards and Mexicans in Texas; Jumanos, Apaches, Wichitas, and Comanches on the Plains; and Caddos and the French in Louisiana. Still, the Plains could be a hard environment, with long droughts and epidemics of European diseases, both of …

Review Of Roadside History Of Montana By Don Spritzer, Michael Malone

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historians tend not to take "roadside histories" very seriously, even while the literate public appreciates them for their ready vantages on the accessible past. This volume, however, merits the attention of historians as well as "buffs" for its multifaceted insights based upon a broad array of state and local histories. It is, in short, a serious work.

Traversing the Highline region of the far north at the start, Don Spritzer moves into the mountain valleys of the west, then the more open valleys and plateaus of the southwestern and central areas, and concludes with a run eastward down the broad …

Review Of Visions Of Paradise: Glimpses Of Our Landscape's Legacy By John Warfield Simpson, Robert Thacker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this book's first pages, Simpson dissects its title and says his use of "glimpses" there "indicates that this is not the complete story of the landscape. Instead, it is a set of snapshots of formative forces over the past two hundred years that ... most shaped our contemporary setting." Readily conceding that "other academics provide the original scholarship" he offers here, Simpson holds nonetheless that his "snapshots synthesize that scholarship across many disciplinary boundaries to clarify and find general meaning in the landscape story .... " Simpson is as good as his word. Visions of Paradise is a lucid …

Great Plains Pragmatist Aaron Douglas And The Art Of Social Protest, Audrey Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Like most of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, its leading visual artist, Aaron Douglas, was not himself a product of Harlem.¹ Although Winold Reiss and Alain Locke were to guide Douglas in the development of his artistic vision once he arrived in Harlem, his early years in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska gave rise to both the communal values and the artistic sense of isolation that were to lead him to Harlem. It was in the black church and in Topeka's "cohesive and politically active" African-American community that Douglas first experienced black solidarity and embraced "the values of education …

Review Of The Cherokees And Their Chiefs: In The Wake Of Empire By Stanley W. Hoig, Daniel Heath Justice

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A popular history of the Cherokees, Hoig's book recounts, through vivid prose and detailed research from Euro-American records and scholarly sources, the diverse and troubled relationships between the Cherokee people and varied agents of colonialist expansion. Those who are largely unfamiliar with the voluminous number of academic texts about the history of British/US/Cherokee interaction will find the volume quite compelling. Those looking for more contemporary research, however, or for a strong Cherokee presence among the sources chosen will find The Cherokees and Their Chiefs something of a disappointment.

Hoig's greatest strength is as a dynamic storyteller. Writing with clarity and …

Review Of Reservation X: The Power Of Place In Aboriginal Contemporary Art Edited By Gerald Mcmaster, Kathleen E. Ash-Milby

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The reservation (or "reserve" in Canada) is a place with multi-layered meanings to contemporary Native People. As editor Gerald McMaster states, "the reserve has been both sanctuary and prison." While symbolizing community, home, family and tradition, by its very nature (government imposed confinement) it simultaneously represents repression, poverty, and the social ills that follow. For a reader interested in the Great Plains, or any other region, Reservation X: The Power of Place in Aboriginal Contemporary Art deftly illuminates these complex relationships through the work of seven artists and four authors.

The volume's first half is devoted to thought-provoking essays by …

Title And Contents- Summer 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 20/ Number 3 / Summer 2000

CONTENTS

A WEEK OF MUSIC AND DANCE: AN INTRODUCTION Randall Snyder

THIS WEEK AT THE OPERA HOUSE: POPULAR MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENT AT GREAT PLAINS OPERA HOUSES, 1887-1917 D. Layne Ehlers

POWERFUL FEELINGS RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILITY: LITERARY CRITICISM AND LAKOTA SOCIAL SONG POETRY R. D. Theisz

THE MUSICAL LANDSCAPE OF SINCLAIR ROSS'S AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE Philip R. Coleman-Hull

THE OMAHA GOSPEL COMPLEX IN HISTORICAL: PERSPECTIVE Tom Jack

BOOK REVIEWS

George W. Lyon Community Music in Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By FRANCES W. KAYE

Luke E. Lassiter The Power …

Review Of Buckskin And Buffalo: The Artistry Of The Plains Indians By Colin F. Taylor, Paul M. Raczka

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Great Plains has always been a unique ecosystem throughout whose history the various cycles of human habitation have had to adapt. In Buckskin and Buffalo Colin Taylor has provided us with a glimpse of how one period of human habitation, the zenith of Plains Indian culture from the early 1800s to reservation days, incorporated that ecosystem into its art forms.

It was a time when the rich artistic cultures of the Plains people were infused with new artistic materials and tools. The marriage of these new materials with already existing nature- orientated cultures produced an explosion of creativity and …

Review Of Traces On The Landscape By Kent Midgett, Harry W. Fritz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kent Midgett arrived with his family in Hibbard, on the Wind-swept Plains of eastern Montana, late in 1914. His father, a physician, packed up and moved to Bridger in 1924. Here is one man's account of growing up during the homestead boom and bust On the Northern Plains in the early twentieth century. All of the standard elements of the agricultural tragedy are here-the fulsome promotional campaigns; the bumper crops and commodity prices of wartime; drought and other disasters after 1917; the fading of hope. Today, the town of Sumatra (where the family of six moved in 1917) has disappeared; …

Review Of The Invasion Of Indian Country In The Twentieth Century: American Capitalism And Tribal Natural Resources By Donald L. Fixico

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his preface, Donald Fixico asserts that Native American "tribes had a special relationship with the earth." Through six case studies of individuals or groups (Part One), he discusses how his "ancestors and other Indian people ... suffered at the hands of American capitalists in this age of greed, the twentieth century." Five essays on recent efforts to defend resources (Part Two) cover institutional strategies among tribal governments. Fixico concludes that "until capitalistic attitudes are corrected and the preservation of the earth's diminishing resources become a priority, we will continue to destroy ourselves." Most chapters examine experiences of Plains Indian …

Review Of The Power Of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography By Luke E. Lassiter, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his informative and innovative exploration of Kiowa music, Luke Lassiter focuses on intersubjective, phenomenological, and experiential aspects of Kiowa song. Employing collaborative ethnography, a method that "fully embraces dialogue in both ethnographic practice and ethnographic writing," he discloses the ways in which his own social interactions with Kiowa consultants have informed his ethnography.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Experience, Dialogue, and Ethnography," recounts Lassiter's early impressions of Plains Indians and the gradual transformation of his understanding. The second, "Powwows, the Gourd Dance, and Kiowa Song," offers his interpretation of the social worlds in which Kiowa …

Review Of The Lakota Ritual Of The Sweat Lodge: History And Contemporary Practice By Raymond A. Bucko, Martin Brokenleg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Native Americans, including the Lakota of the Great Plains, are mistrustful of anthropologists. For four centuries, white explorers, settlers, and scholars have defined Native American life, culture, and values. Because these cultural records are kept in writing, people from western cultures regard them as authoritative. The result is the current tendency for readers to trust the records of a white investigator more than the spoken word of a Lakota. The mistrust Lakotas have of anthropologists is the result not only of inaccurate accounts but also the assumption that the recording authority has a "true" understanding that is more accurate than …

Review Of Spirit Capture: Photographs From The National Museum Of The American Indian Edited By Tim Johnson, Mick Gidley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features.

First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection's editor has avoided reproducing too …

Review Of Charles M. Russell, Legacy: Printed And Published Works Of Monwna's Cowboy Artist Text By Larry Len Peterson, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Larry L. Peterson has for many years collected art by Charles M. Russell (1865-1926) as well as printed and published works of the "cowboy artist." A native of Montana where the artist lived most of his life, Peterson is highly knowledgeable about Russell's work and has published numerous articles on the subject in Russell's West, a periodical of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. As Peterson traces examples of the printed appearances of Russell's work in varied forms, he underscores how the artist's vision of the American West was not limited in its appeal to an …

A Week Of Music And Dance An Introduction, Randall Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the second week of April 1999, the Center for Great Plains Studies hosted The Great Plains Music & Dance Festival and Symposium. This undertaking, three years in the planning, co-chaired by Ron Bowlin and myself with suggestions of various committees of local advocates, resulted in a multidisciplinary event which showcased the diversity of our music and dance heritage in the Great Plains. Performances of Plains music and dance ranging from Northern and Southern Native Drums to Jazz, Folk, Gospel and Classical were featured at a variety of venues in Lincoln. This phase of the symposium culminated in a premier …

Review Of State Of Mind: Texas Literature And Culture By T Om Pilkington, Jose E. Limon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Those of us who teach college courses in Texas literature have need of a scholarly study-a critical survey-that would closely attend to its subject in a learned, critical, and theorize well-written manner; deal with this literature in an ample historical and cultural context; and the connection between literature and context in a manner that would at least gesture in the direction of recent developments in literary critical theory. Pilkington's book is superb in the first instance, disappoints in the second, and is almost wholly unresponsive in the third.

This is a clearly written, intelligent, and relatively comprehensive account of the …

Review Of Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros: A Celebration Of Nebraska's Mexican Heritage/Una Celebración De La Herencia Mexicana De Nebraska By Ralph F. Grajeda, Et Al, Juan R. García

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros is part of a grant funded project designed to collect and preserve the cultural heritage of Mexican Americans in Nebraska. The information presented is largely drawn from oral histories and interviews of residents living in Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha, and Scottsbluff.

The published volume consists of five parts. "Mexicans in Nebraska," by Ralph Grajeda, provides a general survey of Mexican immigration into the state. Much of the information covers the period before Wodd War II and focuses on the first two waves of immigration of Mexicans into the US and Nebraska. Although those familiar with the history …

Review Of Jazz Of The Southwest: An Oral History Of Western Swing By Jean A. Boyd, Cary Ginell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her preface to Jazz of the Southwest, Jean Boyd explains that she was only introduced to western swing in 1990. A musicologist at Baylor University's School of Music, Boyd is well-schooled in music theory, as evidenced by her frequent lapses into musicological jargon. But she is painfully unschooled not only in western swing's history, but the record industry in general during the period in which the genre thrived. Boyd's assumption that western swing is an offshoot of jazz is simplistic, yet she spends the entire book trying to prove this point rather than coming to a conclusion based …

Review Of Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art In The Midwest Edited By Barbara Brackman And Cathy Dwigans, Karen Janovy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Always eager to plunge into books with enticing epigraphs (such as Archibald MacLeish's "A world ends when its metaphor has died"), I was not disappointed with Brackman and Dwigans's Backyard Visionaries. Beautifully illustrated, it not only documents, with excellent notes, a kind of "visionary" art, much of which exists on site rather than in museums, but also highlights model preservation efforts by the Kansas Grassroots Art Association (KGAA) of historically significant outsider art. Elizabeth Broun's illuminating introduction states that this art, first coined "outsider" art in 1972, has found an "exceptional environment throughout the Midwest" since the …

The Omaha Gospel Complex In Historical Perspective, Tom Jack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this article, I document the introduction and development of gospel music within the African-American Christian community of Omaha, Nebraska. The 116 predominantly black congregations in Omaha represent twenty-five percent of the churches in a city where African-Americans comprise thirteen percent of the overall population.¹ Within these institutions the gospel music genre has been and continues to be a dynamic reflection of African-American spiritual values and aesthetic sensibilities. By focusing the research on perceptions and descriptions provided by the music's practitioners, an examination of this genre at the local level will shed insight into the development and dissemination of …