Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Notes And News- Summer 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Call For Papers: "Rhetoric On The Great Plains"

Sacred Lands: Plains Indian Seminar

Greatplains.Org

Omaha Indian Music

Association For Canadian Studies Colloquium

Northern Great Plains History Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920

Review Of New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian And American Landscapes By Elizabeth Johns, Andrew Sayers, And Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, With Amy Ellis, Julie K. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An exhibition of nineteenth-century landscape art from the United States and Australia (the latter a British colony until federation in 1901) is such an excellent idea one wonders why it has not been done before. Such an ambitious and challenging project, however, has some inherent dangers in collapsing historical differences for the sake of presentation. Assessing cultural productions must take into account distinct histories in these two "settler countries," especially in the creation of their respective national identities-as Lyn Spillman has already demonstrated in her excellent Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (1997).

New …

Review Of Contemporary American Indian Literatures And The Oral Tradition By Susan Berry Brill De Ramirez, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brill de Ramirez's work addresses at least two crucial issues that scholars of Native American literatures must consider every time they read: what cultural contexts are informing the texts, and what critical approaches to these contexts and texts will not perpetuate academic or intellectual colonialism. In Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), Greg Sarris explains that in addition to a careful consideration of American Indian cultural and historical contexts, a reader must also consider the history of her or his own readings. Slug Woman, an important precursor to Brill de Ramirez's study, proposes that …

Review Of A Sense Of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism In Canadian And American Writing Edited By Christian Riegel And Herb Wyile, Heidi L. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In their introduction to A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, the editors assert that for most North Americans, identity is "a complex mix of a feeling of community, a shared cultural, ethnic and social background, and an attachment to place-a mix that is much more localized than the feeling of being Canadian or being American." Great Plains studies rely upon regionalism and the assumption that national, provincial, and state boundaries can be transcended through a shared geographical region. As the editors write, "current global trends are investing the term [regionalism] with new significance, necessitating …

Review Of Community Music In Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By George W. Lyon, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you have any Alberta connections, you will not be able to resist paging through this engaging, photo-full book looking for people and places you know. I found my grandfather on page 43, but still can't make out if my grandmothers are in the background of some of the other scenes.

Most of Community Music in Alberta is given over to photographs of a stunning variety of music groups from the 1880s to the present. Not only are there the fiddlers, dance bands, brass bands, pipers, CFCN and CKUA radio groups, cowboy singers (including Wilf Carter), powwow drums, little theater …

Review Of Chokecherry Places: Essays From The High Plains By Merrill Gilfillan, Douglas Unger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For fifteen years, poet Merrill Gilfillan has been driving "in long misshapen circles" through the High Plains of the American West. The result is Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains, a collection not so much of essays as of poetic meditations on prairie landscape and fauna recalling in its intentions passages of Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Donne.

What is also impressive about this book winner of the 1999 Western States Book Award for non-fiction-is its lack of pretense, its avoidance of highly politicized cause or preservationist polemic so common in recent prose explorations of a sense …

The Musical Landscape Of Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House, Philip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his essay "Sinclair Ross in Letters and Conversation," David Stouck recounts Ross's humble reactions to the array of criticism given to his first and most famous novel, As For Me and My House:

"You understand the [Bendeys] perhaps better than I do, or at least did when I was writing. For when I was writing I was participating and when you participate you often don't understand or see. More was coming I suppose than I knew." In this same vein he has often remarked that critical articles about the novel amaze him-discuss ions of Chopin and George Sand, …

This Week At The Opera House Popular Musical Entertainment At Great Plains Opera Houses, 1887-1917, D. Layne Ehlers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Americans in the years immediately preceding the twentieth century clung to a naivete reminiscent of the manifest destiny days. Novels, newspaper accounts, and old-fashioned, rousing melodramas on the stage all displayed a predilection for an American way which showed that moral good, coupled with patience, would triumph, providing it remained within carefully proscribed social and ethical limits. "Home Sweet Home," the most popular song of its time, celebrated the simple virtues of hearth and family.

Nowhere was this vision of life more apparent than in the Great Plains. By 1877 the days when Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff welcomed trail-weary …

Powerful Feelings Recollected In Tranquility Literary Criticism And Lakota Social Song Poetry, R. D. Theisz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist William K. Powers, in his Beyond the Vision: Essays on American Indian Culture, laments that the discipline of ethnomusicology-and music pedagogy-with its emphasis on the vocal and instrumental "art music" traditions of musically literate peoples has been lax in accepting anthropological theory. Thus, Powers points out that ethnomusicology, where it is concerned with the music of oral, indigenous cultures, adheres to outdated theories on "primitive" music and displays a telling absence of ethnographic abilities.¹ Reflecting Powers' judgment, it seems to me that the conceptual seams between anthropology, ethnomusicology, and musicology are rather formidable.

At …

"Wild Men" And Dissenting Voices: Narrative Disruption In Little House On The Prairie, Donna M. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long considered to be a work celebrating traditional pioneer values, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has in recent years come under increasing attack for its stereotypic racial representations and attitudes. In one notable instance, novelist Michael Dorris describes trying to read the novels to his daughters and stopping because of the unfavorable depictions of Native American characters and Ma's "unreconstructed" bigotry. Dorris and others present a compelling argument about the potential negative effects of such representations, yet to dismiss the work as though Wilder's vision of other races represents a …

Citizenship And Treaty Rights: The Indian Association Of Alberta And The Canadian Indian Act, 1946-1948, Laurie Meijer Drees

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the spring of 1946, J. Allison Glen announced a public inquiry into Canada's federal administration of Indian Affairs and the Indian Act. In Parliament on 13 May 1946 this minister of Mines and Resources responsible for Indian Affairs moved "That a joint committee of the senate and house of commons be appointed to examine and consider the Indian Act ... with authority to investigate and report upon Indian administration in general" including treaty rights, band membership, enfranchisement of Indians, Indian schools, and "any other matter or thing pertaining to the social and economic status of Indians and their advancement."! …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents:

Frederick C. Luebke Award 2000
California Indian Conference
Internships at the American Folklife Center
Intertribal Bison Cooperative Conference 2000

"Going To Indian Territory": Attitudes Toward Native Americans In Little House On The Prairie, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since its first printing in 1935, Little House on the Prairie has been a perennial favorite among countless readers. The Little House series itself ranks consistently as one of the most commercially popular of all times. However, Little House on the Prairie, the second book in the series, has become the center of numerous controversies. Yellow Medicine East School District, in Granite, Minnesota, which serves a portion of the Upper Sioux Community of that region, stopped class reading of the book, citing disgust with the text's portrayals of Native Americans. Such action follows a similar banning of the text …

Little Squatter On The Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Kansas Indians, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a person of her time and place. She fictionalized her memories to give what she honestly believed was the truest possible account-true in deeply human ways as well as in accurate details-of one family's settlement history on the Great Plains frontier. I have never really liked her work. While my sister read all the Little House books, I read ... Zane Grey. That I do not share Wilder's values and point of view is no argument against the books-I do not share Zane Grey's values and point of view, either. But Zane Grey is not held …

Review Of The Literary History Of Alberta: From Writing-On-Stone To World War Two, By George Melnyk., Pamela Banting

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Literary histories play a crucial role in the construction, maintenance, and enforcement of literary canons. In some academic quarters, literary histories have come to be thought of as the tanks deployed in the canon wars, forces acting to suppress awareness of the vitality of local, regional, and minority literatures, and even of the national literatures of postcolonial countries. The canon-as represented in literary histories, conservative anthologies, official prizes, traditionally designed university English courses, and other cultural apparatuses- is the bulwark resisted by younger writers, women writers, writers of color, gay, lesbian, aboriginal, and experimental writers. Literary histories themselves, however, can …

Review Of In A Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession And Survival, By Paula Mitchell Marks., Leroy V. Eid

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In A Barren Land covers a four-hundred-year history with the large brush strokes required of a text incorporating, chronologically and creditably, all the generally agreed upon major points of that story. What is in reality a large number of stories, each unfolding within a complex non-Western setting and often with byzantine logic, becomes for Marks-as the book's title succinctly indicates-a focus on what is now the usual media story of peoples dispossessed by an unstoppable force.

Review Of Congressional Populism And The Crisis Of The 1890s, By Gene Clanton., Robert W. Cherny

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Gene Clanton, emeritus professor of history at Washington State University, has spent much of his scholarly career studying Populism; this long-awaited study of congressional Populism contributes significantly to our understanding of that party.

Review Of Wakinyan: Lakota Religion In The Twentieth Century, By Stephen E. Feraca., Tink Tinker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This slim volume is essentially a caricature of an older genre of anthropological books about Indians and other colonial "others." The new "revised" edition adds precious little new material or insight to the inadequacies of the 1963 version. Feraca, a one-time US government employee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has an inconsiderable sense of the complexities of Oglala or Lakota culture. He describes some personal observations of Lakota religious traditions at the surface level, but has no clue regarding the deeper meaning or significance of what he attempts to describe.

Review Of Betraying The Omaha Nation, 1790 - 1916, By Judith A. Boughter., Mark J. Awakuni-Swetland

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The question of whose history is portrayed in any historical narrative remains open to debate. Judith Boughter notes in the preface to Betraying the Omaha Nation that "until now, no one has written a comprehensive history of the Omahas from their legendary origins to their near destitution by the early twentieth century." Her book is reportedly the first part of a trilogy, with subsequent volumes proposing to address Omaha history through World War II as well as contemporary legal battles to regain lost lands.

Review Of A Female Economy: Women’S Work In A Prairie Province, 1870 - 1970 , By Mary Kinnear., Nanci Langford

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A Female Economy analyses how women disposed of their labor during the century from 1870 to 1970 in the Canadian province of Manitoba. This ambitious project, the culmination of Mary Kinnear's interests and activities in the history of women's work, reflects the skills of a mature scholar who has lived with the material for decades.

Review Of Visions Of Freedom On The Great Plains: An Illustrated History Of African Americans In Nebraska, By Bertha W. Calloway And Alonzo M. Smith., Ernie Chambers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Historical or hysterical-that is the question. An 18 January 1999 Omaha World-Herald "Bookwords" column fingered Dr. Smith as "the principal writer" of Visions. In a 14 January 1999 review, The Reader of Omaha gushed: "an exciting new picture book ... filled with picture after crisp black-and-white picture ... a must for anyone even slightly interested in local history." Napoleon decried history as a fable agreed on. To deem this error-riddled book a "history" would be indeed a fable agreed on. This could have been a magnificent project-but what we have instead merits those saddest "words of tongue or pen …

Review Of Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900 – 1940, By Brenda J. Child, David W. Adams

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The appearance in recent years of several books on Indian boarding schools attests to historians' growing realization that the efforts of the federal government to solve the so-called Indian problem through education is one of the significant chapters in the history of Indian- white relations. Determined to strip Indian youth of all vestiges of Native outlook, while simultaneously inculcating the knowledge and attitudes of their white colonizers, policy-makers by the end of the nineteenth century had constructed a network of reservation and off-reservation boarding schools devoted to accomplishing the "civilization" process.

Review Of The Moccasin Speaks: Living As Captives Of The Dog Soldier Warriors, Red River War, 1874 - 1875, By Arlene Feldmann Jauken., Robert Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It was family pride that initially caused Arlene Jauken of southeast Nebraska to begin to research the life of her great-grandmother Sophie, one of four daughters of John German, an unfortunate pioneer who was murdered, along with three others in his family, on 11 September 1874, only a day's travel from the safety of Fort Wallace, Kansas. Almost immediately Jauken found that Sophie's story was inseparable from that of the other German girls whose lives were spared: seventeen-year- old Catherine, ransomed with twelve-year- old Sophie in March of 1875, and Julia and Addie, aged seven and five respectively, who were …

Review Of Flight Dreams: A Life In The Midwestern Landscape, By Lisa Knopp., Linda M. Hasselstrom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Lisa Knopp's story will be encouragingly familiar to those who struggle to find meaning in the muddle of family, education, mistakes, insights, and loves we encounter growing up. Flight Dreams is part of Singular Lives, the Iowa Series in North American Autobiography, whose editor asserts in a foreword that Knopp's Way parallels ancient Oriental definitions of the Tao and its three parallel paths. The book proceeds through the writer's childhood, through various work and religious experiences (including Transcendental Meditation and augury), and finally to her writing about nature and her interpretation of her past. Its three major sections show internal …

Review Of Fort Robinson And The American West, 1874 - 1899, By Thomas R. Buecker., Frank N. Schubert

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Army established Fort Robinson near the source of the White River on the Pine Ridge in northwestern Nebraska in 1874. The post saw active service in the best known war between the United States and Plains Natives, the Sioux War of 1876, and was the site of the death of Crazy Horse. It also witnessed the tragic Cheyenne outbreak of January 1878, the bloodiest episode in the post's history. This book, the first of a projected two-volume study, covers these events and the next two decades, during which the United States emerged as an imperial power.

Review Of Ghost Towns Of The Montana Prairie, By Don Baker., James R. Shortridge

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Unfulfilled aspirations, a condition common to all human beings, are nowhere more tangible than in an abandoned town. They are the siren call of such places and why guides to ghost towns have become popular items on bookstore shelves, forming a highly varied genre both in quality and intended audience. Don Baker positions his entry on the far side of informality, which is fine, and of carelessness, which is not. The author, a Billings resident bringing enthusiasm to his subject, has produced a visually pleasing, large-format book contammg over eighty photographs. After short sketches of early railroads, the homesteading process, …

Review Of Dispersed City Of The Plains, By Harris Stone, With Joan Stone And J. William Carswell., W. Cecil Steward

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The book succeeds on several intellectual levels: it presents valuable historical references for the development of towns and cities on the Great Plains; it exposes the materiality and construction, and painful choices, in the restoration and rehabilitation of historic structures; and it lends a frame of values and iconographic references to the overlooked and little appreciated dispersed places and architecture of the middle territory of the United States.

Review Of Forging The Prairie West, By John Herd Thompson., Adele Perry

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Herd Thompson's Forging the Prairie West is a wise, clever, and decisive book, though not an especially consistent one. But that hardly matters: Thompson's lively prose, trenchant observations, and firm portrayal of the Prairie West's history make for an analysis both accessible and engaging.

Review Of Artistry In Native American Myths, By Karl Kroeber., Kathleen Danker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this volume, Karl Kroeber, Mellon Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, makes an important contribution to the understanding of the oral mythology of Native North America by using thirty-six stories to illustrate and explore the form, function, and artistic achievement of such narratives.

Review Of The Sacred Pipe: An Archetypal Theology, By Paul B. Steinmetz., Jordan Paper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Father Steinmetz spent twenty years as a priest among the Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota collaborating with major Lakota Traditionalist-Catholic elders. Among the first to integrate indigenous rituals into Catholic practices following Vatican II, Steinmetz undertook a vision fast, through which he received an understanding that Christ was present in both the consecrated host and the Sacred Pipe. This volume follows several decades of reflection on this experience.