International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People Of The Great Swampy Land By Victor P. Lytwyn, Peter Geller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Muskekowuck Athinuwick, Victor Lytwyn provides a detailed study of the indigenous people of the Hudson Bay lowlands. At its core is the author's extensive historical research in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg; the academic context is the scholarly debate over the effects of the fur trade on indigenous peoples. As a historical geographer, Lytwyn brings an important spatial understanding to the Cree past, which is conveyed through the accompanying maps.

The first half of the book is the more methodologically diverse, as it examines pre-contact history, international relations (particularly the alliances with neighboring Cree and northern …

Notes And News- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Call For Papers

20th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Visiting Scholars Program

Willa Cather Literary A Ward 2004

Map Correction

Review Of America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education And The Ownership Of English, 1860- 1900 By Ruth Spack, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ruth Spack's thoroughly researched study of English education in Indian boarding schools goes beyond historical investigation. Spack shows how the methodology of teaching English imposed American ideologies in Native students. Then she closely examines the primary writings of Indian students and teachers who had learned English in the boarding school system. The result is a fine linguistic and cultural analysis of the complicated transitions from Native languages to the second language of the book's title, English.

Much has been written about the assimilative mission of boarding schools. Their purpose, as stated by Richard H. Pratt, was to "Kill the Indian; …

Review Of The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By R. Douglas Hurt, Victoria Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frontiers have dominated American historiography ever since Frederick Jackson Turner placed the term into the academic lexicon in the early twentieth century. Historians such as Bolton and Webb built entire careers around the ideology of the American western frontier, and the concept has grown exponentially since the mid-twentieth century.

Today's scholar can choose from a host of publications focused on geographical frontiers. The American South, the Appalachians, Spanish Borderlands, colonial America, Canada, even Alaska and Hawaii, have all been dissected under the frontier scalpel. But surprisingly few scholars have focused on Native American frontiers.

Dale Van Every broke ground in …

Review Of "They Treated Us Just Like Indians": The Worlds Of Bennett County, South Dakota By Paula L. Wagoner, Larry J. Zimmerman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The land is at the core and "in charge" of the overlapping cultures of the Lakota and whites of Bennett County, South Dakota. The challenging Plains environment is a major element of personal and group identity, a force that "measures one's worth." In her ethnology derived from fieldwork in the county between 1993-1996 and in 2001, Paula Wagoner had expected to find sharp social contrasts between groups. As she discovered, residents had more in common than they might wish to admit.

Fear of loss of the land and the identity rooted to it are behind most tensions and disputes between …

Ancient Way In A New Land: Benedictine Education In The Great Plains, Marielle Frigge O.S.B.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the first half of the sixth century, an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, provided a framework for Christian monastic life. In the last half of the nineteenth century, his descendants arrived in the Great Plains, part of the westward movement of Christian missionaries in North America. What could this ancient way of life offer to a new land of Native tribes and immigrant farmers, traders, and soldiers? And what might this new land contribute to the shaping of a uniquely American form of monastic life?

These Benedictine men and women brought with them centuries of experience as learners and …

Religion, Idealism, And African American Autobiography In The Northern Plains: Era Bell Thompson’S American Daughter, Kevin L. Cole, Leah Weins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her introduction to American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, Margo Culley writes, “It would be hard to point to a field of contemporary literary studies more vibrant than autobiography studies. Where else does one find a wealth of primary material still mostly unread and unranked?” “Unread and unranked” aptly describes Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter, an autobiographical account of an African American woman who comes of age on the plains of North Dakota in the early twentieth century. It is one of those almost forgotten autobiographies that deserves to be read, ranked, and reconsidered, especially in the …

Review Of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir By Bob Kerrey, Marilyn B. Young

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Kerrey's memoir begins with a promise to his dying father to find out what happened to the father's brother, lost in the Philippines during WWII. This Kerrey did, but instead of writing his uncle's story, he wrote his own, of growing up in the 1950s in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of seven children in a solid, church-going, middle-class family. "We biked everywhere," Kerrey writes. "The edge of the universe lay at the ends of the dirt roads leading to those places where the wild and wooly frontier began." The fearful things in this safe place were either abstract (Soviet and …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And The American Frontier: Five Perspectives Edited By Dwight M. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most interesting literary figures of the twentieth century, Laura Ingalls Wilder, through her books about the American heartland, examines in many ways the heart of America. She questions the Euroamerican pioneer experience, the racial tensions of the contested West, and assumptions about gender roles. Even her relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, asks readers to reconsider the privileging of authorial autonomy; and, with respect to genre aesthetics, Wilder's mimesis of autobiography blurs the line between fact and fiction. Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives, a collection of essays that originated at the …

Review Of Breaking Clean By Judy Blunt, Linda Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience." In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt's memoir of her life as a Montana rancher's daughter, and eventually as a Montana rancher's wife, she reminds us that storytelling mines the minute and the particular in order to unearth larger truths. In this memoir, those truths are about the cramped inarticulateness of women's lives and the paucity of real, vibrant choices, as well as the ranching community's support for its members during the inevitable crises that occur on the windswept Montana Plains.

Now …

Fairy Castle Or Steamer Trunk? Creating Place In O. E. Rølvaag’S Giants In The Earth, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What happens when humans move beyond the boundaries of civilization? Does the very act transform them? How do they define themselves in apparently empty space? Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of Americans headed west to the frontier, the borderland between civilization and wilderness. Most went willingly, confident or desperately hopeful that they would have the freedom to create a place of their own and, in the process, recreate themselves. Before they set out for the frontier, they imagined it a garden, based on the myths of plenty and entitlement that were described in boosters’ letters, newspaper accounts, railroad brochures, and …

Review Of The Snow Geese: A Story Of Home By William Hennes, Bruce D.J. Batt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

William Hennes is an Englishman who was struck by a serious illness in his twenty-fifth year. Following multiple surgeries, he required several months of convalescence, most of it occurring at his parents' home, from his earliest memories the stable touch point to his life. The remainder of this true story is built around themes of home, nostalgia for familiar surroundings, homesickness, and the quest that many organisms have to go home at critical junctures of their lives. The subtitle is more descriptive of the fascinating narrative that follows than is The Snow Geese.

During his extended recovery period Hennes …

Review Of Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels Of Louis Owens By Chris Lalonde, Margaret Dwyer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the last paragraph of his last chapter, "Endgames," Chris LaLonde articulates an idea implied throughout his text: the fiction of Louis Owens is "trickster activism." This was indeed Owens's personal approach to changing how the world at large views American Indians, and how he felt the world at large (including American Indians) do (or should) view the environment in which they live. LaLonde earns high marks for this and many other lucid observations about the fiction of American Indian author and scholar Louis Owens (1948-2002), in the first book-length examination of Owens's five completed novels. "Language has the power …

Review Of When Montana And I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood By Margaret Bell, Randi Tanglen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I might not have gone to school, but I had to solve more problems than most children," asserts Margaret Bell in When Montana and I Were Young: A Frontier Childhood. As the oldest child in a family of four girls with no mother and a shiftless stepfather, Bell relates that she was often responsible for tasks not usually relegated to women-and especially not to children. In her childhood memoir, she describes pulling a yearling calf out of an iced-over spring by herself, developing an intricate system for managing ranch chores while her stepfather was away, and spending her days …

Review Of Growing Up With The Town: Family And Community On The Great Plains By Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder, David A. Wolff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dorothy Schwieder knows community history. As a historian at Iowa State University, she investigated a number of Iowa locations, especially that state's coal camps. In Growing Up with the Town, Schwieder takes a much more personal look at the community she grew up in, Presho, South Dakota. Her father arrived in Presho in 1909, just four years after the Milwaukee Railroad established the town, and Schwieder tells Presho's story through the activities of her family. She has two motives: first, "to preserve at least a part of a small town's experience in its first fifty years," and second, "to …

Review Of Montana Legacy: Essays On History, People, And Place Edited By Harry W. Fritz, Mary Murphy, And Robert R. Swartout Jr., Don Spritzer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Montana Legacy is a sequel to the well-received 1992 anthology, The Montana Heritage. Like its predecessor, this new collection offers sixteen republished essays arranged in roughly chronological order. And much like the articles in Montana Heritage, these new pieces either explore a little-studied aspect of Montana's past or offer a revised slant on a more familiar topic.

The two best revisionist essays are Colin G. Calloway's "Army Allies or Tribal Survival?" and David Emmons's "The Orange and Green in Montana." Calloway's reinterpretation of the 1876 military campaign leading to the Battle of the Little Big Horn examines the …

Great Plains Research - Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 2003

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Failure Of National Rural Policy: Institutions And Interests By William P. Browne, Donna Barnes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

William Browne argues that there is a distinct bias in US policy, one that privileges farmers and results in the neglect of nonagricultural rural problems. He locates the source of this pro-farm bias in the influential political power block created when farm interests mobilized and successfully pushed for the creation of the Department of Agriculture and other institutions that collectively form the Agricultural Establishment. The farm paradigm for rural development came to dominate policy talk so completely that competing rural policy paradigms were quickly dismissed. Declining rural communities and the growth of rural poverty were dealt with indirectly and ineffectively …

Differential Population And Income Migration In The Great Plains, 1995- 1998, Alexander Vias, Charles Collins

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The depopulation of the Great Plains continues to draw the attention of rural scholars. However, a number of aspects of migration in the region remain poorly understood. For example, what differences exist among migrants in terms of their economic characteristics? Recent research shows that there is tremendous variability in the amount of income each migrant brings to or takes from a region. Using county-level Internal Revenue Service data for migration flows between 1995 and 1998, we explore the spatial patterns of income and population migration, while contrasting the income flows of in-migrants versus out-migrants. The results show that income flows …

Migration And Counter-Urbanization In The Edwards Plateau Of Texas, 1985-1990, Jason Holcomb

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Unlike most of the Great Plains, Texas's Edwards Plateau lies near large, rapidly growing metropolitan centers. County-to-county migration data for the period 1985-1990 were used to examine migration patterns in Edwards Plateau counties. Weighted standard distance and stream efficiency values were used to analyze county immigration fields of 28 nonmetropolitan counties. A key finding was that net in-migration to counties closest to metropolitan areas was not mere "urban spillover." There were also indications that counterurban migration extended beyond metropolitan-adjacent counties to more sparsely populated destinations. Counterurbanization was occurring from central counties of the nation's largest metropolitan areas and some Texas …

Invasion Dynamics And Biological Control Prospects For Sericea Lespedeza In Kansas, Thomas Eddy, Jeff Davidson, Brian Obermeyer

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Sericea lespedeza [Lespedeza cuneata (Dum.-Cours.) G. Don], an exotic, drought-hardy perennial legume was first introduced into the United States from Japan. It was planted from the 1930s through the 1950s as a forage crop, for healing erosion scars on farmlands, establishing cover on mine spoils, and as cover for wildlife. The species range was unintentionally increased in the 1980s when seeds harvested from infested rangelands were planted on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres. Sericea lespedeza has spread to extensive areas of native prairie and other lands not under cultivation in the more humid regions of the Great Plains in …

Habitat Use And Migration Patterns Of Sandhill Cranes Along The Platte River, 1998 – 2001, Craig Davis

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

During spring migration, sandhill cranes (Crus Canadensis) rely on the central Platte River valley in Nebraska as a staging area to replenish depleted energy and nutrient reserves. From mid-February to mid-April 1998-2001, we conducted ground and aerial surveys of sandhill cranes in the central Platte River valley. Peak numbers of sandhill cranes (121,000-285,000 cranes) detected during ground surveys occurred in mid-March (1998, 2001) or early March (1999, 2000). From 42% to 55% of the cranes occurred in cornfields, 26%-38% in lowland grassland, 7%-13% in alfalfa, and 2%-12% in other habitats (soybean, winter wheat, shrub-grassland, upland grassland). In general, …

The Impact Of Immigration On A Local Economy: The Case Of Dawson County, Nebraska, Orn Bodvarrson, Hendrik Van Den Berg

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The Hispanic population of Lexington, seat of Nebraska's Dawson County, increased nearly tenfold between 1990 and 2000, from just over 400 to about 4,000, and the city's population grew from 6,600 to over 10,000. Economic trends in the 1990s contrast sharply with the previous decade, when the county's population and overall employment declined rapidly. This episode of immigration provides a unique opportunity to analyze the economic impact of immigration on a local economy. Traditional models of immigration, which focus almost entirely on the effects of immigration on labor supply, predict that immigration depresses wages and raises unemployment rates. However, census …

Title And Contents- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Great Plains Quarterly

Volume 23/ Number 4/ Fall 2003

Contents

RELIGION, IDEALISM, AND AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE NORTHERN PLAINS: ERA BELL THOMPSON'S AMERICAN DAUGHTER Kevin L. Cole and Leah Weins

ANCIENT WAY IN A NEW LAND:BENEDICTINE EDUCATION IN THE GREAT PLAINS Marielle Frigge

FAIRY CASTLE OR STEAMER TRUNK?:

CREATING PLACE IN O. E. R0LVAAG'S GIANTS IN THE EARTH Diane Quantic

Book Reviews

Victor P. Lytwyn Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People of the Great Swampy Land By PETER GELLER

R. Douglas Hurt The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By VICTORIA SMITH

Ruth Spack America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of …

Review Of Red Matters : Native American Studies By Arnold Krupat, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A reviewer of Red Matters might reasonably expect a work with the post-colon title Native American Studies to foreground Native intellectual voices or the voices of Native and nonnative scholars who work in the field and publish in the field's journals and to privilege indigenous critical perspectives. The reviewer might have some apprehension, however, that Krupat would say he or she was provincial or a "back to the blanket" scholar. The title, nevertheless, is part of a broad deception, for though red matters in Red Matters, non-indigenous critical perspectives and Western and non-Native intellectual, cultural, and historical traditions matter …

Review Of Geometry In Architecture: Texas Buildings Yesterday And Today By Clovis Heimsath, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Geometry in Architecture is really two books in one. The subtitle, Texas Buildings Yesterday and Today, provides the context for the theme of a book that is fundamentally a pictorial essay covering selected architectural elements of early Texas buildings. The original book, written in 1968 and titled Pioneer Texas Buildings: A Geometry Lesson, was an essay in two parts. The written section provided Heimsath's personal observations on the state of architecture as he perceived it in 1968. As a critique of architectural design, his views, though caustic, had some degree of validity. His major criticism was his concern …

Review Of Chasing The Glitter: Black Hills Milling, 1874- 1959 By Richmond L. Clow, Chris H. Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the 1800s, the American Gold Rush shifted from California and Nevada to Colorado, and then to South Dakota. The search for gold, and the wealth and profits it brought, helped develop the American West. Richard Clow's Chasing the Glitter: Blacks Hills Milling, 1874-1959 tells the story of Black Hills gold mining in South Dakota. Drawn from successful mining ventures in California, Nevada, and Colorado, gold miners and investors hoped to strike it rich again in the Black Hills. But only by milling and extracting the gold trapped in tons of hard-rock ore could these companies and their investors make …

Guidelines For Finding Nests Of Passerine Birds In Tallgrass Prairie, Maiken Winter, Shawn E. Hawks, Jill A. Shaffer, Douglas H. Johnson

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

The productivity of birds is one of the most critical components of their natural history affected by habitat quality. Birds might occur at high densities in a given habitat patch but have low nesting success. Such "population sinks" would not be detected if observers relied solely on estimates of bird density. Therefore, it is essential to monitor nests and determine their outcomes. Although interest in grassland-nesting passerines has increased greatly during the last decade, we still know little about factors affecting their nesting success. To stimulate more research in this area, we summarize several methods for nest-searching and provide suggestions …

Review Of The Professor's House By Willa Cather, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although less familiar to most readers than O Pioneers!, My Antonia, or Death Comes the Archbishop, The Professor's House (1925) is arguably Willa Cather's most important novel of the 1920s. Thematically, the book is exceptionally far ranging. As Cather's closest approach to a novel of the Jazz Age, The Professor's House offers a portrait of conspicuous consumption occasionally reminiscent of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. As a portrait of post-World-War-I disillusionment, the novel bears comparison with Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. And then there is the narrative's timely concern with the health of American higher education, especially the Liberal …

Review Of Willa Cather Remembered Edited By Sharon Hoover, Mark Madigan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This welcome addition to Willa Cather scholarship is composed of forty-five reminiscences of the author by friends and professional associates documenting key stages of her personal life and literary career. While there is little here that has not been published before, Cather specialists will nonetheless want to add Willa Cather Remembered to their libraries. What makes the volume so appealing is that it collects important biographical material previously available only in miscellaneous sources. The legal restriction on publishing or even quoting excerpts from Cather's letters makes scholarship such as this all the more important. General readers with an interest in …