International and Area Studies Commons^™

Book Review: The Native American Oral Tradition: Voices Of The Spirit And Soul By Lois J. Einhorn, Randall A. Lake

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This excellent, albeit imperfect, book reexamines indigenous North American oral traditions as alternatives to mainstream Western discourses. Neither a literary anthology of Native myths nor an oral history of storytellers, it treats these traditions as persuasive messages addressed to audiences. Einhorn, rhetoric professor at Binghamton University, combines "transtextual" analysis of metaphor and symbol with "contextual" considerations of time, place, and cultural assumptions in an ambitious study of indigenous rhetoric spanning myriad speakers, nations, regions, and periods.

Casting The Buffalo Commons: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Print Media Coverage Of The Buffalo Commons Proposal For The Great Plains, Mary L. Umberger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

T hey filed into the auditorium and found seats, waiting politely for what they expected to be a preposterous talk. The featured speaker rose and began his prepared speech. The audience took note of his attire, his educated vocabulary, his "eastern" ways. Their scrutiny became vocal as he proposed his dream for the Great Plains.

Book Review: Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, And African Americans In Oklahoma, 1865- 1907. By Murray R. Wickett, Linda W. Reese

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Many historians have recognized the tripartite nature of race relations in the Great Plains region and the aggressive negotiation for power this created in the post Civil War period, but each has selected a manageable portion of the story to interpret. Murray Wickett deserves recognition for intertwining the central issues affecting all three races into a meaningful analysis. The choice of Oklahoma as the site of interaction is rich with possibilities but fraught with complexity. Acculturated and non-acculturated Indians, mixed-bloods and full-bloods, Indian freedmen and southern migrant freedmen, Twin Territories, Democrats and Republicans, white entrepreneurs and white tenant farmers- each …

Book Review: Spirit Beings And Sun Dancers: Black Hawk’S Vision Of The Lakota World By Janet Catherine Berlo, James D. Keyser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1880 the Lakota warrior Black Hawk drew a series of seventy-six ledger drawings in exchange for credit at William Caton’s Cheyenne River Reservation trade store. In 1994, these drawings were purchased for the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Working with Sioux elders, Janet Berlo has analyzed Black Hawk’s drawings in a beautiful book that will interest Plains scholars. As an artist, Black Hawk drew seventeen typical ledger art warfare scenes, but probably more valuable are the drawings of his visions, Sioux cosmology and ceremonies, and even enemy Crow warriors. He also drew seventeen natural history studies showing …

Book Review: Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays On Cather And The South, Marcia Robertson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The cover of Willa Cather's Southern Connections reproduces one square of what is Known as the Robinson-Cather quilt, an image that testifies to a communal-and female-artistic tradition in which Cather's Back Creek, Virginia, kinswomen participated and with which her often heroic literary fictions seem to have little relation. Ann Romines participates in a quilting process of her own, piecing together seventeen revised essays from the seventh of a series of international conferences on Willa Cather held in 1997. Both conference and volume recontextualize a writer so often seen as Nebraskan or Western within a Southern matrix, asking Cather's readers to …

Book Review: Alberta Society Of Artists: The First Seventy Years By Kathy E. Zimon, Colleen Skidmore

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Kathy E. Zimon, Fine Arts Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, has launched a new career as a researcher on Alberta art and artists. Her first major work, on the Alberta Society of Artists, is a valuable accounting of names, dates, issues, and images of an important aspect of the history of art in Alberta and a timely contribution to the study of art institutions in Canada.

Book Review: Lourneys To The Land Of Gold: Emigrant Diaries From The Bozeman Trail, 1863-1866, Sherry L. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Most students of Western history know something about the Bozeman Trail, the 1860s-era cut-off from the Platte River trails bisecting the Powder River Basin before heading toward the Montana goldfields. Usually the Bozeman's story enters our consciousness in the context of the Northern Plains Indian Wars-Red's Cloud's War and the Sioux War of 1876. This outstanding two-volume collection of diaries and memoirs reminds us, however, that the Bozeman was an emigrant pathway before it became a hotly contested military road. Susan Badger Doyle's painstaking efforts to locate, research, and edit these documents reasserts the role played by the ambitions of …

Book Review: Winning The Dust Bowl By Carter Revard, Norma Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Carter Revard says of Winning the Dust Bowl, "I've made this a home of new and selected poems, and put a meadow around it of history and autobiography, by looking out from these poems at the people, places and happenings from 1931 to the present." The vast meadow of memories allows his poems to sing more clearly.

Thirty-eight chapters surround forty-four poems in various forms, from the Old English riddle to free verse. His songs and metaphors range across time and place. Having drunk from the springs of the Greek gods and muses, Revard writes "To the Muse, in …

William Jennings Bryan: Boy Orator, Broken Man, And The "Evolution" Of America's Public Philosophy, Troy A. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Perhaps more than any other figure in American history, William Jennings Bryan is remembered for specific and identifiable moments of rhetorical action: the much-revered 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech and the much-maligned Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925. The dissonance between these two events, at least with respect to the ways in which political and rhetorical history has traditionally recorded them, could not be more striking. Bryan, the "Boy Orator," was, at thirty-six years, the youngest and most left-leaning candidate ever to receive a major party nomination for the US presidency. He is often regarded as the founder of the modern …

Book Review: "Peace, Progress And Prosperity": A Biography Of Saskatchewan's First Premier, T. Walter Scott. By Gordon L. Barnhart., J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This biography establishes Walter Scott as one of the major political figures in the history of Saskatchewan. It also sheds new light on Scott's personal life, especially his long battle with manic depression which cut short his political career at the relatively young age of forty-nine.

Gordon Barnhart provides a revealing account of Walter Scott's early (and somewhat troubled) life in Ontario, and his rise to prominence in the newspaper business and then in politics in Regina and the North-West Territories during the 1880s and 1890s. After 1900 he was the Member of Parliament for Assiniboia West, having defeated the …

Book Review: Tell Them We Are Going Home: The Odyssey Of The Northern Cheyennes. By John H. Monnett., Alan Boye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In September 1878 about three hundred Northern Cheyenne men, women, and children under the leadership of Dull Knife and Little Wolf fled Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma in an attempt to return to their homeland in present-day Montana. Thousands of soldiers were eventually involved in a chase that turned into a 1,200 mile running battle of pain and sorrow. The following April less than half of the starving and sick Cheyenne reached Montana. Eventually they were granted a reservation there. Many of the others, mostly women, children, and old men, had been captured in Nebraska, and many of …

Book Review: Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook , Robert Bensen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

To readers raised on the literary Great Plains of Rolvaag and Cather, or in the West of Native writers Momaday, Welsh, and Silko, the North Dakota of Louise Erdrich's Ojibwa and mixed-blood characters in Love Medicine (1984, 1993) may seem a comically alien and tragically magical place. Hertha D. Wong's casebook will prove a welcome and reliable guide to the strange practices of Love Medicine. These thirteen critical studies (complemented, even upstaged, by two Erdrich essays and interviews with her and Michael Dorris) address important questions concerning history and culture, identity and narrativity, oral and literary structure, and Erdrich's 1993 …

Booknotes- May 2002

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ner Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis. By Jerome A. Greene.

In Custer's Shadow: Major Marcus Reno. By Ronald H. Nichols.

Regional Studies in LDS Church History: Western Canada. Edited by Dennis A. Wright, Robert C. Freeman, Andrew H. Hedges, and Matthew 0. Richardson.

Coyote at Large: Humor in American Nature Writing. By Katrina Schimmoeller Peiffer.

Book Review: Sacred Objects And Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions By Andrew Gulliford, G. Ian Brace

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rather than dealing strictly with the subject of his book's title, Gulliford leads the reader through a variety of background history pertaining to the American government's misuse of its First Nations peoples, their culture, and associated artifacts. While this approach is acceptable for establishing a fundamental framework, a foreword explaining the procedure would have prepared the reader for the thrust of the ensuing discussions. In each chapter Gulliford wades through the negative implications of the criteria he is using before presenting examples of the subject. In fact, there are few examples of each variety of object or site compared with …

Book Review: Dream A Little: Land And Social Justice In Modern America By Dorothee E. Kocks., Betsy Downey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the beginning was land. Lots of land. "Before there was a welfare state, there was a frontier state," which distributed land in hopes of ending poverty. Dream a Little explores what Dorothee Kocks calls the "geographic embrace": the dream that nature has a moral function and offers "a blueprint to a good society." The first part of her book examines the frontier state, finding many similarities with the welfare state. Most Americans seem blind to the parallels, believing that nature and land are good; land is a "birthright," and a homestead is not a handout. "Asking for land is …

Book Review: Naming The Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship By Caroline Marwitz, Stefani Jaye Farris

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"To love the land was all," concludes Caroline Marwitz in Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship. Indeed, Marwitz's unlikely love for the dry sagebrush steppe surrounding Laramie, Wyoming, where she spent her youth, anchors this memoir. Focusing on the friendship and guidance of an older woman named Nasim, who serves as a kind of spiritual mentor, Marwitz traces her haphazard path to the realization that the place where she grew up-"that rough, left-alone land" where "the wind was blowing so hard we could barely stand up”-holds a unique and inescapable beauty all its own. "Even the most barren …

Book Review: Waltzing With The Ghost Of Tom Joad: Poverty, Myth, And Low-Wage Labor In Oklahoma By Robert Lee Maril, Robert Fulton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The title of this book seeks to link the people whose lives it examines with the tale of the Joad family in John Steinbeck's classic The Grapes of Wrath. In addition, the author sets forth four ambitious goals.

The book reports on research funded by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and conducted by sociologist Robert Lee Maril, assisted by staff and students from Oklahoma State University. The researchers examined the daily lives of Oklahomans in three households in each of four low-income neighborhoods in two cities and two small towns. Interestingly, no truly rural households were included.

Book Review: The Natural West: Environmental History In The Great Plains And Rocky Mountains By Dan Flores, Emily Greenwald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Prolific environmental historian Dan Flores has gathered together and revised many of his previously-published short works in The Natural West. Two ideas link the essays together: genetic evolution that has produced ingrained, even instinctive, environmental behaviors in humans; and the West's distinctiveness, deriving not from aridity but from the ecological (and historical) interrelationships of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

Drawing from the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Flores argues that humans are revolutionarily adapted to transform the environment in order to perpetuate the species. But, he admits, "I can't imagine that many historians are going to …

Mending The Sacred Hoop: Identity Enactment And The Occupation Of Wounded Knee, Sheryl L. Lindsley, Charles Braithwaite, Kristin L. Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This account by Oglala holy man Black Elk of the 1890 US cavalry massacre of three hundred Sioux Indians, mainly women and children, helps us understand the rhetorical importance of the American Indian Movement's return to Wounded Knee eighty-three years later. The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) represented a culmination of frustration felt by Native Americans. Magazines as diverse as Time and National Review reported the incident as a staged "pseudo-event" designed to amplify the oppressor/oppressed relationship. News coverage of Wounded Knee included headlines of mockery: "Of Fallen …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents:

Call for Papers
Graduate Fellowships
Call for Papers
Arts and Culture of the Ute Indians
2002 Great Plains Chautauqua

Book Review: Dust Bowl Usa: Depression America And The Ecological Imagination, 1929-1 941 By Brad D. Lookingbill, Diane Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his introduction to Dust Bowl USA, Brad Lookingbill states that a historian "makes an archeological expedition into the ecological imagination, ending with stories about stories quite different from where each actually began." Lookingbill's book catalogs these stories about stories; accounts of the Dust Bowl and Depression in newspapers, popular magazines, novels, personal accounts, art, photography, and government documents create a history of the changes in our understanding of Great Plains ecology.

The book is divided into chapters with such titles as "Survivor" and "Legacy" that focus on the persistent attitudes each label reflects. In the chapter "Fall," for …

Book Review: The Novels Of Louise Erdrich: Stories Of Her People By Connie A. Jacobs, Catherine Rainwater

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Jacobs offers readers abundant contextual information pertinent to a critical understanding of Erdrich's novels. Her purpose is similar to Susan Scarberry-Garcia's in Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn (1990); both books are valuable reference tools for newcomers to their authors' works and to American Indian Literature in general. This volume will be of particular benefit to teachers of introductory courses in Native American literature covering Erdrich's fiction.

Book Review: The Arikara War: The First Plains Indian War, 1823 By William R. Nester, Victoria A.O. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The history of the Great Plains has been dominated by scholars focused on the journey of Lewis and Clark, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Ghost Dance phenomenon. Fortunately, William R. Nester has brought historians' attention to an overlooked episode of Plains history, the Arikara War of 1823.

Strategically situated on the middle Missouri River, the Arikaras had served as middlemen between the colonial arms trade flowing south from the Great Lakes region and the horse trade pushing north from the Southern Plains since the late 1600s. When smallpox decimated the tribe in the late 1700s, however, …

The Development Of The China Digital Library, Yang Guihua, Zhang Tong

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

This article describes the China Digital Library (CDL) and explains how to use the computer network in China. It also explores the advantages of the China library in establishing the CDL. Finally, it examines the future construction and development plans for the CDL.

China is a large country that contains 5% of the world’s population. Along with the rapid development of the Internet worldwide, China has advanced her steps. The digital library has become a focal point in the high-tech world. At the same time, it is also a very important symbol with which to evaluate the basic facilities of …

White-Tailed Deer Browsing On Six Shrub Species Of Tallgrass Prairie, Dirk-Jan Van Der Hoek, Alan K. Knapp, John M. Briggs, Jan Bokdam

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

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations have in the past, and continue today, to increase in the Great Plains and North America. However, their impact on native plant species and endangered ecosystems such as the tallgrass prairie is poorly documented. To better understand the consequences of increasing deer numbers for native shrubs in grasslands, we assessed the extent of their summer browsing activity on six shrub species (wild plum, rough-leaved dogwood, smooth sumac, fragrant sumac, and coralberry) along transects that spanned riparian margins to upland tallgrass prairie. The proportion of terminal shoots browsed was quantified along established white-tail deer …

Review Of Creating Colorado: The Making Of A Western American Landscape, 1860-1940 By William Wyckoff, Brian Page

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

The history of Colorado has been well portrayed, but most often in geographical bits and pieces. What has been missing from this literature is a comprehensive view of how these constituents coalesce into a coherent picture of the formation and evolution of the state's geography of human production, settlement, movement, power, and meaning. William Wyckoff's Creating Colorado provides a panoptic view of Colorado's geographical history rendered in broad stokes and a fluid, eloquent prose.

Review Of American Agriculture And The Problem Of Monopoly: The Political Economy Of Grain Belt Farming, 1953-1980 By Jon Lauck, John Mark Hansen

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

Through the years, nothing has marked agrarian political discourse on the Great Plains quite as much as the charge of monopoly. Farmers' demands for protection from the firms that purchased their product animated the Populist and Progressive movements in the region and contributed to the regulation of business practices in the grain trades and packing industry. Farmers' search for greater control over their own prices culminated in policies promoting agricultural producer cooperatives during Normalcy and regulating agricultural production during the New Deal.

Review Of The Essential Aldo Leopold: Quotations And Commentaries Edited By Curt D. Meine And Richard L. Knight, Thomas R. Dunlap

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

A book of quotations is always suspect, and one on Leopold doubly so. The form suggests hagiography, which Leopold scholarship does not need, or the desire to make accessible an important but obscure body of thought, which is not the case with Leopold. Even more alarming, the editors have arranged Leopold's ideas into categories, although one of his great strengths was his willingness to think across intellectual boundaries. Dipping into the collection, however, allays all fears. This volume gives the general reader a good, well-organized look at Leopold's ideas. Scholars get a lot more: a wealth of quotations for lectures …

Culture And Ecology Of Latinos On The Great Plains: An Introduction, Gustavo Carlo, Miguel A. Carranza, Byron Zamboanga

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

The topic of culture is relevant when focusing on Latinos on the Great Plains. It is evident that Latinos, both as individuals and as group members, exhibit various dimensions of culture in their day-to-day lives. What becomes problematic is how culture is defined and/or operationalized in assessing the Latino experience.

Several definitions of culture serve to demonstrate that culture is one of the most difficult terms to describe. One of the earliest definitions comes from E. B. Tylor who perceived culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired …

Review Of Changing The Way America Farms: Knowledge And Community In The Sustainable Agriculture Movement By Neva Hassanein, Patricia Allen

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

This book makes a significant contribution to the literature on the sustainable agriculture movement in the United States. While Hassanein acknowledges that the movement arose in response to systematic, global problems, her purpose here is to go beyond large-scale analysis of the movement and dig deeply into what makes it tick at the local level. Her interest is in the dynamics within the movement and in the ways that knowledge is created and disseminated in the sustainable farming networks that operate largely outside public agricultural research and extension systems. For this she selects two case studies, the Ocooch Grazers Network …