International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Cather Studies 4: Willa Cather's Canadian And Old World Connections Edited By Robert Thacker And Michael A. Peterman, Merrill Maguire-Skaggs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections is the first of four new collections that have emerged from international colloquia held in different locales of Cather's work. To those whose Cather is primarily a Nebraska writer, they may provide a jolt. Nevertheless, Willa Cather now not only belongs to the world but is also being claimed by a growing number of its corners: first Quebec; then Pittsburgh; then Winchester, Virginia; later New York City; and, most recently, the Southwest. One explanation for the exponential growth in Cather scholarship is, in fact, these geographical pulls which position her newly and thus …

Review Of Little Gray Men: Roswell And The Rise Of A Popular Culture By Toby Smith, David E. Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you are looking for a definitive summary on the latest scientific evidence for or against the occurrence of what has come to be called the "Roswell Incident"-the crash and government retrieval of a flying saucer and alien bodies near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947- then Toby Smith's Little Gray Men is not for you. The book is not a detailed analysis of the incident itself; in fact, Smith takes it as a given that the alien crash did not occur. Instead, the author places Roswell in a larger cultural and historical context, making the case that Roswell is an …

Review Of One Degree West: Reflections Of A Plainsdaughter By Julene Bair, Elizabeth Dodd

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Readers will likely be familiar with the background dramas in One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, Julene Bair's collection of eleven personal essays. Life in western Kansas has changed dramatically since the 1950s; the farming communities that were scraped or nestled into dry land, shortgrass country have seen two migrations in the last half-century: from the farm into town, the course taken by Julene Bair's parents; and out of the region, the trajectory of her own life. Farming itself has changed so much that those who haven't left cannot maintain the shape and rhythm of the lives they …

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 …

Preface, Tom Farer

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A quarter century ago, when I was elected to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the human rights institutional landscape had the appearance and analogical character of a largely undeveloped sub-division on the metropolitan fringe. In large part, the land was not even platted. Here and there a few structures poked out of the muddy soil. One, the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, had the look of a community hall built with little hope and less conviction by largely disinterested city fathers obligated to intimate belief in the sub-division’s arresting features and future. Among public buildings, only the …

Challenging The Gendered Hegemony Of Space: Acknowledging ‘Difference’ In Development Planning, Laura Hebert

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of Gender, Planning and Human Rights, edited by Tovi Fenster. New York: Routledge, 1999 (International Studies of Women and Place Series). 240pp.

Traditionally, feminist efforts to promote and protect women’s rights as human rights have focused on legalistic strategies, such as advocating for the inclusion of gender-specific concerns in international human rights conventions, the implementation of national legislation, the revision of laws that are discriminatory to women, and the strengthening of police and judicial procedures. In recent years, however, feminist activists and academics have recognized that advancing the status and empowerment of women requires recognition of the multiple …

“¡Tierra Y Libertad!” A 100 Year-Old Echo For The Maya Of Chiapas, Sharon Healey

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of Conflict in Chiapas: Understanding the Modern Mayan World. By Worth H. Weller. North Manchester, IN: DeWitt Books, 2000. 152pp.

Prior to the January 1, 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Mexico’s impoverished southernmost state, were largely oppressed by their own government and ignored by the rest of the world. The Zapatistas, (named after the mustachioed hero of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata), and their eloquent, pipe smoking spokesperson, Sub-Comandante Marcos, changed that by turning the international spotlight on the woeful living conditions of Mexico’s indigenous population.

Universality By Consensus: The Evolution Of Universality In The Drafting Of The Udhr, Amy Eckert

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Drafting, Origins & Intent by Johannes Morsink. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights), 2000. 400pp.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has helped to define human rights standards and bring them to the forefront of global concern. Yet the UDHR continues to suffer from charges of cultural imperialism. While many scholars have answered these charges with philosophical justification for universal human rights, Johannes Morsink takes another approach to the question of cultural relativism in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting & Intent.

Visions Of Globalization: The Twenty-First Century Perspective, Asawin Nedpogaeo

Asian Review

Globalization is often thought of as either the domination of one powerful nation-state over another, or the wholesale commoditization of society, in which large multinational corporations and their fluid capitals are usually the driving force. Rejecting both views, this article argues that the globalization process is far more complex and multidirectional in its probable consequences. More significant, it is beyond predictability to suggest what might be the actual outcome of globalization, of which both the global and the local are dynamically at play. What appears to take place instead, is the sense of cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism, felt in various ways …

A Linguistic And Anthropological Survey Of The Tibetan Borderland, Krisadawan Hongladarom

Asian Review

This paper reports the linguistic and anthropological situation of an important but poorly documented region of Tibet, namely the cultural province of Kham. Characterized by "four rivers and six ranges, " the region n a historical frontier zone between Tibet proper and western provinces of China n has been a meeting place between the Tibetans and the Han Chinese and a common home for these peoples as well as other ethnic minorities. As an introduction to the ethnic and linguistic complexity of Kham, the paper pays a special attention to Gyalthang (Zhongdian), which is located on the southernmost tip of …

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Asian Review

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