International and Area Studies Commons^™

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …

Review Of Forging An American Identity: The Art Of William Ranney: With A Catalogue Of His Works. By Linda Bantel And Peter H. Hassrick, Kenneth Haltman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since the appearance of Francis S. Grubar's William Ranney, Painter of the Early West, a catalogue raisonne published to accompany the artist's 1962 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ranney's reputation has revolved around the thirty-odd images of western trappers, hunters, and pioneers he worked up in New York {and later in an impressive two-story studio he kept across the river in West Hoboken} during the 1840s and early 1850s, at least in part from sketches dating to the time of his enlistment as a soldier in the Texan war for independence more than a decade earlier. The …

Review Of Writing The Trail: Five Women's Frontier Narratives By Deborah Lawrence, Sherry Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This slim volume offers literary analysis of five nineteenth-century women's narratives of their travels to and experiences in the American West. The central themes of the book are that women's narratives differed from men's, and, that in the course of their western experiences, these women shed traditional roles dictated by a patriarchal society and realized new possibilities for self-identity. Western historians, particularly those who have studied women's history, will find little new here. But if this book brings such material to the attention of other students and scholars, then it is clearly worthwhile.

Deborah Lawrence focuses her attention on Susan …

Review Of Contact Zones: Aboriginal And Settler Women In Canada's Colonial Past Edited By Katie Pickles And Myra Rutherdale, Anne Gagnon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The articles grouped in Contact Zones examine the racial, class, and gender power relations that developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English Canada in the spaces where contact between colonizers and colonized occurred. The repercussions of contact were far greater for Aboriginals since the balance of power between the two groups was rarely even and "[t]he process of 'forming a community' in the new land necessarily meant 'unforming' or re-forming the communities that existed already" (Ania Loomba, Colonialism/ Postcolonialism. 1998, #Z). Missionaries, government officials, and settlers attempted to transform Aboriginal women by imposing metropolitan ideals of domesticity, sexuality, and work. …

Review Of Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape By Courtney Milne, Terry Graff

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape is a compelling photographic anthology of the diverse and complex topography of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan. Published to commemorate Saskatchewan's centenary in 2006, this handsome coffee-table book comprises 225 sumptuous full-color photographs by the internationally acclaimed master photographer Courtney Milne. Six chapters of stunningly beautiful imagery, combined with personal commentary, chronicle Milne's intimate relationship to his home place, which extends back to his childhood growing up on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River.

For Milne, landscape photography has served as a sustaining inspiration in a remarkable photographic and writing career that has taken …

Review Of Cather Studies 6: History, Memory, And War Edited By Steven Trout, Margaret Doane

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Steven Trout's engrossing History, Memory, and War, volume 6 of the acclaimed Cather Studies series, is a collection of essays showing how pervasively war appears in Cather's works: the "sheer number of armed conflicts evoked in her fiction is perhaps unprecedented in American literature." Trout's wide-ranging volume shows "the ubiquity of armed conflict . . . as a major theme or as a background feature in Cather's writing" as well as showing that she personally "thought of war on a regular basis."

The collection includes essays by fourteen Cather scholars and moves from the Civil War through World War …

Review Of The Force Of Vocation, By Adele Wiseman, Leslie Ianno

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Adele Wiseman's literary career began with the publication of her acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, in 1956. Public success and scholarly praise of the novel were followed by the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Though Wiseman continued to write plays, fiction, memoirs, and essays throughout her career, she never again enjoyed the success of her earliest novel. In The Force of Vocation, the first booklength study of Wiseman's work, Ruth Panofsky attempts to account for the rise and fall of this Jewish Canadian woman of letters.

Responding to the lack of attention to the publishing side of …

Review Of John Graves, Writer Edited By Mark Busby And Terrell Dixon, Pete Gunter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

A geographical accident, Texas lumps together High Plains and Gulf tropics, western deserts and eastern bayous. The writings of John Graves (chiefly known for Goodbye to a River) mirror these incompatibles, relentlessly probing their transitions and significance, including their human significance. His is a perpetually thoughtful prose.

The first section of John Graves, Writer contains discussions with friends and associates plus a long interview. The second is a "festschrift" celebrating his life and writings. An essay on his relations with Texas Monthly magazine appears here, backed up by a second essay on this topic in the next section, which …

Review Of Texas Women On The Cattle Trails. Edited By Sara R. Massey, Judy Alter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It's been almost twenty years since Patricia Limerick debunked myths of the Old West and forced us to look at the role of women, Native Americans, and minorities in the American West. But if the new history brought women to prominence, it was as stoic homemakers in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. We see them walking patiently beside wagon trains, collecting buffalo chips for fuel, hoeing rock-hard ground for a vegetable garden, but never on cattle drives, never on horseback. Men-Anglo men-drove those cattle north. This book demonstrates that many women in the Great Plains, specifically Texas, did indeed work and …

Review Of In The Days Of Our Grandmothers: A Reader In Aboriginal Women's History In Canada Edited By Mary-Ellen Keim And Lorna Townsend, Gillian Poulter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This collection of articles published since the early 1990s makes a welcome contribution to the range of texts available for both Native Studies and Women's Studies courses at the upper and graduate leveL In an excellent short introductory essay, Mary-Ellen KeIrn and Lorna Townsend provide a useful historiographic context for the collection and explain their desire to bring Aboriginal women "out of the shadows" by choosing essays that reflect contemporary scholarship and illustrate the diversity of Aboriginal women's histories. They take contributor Jean Barman at her word in turning the past on its head and making Aboriginal women rather than …

Table Of Contents- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 1 / Winter 2008

THE PAGEANT OF PAHA SAPA: AN ORIGIN MYTH OF WHITE SETTLEMENT IN THE AMERICAN WEST

U.S. INDIAN POLICY, 1865-1890: AS ILLUMINATED THROUGH THE LIVES OF CHARLES A. EASTMAN AND ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN

NAMING A PLACE NICODEMUS

REVIEW ESSAY: THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Injuns!": Native Americans In The Movies By Edward Buscombe Killing The Indian Maiden: Images Of Native American Women In Film. By M. Elise Marubbio, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

These two books, while having significant subject matter in common, are very different in style. Buscombe's small volume serves as an effective review of much that has already been written about cinematic representation of "Injuns," offering some useful new interpretations, but apparently not primarily with a scholarly audience in mind. Marubbio's book is very much a specialized work of scholarship, with a much narrower focus, being essentially the first full-length treatment of the cinematic representation of Native American women.

Buscombe is known for his works in film criticism, …

Review Of Taking Charge: Native American Self-Determination And Federal Indian Policy, 1975-1993 By George Pierre Castile., Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Taking Charge George Pierre Castile extends his earlier work, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975 (1998), and carries the story of federal Indian policy through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Castile begins with how President Jimmy Carter's efforts to streamline federal government bureaucracy led to the creation of a new office, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. Carter continued self-determination, but his delegating nearly all Indian matters disappointed most Indians. Issues given most attention involved land and fishing claims, the claims of several eastern tribes for federal recognition, and the …

Review Of By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death Of Meriwether Lewis Edited By John D. W. Guice, Robert Carriker

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

It was at the 1994 Western History Association (WHA) meeting that Dr. John Guice, then teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, launched his campaign to clear Meriwether Lewis of the stigma of suicide and prove that a terrible murder had taken place at Grinder's Stand in the early morning hours of October 11, 1809. Guice titled his session "A Reconsideration," and he came armed with more complex evidence than had been earlier gathered by Vardis Fisher in 1962 or by Richard Dillon in 1965. But the testimony was all one sided. Co-presenting with Guice was James E. Starrs, a …

Review Of 900 Miles From Nowhere: Voices From The Homestead Frontier. By Steven R. Kinsella, Thomas Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Steven R. Kinsella's work is an uneasy admixture. On the one hand it is fresh, because it goes to the grassroots, sampling the writings of settlers up and down the Plains. On the other it's stale, stereotypical. The documents, stirring as individual pieces, are arranged into categories and schema as predictable as they are questionable.

Plains pioneers were, the title says, 900 miles from nowhere. They were "sturdy and determined people" who battled a "harsh, inhospitable landscape," a place of "loneliness and homesickness." The "constant roar" of the wind "drove some settlers mad" on a day-today basis, while the "troublesome …

Review Of War Dance At Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. By Brad D. Lookingbill, Michael Jordan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fort Marion in San Augustine, Florida, 'may seem far removed from the Great Plains, but as Brad Lookingbill ably demonstrates the events that transpired there between 1875 and 1878 form an important chapter in the history of several Plains Indian communities. In April 1875, thirty-three Cheyenne, twenty-seven Kiowa, nine Comanche, two Arapaho, and one Caddo prisoners departed Fort Sill, Indian Territory, destined for imprisonment in Florida. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a staunch proponent of forced Indian assimilation, was placed in charge of them. At Fort Marion he implemented a regimen designed to erase any vestiges of the prisoners' Indian identities …

Notes And News- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

SYMPOSIUM ON THE AMERICAN INDIAN

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALL FOR PAPERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through The Lives Of Charles A. Eastman And Elaine Goodale Eastman, Gretchen Cassel Eick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Rapid change, passionate convictions, acute regional differences, ethnic conflict, and an army looking for a mission characterized the United States from 1865 to 1890. The Civil War was over and most of the soldiers had mustered out and gone home. The others were assigned either to the South to oversee reconstruction or, the larger number of them, to the area between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains-the Great Plains. The U.S. Army's new mission was to "pacify" the Great Plains, to protect the thousands of migrants enticed there by Congress's offer through the Homestead Act of 160 acres-free, contingent upon …

Testing Multigenerational Colonization Of Carrion By Blow Flies In The Great Plains, Timothy E. Huntington, David O. Carter, Leon G. Higley

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

The relationship between carrion and blow flies is well understood, but in situations where fresh carrion sources are unavailable, as may occur on the Great Plains, the potential for multigenerational colonization of a single carcass exists. By testing this possibility through a replicated choice/no-choice experiment using pig carcasses, we were able to demonstrate that multigenerational colonization of carrion by blow flies does not occur. Fresh pig carcasses were exposed to blow fly infestation, then placed in insect exclusion cages. After the emergence of this first generation of blow fly adults, "choice" cages were supplied with a fresh pig cadaver. No …

Review Of Scats And Tracks Of The Great Plains: A Field Guide To The Signs Of Seventy Wildlife Species. By James C. Halfpenny, Raymond S. Matlack

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

Scats and Tracks of the Great Plains provides accounts of the scats, tracks, and other signs of 70 species, including 5 species of amphibians, 5 species of reptiles, 23 bird species, and 37 species of mammals. In some instances, accounts focus on a group of similar species. For example, all snakes are covered in one account. The author limited the book's geographic scope and number of species covered to keep the material manageable and for easy use in the field.

Review Of Native Americans And The Environment: Perspectives On The Ecological Indian. By Michael E. Harkin And David Rich Lewis, Paula Wagoner

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

Native Americans and the Environment is arranged in five parts: "Shepard Krech and His Critics," with essays by Krech and others; "(Over)hunting Large Game"; "Representations of Indians and Animals"; "Traditional Ecological Knowledge"; and "Contemporary Resource Management Issues." Each essay provides useful information on American Indians and the environment, demonstrating the complexity that Krech alludes to in the first chapter in which he discusses the debate his book triggered and welcomes the wealth of discussion it has generated. He argues that the mask of the ecological Indian mystifies complexity, as does generalizing about "the" Indian anything. The rich essays that follow …

Review Of The Niobrara: A River Running Through Time. By Paul A. Johnsgard., Fritz L. Knopf

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

Paul Johnsgard has authored an exemplary list of books as an ornithologist and natural historian. This volume approaches (may actually be) his 50th. The Niobrara reads as if one is on an auto tour with a premier naturalist who has a trunk full of documented species data. Residents from Harrison to Niobrara will find herein a welcome overview of their own unique natural history.

Review Of From Snake Oil To Medicine: Pioneering Public Health. By R. Alton Lee. Westport, Michael H. Fox

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

In this meticulously documented chronicle of Samuel Crumbine's life, Professor R. Alton Lee provokes similarly unsettling images of a physically diminutive giant in the field of public health feted at the Waldorf-Astoria late in life against those of the young medical student from rural Ohio selling Piso's Consumptive Cure on the dusty streets of Dodge City, Kansas, to friends like lawman Bat Masterson. Among pioneers of public health such as Lemuel Shattuck or Jonas Salk, Crumbine is the pioneer in deed as in name, whose life's purpose took hold under the prairie skies of western Kansas.

Review Of Drought Adaptation In Cereals Edited By Jean-Marcel Ribaut, Patrick F. Byrne

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

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing plant biologists this century is developing crop varieties tolerant to drought stress. A warming climate, more extreme weather patterns, and competing demands for limited water supplies will likely combine to increase the frequency and severity of periods of drought, particularly in the Great Plains. Against that backdrop, this volume provides the valuable service of summarizing the state of the art of drought adaptation research involving the world's most important group of crops, the cereals. Editor Jean-Marcel Ribaut of the Generation Challenge Program has enlisted leading authorities on abiotic stress tolerance to author 17 chapters grouped …

Review Of Roots Of Change: Nebraska's New Agriculture. By Mary Ridder., James Peterson

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

Roots of Change provides compelling evidence of the opportunities this new agriculture offers and its effects on communities. Twenty-seven examples are cited outlining successful- and unsuccessful-cooperative ventures developed to add value to the agricultural economy thereby, helping farm families and the communities they live in. Where successful, farm families no longer compete with each other for declining land resources and are actually working together for the benefit of themselves and their communities.

Review Of The Grasslands Of The United States: An Environmental History. By James E. Sherow, Francis Moul

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

Environmental history is a fairly new and complex method of study. It is, according to historian Richard White, the history of consequences of human actions on the environment, and the reciprocal consequences of an altered nature on human society. This interaction thus combines natural history with social, economic, and political history, along with many more subspecies of study.

James Sherow's environmental history of America's grasslands is quite welcome. Although grass covers much of the earth's surface (12 billion of29 billion acres), it may be the least studied or popularized of plants. The National Grasslands of the U.S. are among the …

Review Of Tied To The Great Packing Machine: The Midwest And Meatpacking. By Wilson J. Warren, R. Douglas Hurt

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

Wilson J. Warren provides important answers to that complex question. In this study, he traces the transformation of the red meat industry across the Midwest from the terminal stockyards in Chicago, Kansas City, and Omaha to plants near small towns, particularly in the Great Plains, where cattle and hogs arrive via trucks rather than railroad cars. Warren emphasizes the packers' shift from buying through commission men at terminal markets to direct buying from farmers at plants located close to feed, water, and cheap labor. He also discusses the technical and marketing innovations that substantially changed the meatpacking industry, beginning about …

Annual Index

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

ANNUAL INDEX

Literature Review Of Mule Deer And White-Tailed Deer Movements In Western And Midwestern Landscapes, Scott E. Hygnstrom, Scott R. Groepper, Kurt C. Vercauteren, Chuck J. Frost, Justin R. Boner, Travis C. Kinsell, Gregory M. Clements

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

The relationships among seasonal change, population dynamics, social pressures, landscape dynamics, anthropologic disturbances, and behavioral ecology are complex. Therefore, migration and seasonal movements are poorly understood and dispersal continues to be one of the least understood aspects of animal ecology in North America. We reviewed scientific literature on movements of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) and white-tailed deer (O. virginianus) in western and midwestern landscapes to identify gaps in our knowledge and direct future research. We used electronic databases, library catalogs, Internet search engines, and peer-reviewed journals to conduct key word searches for pertinent articles. We found …

News And Notes

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

CONFERENCES

ANNOUNCEMENTS