Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of People Of The Great Plains By Peter Miller, Gregory L. Morris

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his introduction, Peter Miller declares of the Great Plains: "This is a metaphysical land." By the time both he and his reader, however, make their way through the visual and literary territory covered in this. handsome volume, the Great Plains come to seem far less metaphysical and far more problematical a place. While Miller reinforces some of the traditional mythology of the Plains in his complementary texts and photographs-the elemental and inherent freedom of Plains life, the stubborn resilience of its people, the soul that resides in geography-he also explores the contradictions that have come in time to trouble …

Review Of Uncommon Common Women: Ordinary Lives Of The West By Anne M. Butler And Ona Siporin, Gaynell Gavin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Written for a general audience, Uncommon Common Women examines "ordinary" female experience in the American West. Although the women who appear in this book are ordinary in the sense of having gained neither fame nor notoriety, most of them expressed remarkable courage and fortitude in the face of hardship. Uncommon Common Women also emphasizes diversity in western experience.

The authors have used an interesting, but somewhat problematic, blend of history, fiction, and photographs. The photographs, for instance, enhance the text, but lack of captions or numbers makes it arduous for readers to correlate photographs with the numbered photo credits appearing …

Title And Contents- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

SPRING 1998 VOL. 18 NO.2

CONTENTS

LITERATURES OF THE GREAT PLAINS: AN INTRODUCTION Francis W. Kaye

A CULTURAL DUET: ZITKALA SA AND THE SUN DANCE OPERA P. Jane Hafen

WOMEN WRITING ABOUT FARM WOMEN Becky Faber

GENDERED LANDSCAPES: SYNERGISM OF PLACE AND PERSON IN CANADIAN PRAIRIE DRAMA Anne F. Nothof

THE CORPORATE FARMING DEBATE IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II MIDWEST Jon Lauck

REVIEW ESSAY: HARVEST SONGS AND ELEGIAC NOTES Linda Ray Pratt

A review of Constance Coiner, Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie OLsen and Meridel Le Sueur, and Nora

Ruth Roberts, Three Radical Women …

Book Review: Killing The White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans At The End Of The Twentieth Century By Fergus M. Bordewich, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fergus M. Bordewich's foray into Native American politics and identity is disturbing on a number of different levels. It is, on the one hand, a remarkably accurate look at Native American political dilemmas, frustrations, and achievements. On the other, it is a flawed survey of what it means to be Native American in the United States. It lacks a clear critical framework and races willy-nilly from one group to another, judging achievements on the basis of economic success or how the tribes fit into the hierarchical apparatus that runs the nation.

Bordewich is at his finest when dealing with the …

Review Of The Frontiers Of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives And The Rhetoric Of Westward Expansion By Brigitte Georgi-Findlay, Karen M. Morin

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Georgi-Findlay takes on the seemingly impossible task of synthesizing one hundred years of women's writing about American westward expansion. While focusing each chapter on just a few key texts, she draws widely on the works of Anglo-American novelists, journalists, settlers, travelers, tourists, army officers' wives, missionaries, and teachers, writing about a geographical area extending from Mackinaw Island to Puget Sound to Santa Fe. The author constructs a female counterpoint to male renditions of frontier adventure and conquest, but at the same time explores how white women's cultural practices existed in complicity with American territorial acquisition.

The book's three parts are …

Review Of Contented Among Strangers: Rural German Speaking Women And Their Families In The Nineteenth- Century Midwest By Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, Royden Loewen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Here is an important study that joins the growing number of histories of rural American women. Its strengths are many. First, it uncovers the complex and multi-layered worlds of German-speaking immigrants; Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, a professor of German and Foreign Languages, uses her linguistic dexterity to unveil a rich cache of German-language diaries, letters, and memoirs, delivering it to North American readers in finely-crafted English narrative. The work is also remarkably sensitive to German immigrant diversity; although the immigrant groups hail from five Midwest states-Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska-they represent both Dreisziger Germans and "Germans from Russia," religious and …

Review Of Myths And Traditions Of The Arikara Indians By Douglas R. Parks, Tressa Berman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Once again, Douglas Parks has offered an unsurpassed account of Arikara oral traditions by carefully selecting and elaborating upon his earlier, though less accessible, Traditional Narratives of the Arikara Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1991, in four volumes). Parks's careful English translations of a range of Arikara narratives fulfill the interests of specialists and non-specialists alike through detailed descriptions of both stories and storytellers. Old stories become infused with new life as we learn more about the narrators themselves and the various performative contexts in which stories get told. If this was an attempt on Parks's part to bring the …

Review Of The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation Of The Zulu And The Sioux By James O. Gump, Learthen Dorsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

James Gump's comparative study of the transformation of the Zulu and Sioux nations as a result of their interaction with whites on "closing frontiers" in the eastern region of South Africa and on the western Plains of North America respectively is an impressive undertaking. His foci are two battles-the Zulu assault at Rorke's Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 and the United States government's massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1892. According to the author, these two events have become powerful metaphors, "evoking images of Thermopylae in the first instance and systematic genocide in the latter." Both …

Review Of Son Of Two Bloods By Vincent L. Mendoza, Domino Renee Perez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Vincent Mendoza's Son of Two Bloods, the 1995 winner of the American Indian Prose Award, is an honest and at times heart-wrenching autobiography. The son of a Mexican father and Creek Indian mother, Mendoza conveys his struggle to locate himself within either community. When Vincent was a child, his father moved the family away from a predominately Mexican neighborhood, and his mother allowed the boy to attend Indian school. Both circumstances contribute to the author's feeling "lost" about who he was: not quite Mexican or Indian. He is moved by the Mariachi music his father and uncle play, and …

Gendered Landscapes Synergism Of Place And Person In Canadian Prairie Drama, Anne F. Nothof

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In an attempt to realize the relationship of character and landscape, recent Canadian Prairie drama has moved beyond the confines of theatrical space through a metaphysical evocation of place and time. The prairies are configured as an imaginative projection of the human psyche, expressed through images that are themselves a reflection of an interaction of human and elemental forces. In the works of three women playwrights in particular Gwen Pharis Ringwood's Mirage, Sharon Pollock's Generations, and Connie Gault's Sky and The Soft Eclipse, character has metonymic resonance: it is contiguous with place and time. The relationship with …

Review Of Winter Quarters: The 1846-1848 Life Writings Of Mary Haskin Parker Richards Edited By Maurine Carr Ward, Martha Peterson-Taysom

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Winter Quarters, the first in the new Life Writings of Frontier Women series edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, is the result of Maurine Carr Ward's excellent editing of the journal of Mary Haskin Parker Richards, who converted to Mormonism in Lancashire, England, in 1838 and joined other church members in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1843. Most of the journal, however, was written between 1846 and 1848, from the time she left Nauvoo until her husband, Samuel Richards, nephew of the better-known Willard Richards, returned from Britain to Winter Quarters.

The journal, in offering its richly detailed daily life of one …

Review Of Charles M. Russell: The Life And Legend Of America's Cowboy Artist By John Taliaferro, Elizabeth Dear

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For all the books written on Russell, an accurate, up-to-date biography has been lacking. Perhaps a definitive biography can never be fashioned since Russell left so little writing about himself. He and his wife Nancy did, however, leave many clues in letters to friends, in his fascinating tales, and in numerous other documents which, when pieced together, provide a credible portrayal of this complicated individual.

The first biography, published in 1948, twenty-two years after his death and eight after his wife's, was based on a manuscript commissioned by Nancy Russell which she deemed unsuitable for publication. Earlier autobiographies by some …

Review Of Mexicans In The Midwest, 1900-1932 By Juan R. Garcia, Ralph Grajeda

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is an important book on a significant and neglected topic: the immigration of Mexicans into the Midwest during the early decades of this century.

In contrast to the Southwestern US, the Midwest-with its distinctive Plains landscape and northern weather-would seem inhospitable to a predominantly working-class, Catholic, Spanish-speaking people accustomed to the desert regions and temperate weather of the central valley of Mexico. Mexican immigrants came, though-single men first and families later-"pushed" out from a Mexico in economic or civil strife and "pulled" in by the ready availability of US jobs. Using published materials, government documents, and archival sources, Juan …

Review Of Out Our Way: Gay And Lesbian Life In The Country By Michael Riordon, Ian C. Nelson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Michael Riordon, radio playwright and author of The First Stone: Homosexuality and the United Church (1990), is obviously a master interviewer. From meetings with some three hundred gay men and lesbians in rural Canada, he distills the personal narratives of subjects from the pseudonymous tightly closeted to local semi-acknowledged "characters" and internationally known figures such as writer Jane Rule or Jim Egan, recent challenger to the Canadian Charter of Rights. Quotable nuggets of wisdom and sharp human observation come from all, often marked by fear, loneliness, and bigotry. Overwhelmingly, story after story echoes the phrase, "I always knew I was …

Review Of The Black Hills Journals Of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge Edited By Wayne R. Kime, Paul L. Hedren

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Formal exploration of the Black Hills was long thwarted by their remoteness in northern Indian country and then by their inclusion in the Great Sioux Reservation created by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Changing national circumstances by 1874, however, led to Custer's well-publicized Black Hills survey where gold was discovered, as he reported, among the roots of the grass. Though several practical miners traveled with Custer, his expedition's pronouncements were not scientifically grounded, and doubt shrouded his discovery.

Across the nation the prospect of a new El Dorado grew irresistible, and the federal government soon authorized a formal scientific study …

Notes And News- Spring 1998

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Images Of The Northern Great Plains

Visiting Scholar Program, University Of Oklahoma

Mid-American Studies

Communities And Traditional Knowledge

Western History Conferences

Review Of Farm Boys: Lives Of Gay Men From The Rural Midwest Collected And Edited By Will Fellows, John Gilgun

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Dear Will Fellows:

Thank you for collecting and editing Farm Boys. I have already found a use for it. Today, in one of my classes, a student, Ed Grimes, read a poem he had written. I have asked Ed if I can use some of it here:

Jeremiah, twenty-two years old, great looking, great personality, yet he is so damn alone, trying to bust out of the prison which is his closet of sexuality.

He sees fear, he senses despair, he sees facing family, friends and life of such blackness that he cannot comprehend all of the changes it …

Review Of Hawk Flies Above: Journey To The Heart Of The Sandhills By Lisa Dale Norton, Brenda Doxtator

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I realize that I am being seduced by memories," Lisa Dale Norton informs us, "that the task at hand has slipped behind the mirage of the past .... This place is lined with my stories. It has the power of home, and any tale I can tell is woven with knowledge I carry from a childhood spent exploring sandy prairie."

There are moments of loss in our lives when an unexpected song on the radio replays haunting fragments of our past. There are moments of joy when the scent of melting snow in spring rises like black earth freshly plowed, …

Review Of After Wounded Knee: Correspondence Of Major And Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale While Serving With The Army Occupying The Pine Ridge Reservation, 1890-1891 Edited By Jerry Green, Michael D. Berndt

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When scholars have covered events like the Wounded Knee Massacre comprehensively, the record of an unlikely observer or indirect participant can provide a fresh and valuable perspective. The correspondence of John Vance Lauderdale offers the views of one surgeon at the Pine Ridge Reservation whose participation in the Native American stereotypes of the time is complicated by his involvement in the aftermath of the Massacre and his personal interaction with individual Lakota.

To reconstruct Lauderdale's situation, Jerry Green offers an extensive introduction divided into three sections dealing with the surgeon's personal background, the medical department's practices, and the conditions on …

Review Of A Cowboy Writer In New Mexico: The Memoirs Of John L. Sinclair By John Sinclair, Ben E. Pingenot

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Sinclair was the author of four unique grassroots novels: In Time of Harvest; Death in the Claimshack; Cousin Drewey and the Holy Twister; and The Night the Bear Came off the Mountain. In addition he published numerous articles and short stories in the New Mexico Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and other journals. Throughout all his writings runs the thread of his love of the land and the simple, earthy people native to it.

Sinclair was born in New York City in 1902. His father was the son of a wealthy and aristocratic family in northern Scotland. …

Review Of Bust To Boom: Documentary Photographs Of Kansas, 1936-1949 Edited By Constance B. Schulz, Drake Hokanson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Despite its quiet and broad landscape, Kansas has endured a history that runs from antebellum violence, through buffalo slaughter and dust bowl despair, to wartime boom. Perhaps no time in Kansas history has seen more flux than the depression 1930s and the wartime 1940s; and doubtless no time has been better documented by able photographers. Thanks to Kansas-born Roy Stryker and the three documentary photography projects he headed during the period (for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey), Kansans and the world have a sharper idea of what life was like …

Review Of All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions By Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, And Peter S. Onuf, Thomas D. Isern

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"People will think spatially and historically," observes Ayers in his essay on Southern identity for this book. "But we can be more self-conscious about the way we think in these dimensions." His remarks offer a good rationale for this collection of essays on American regions, originally a series of lectures delivered at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Ayers on the South, the volume includes Onuf on the origins of American sectionalism, Nissenbaum on New England, and Limerick on the West.

For the student of Great Plains regionalism, every essay offers insights, either theoretical or comparative. Onuf, for instance, works …

Review Of The Fort That Became A City: An Illustrated Reconstruction Of Fort Worth, Texas, 1849- 1853 By Richard F. Selcer, Robert Duncan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fort Worth, the northern most outpost west of Dallas and part of a chain of forts establishing a general line from the Rio Grande north constructed during the 1850s, is the subject of this book. The forts included in the line Graham, Gates, Croghan, Martin Scott, Inge, and Merrill-covered some three hundred miles from north to south and were built as a defensive system to control the interior of Texas and promote settlement. Fort Worth's origins were at best "humble." It began as an "outpost" for Fort Graham and was named after the estimable General William Jenkins Worth. Its garrison, …

Literatures Of The Great Plains An Introduction, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.¹

Storytelling, narrative, seems to be hardwired into humans as a way of comprehending emotional truths about ourselves and others, our history and our cultures. Through the stories we tell, over and over, circling through different kinds of truths, we make our approaches to the question of "what really happened," and somehow we find a few answers that suit our private and public nows. The conference on literatures of the Great Plains, presented by the Center for Great Plains Studies in Lincoln, …

Review Of White Man's Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade And Prohibition In Indian Country, 1802-1892 By William E. Unrau, Maril Hazlett

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book examines how the federal government and private capital, through interlocking agendas, used the alcohol trade in nineteenth-century Indian country to achieve the removal and dispossession of Native peoples from their remaining lands. William E. Unrau argues that federal Indian land cession policies influenced the increase in the region's alcohol trade, thereby ensuring the failure of Indian prohibition. His analysis, challenging the racist view that Indians are by nature disposed to alcohol, claims instead that whites in Indian country "set the standard" for Indian drinking.

Unrau proves that poorly drafted prohibition legislation, conflicting court decisions, and non-enforcement of treaty …

Review Of Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example By D. Michael Quinn, H. Wayne Schow

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

That cultural and temporal contexts continually reshape our perception of sexual reality is made abundantly clear in Michael Quinn's revealing contrast between the same sex dynamics of nineteenth-century America and those currently prevailing. Homosexuality (and consequently heterosexuality) as a concept of intrinsic personal identity has only relatively recently established itself in European and American cultural consciousness. Previously, the focus was simply on sex acts that were or weren't approved. Without "categories to define 'sexuality,'" Quinn asserts, "nineteenth-century Americans ... responded to homo-eroticism in ways that often seem restrained, even tolerant, today."

But homoeroticism was only one strand of a complexly …

Review Of Texas Wanderlust: The Adventures Of Dutch Wurzbach By Douglas V. Meed, Cary D. Wintz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Eight-year-old Emil Frederick "Dutch" Wurzbach arrived with his family in Galveston in early 1846 as one of the hundreds of German immigrants who sailed to Texas that year. He spent his childhood in central Texas, first at Fredericksburg, then in Austin, and finally on a farm outside Austin. At the age of eleven Wurzbach began a series of frontier jobs, largely with the army, herding livestock or working as a teamster supplying the scattered frontier posts south and west of San Antonio; he also served a brief stint in the Texas Rangers. He encountered legendary frontiersmen, fought Comanches and Apaches, …

Review Of Frederic Remington And Turn-Of-The-Century America By Alexander Nemerov, H.W. Brands

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Readers of this book will learn a great deal about contemporary art criticism, a modest although unquantifiable (and mostly unverifiable) amount about Frederic Remington, and very little about the American West. The author, an art historian, applies a postmodernist, Freudian analysis to the work of the popular painter, sculptor, and illustrator. He concedes that the multiple meanings he reads into Remington's work probably escaped the consciousness of the artist himself. But not to worry: "The meanings of which the artist is not conscious are often those that are most powerfully revelatory of the work's historical moment."

Readers who can get …

Review Of Homeland To Hinterland: The Changing Worlds Of The Red River Metis In The Nineteenth Century By Gerhard J. Ens., D.N. Sprague

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Studies of the Red River Settlement, the Metis people, and their buffalo hunt are so numerous that historians in the wider fields of Aboriginal or western Canadian studies have become increasingly impatient with this phenomenon of "Red River myopia." The question a reader must ask of this book is what new perspective Gerhard Ens brings to the existing material.

According to Ens, Homeland to Hinterland situates the local experience in a "broader process of economic change." Authors of previous works, he claims, were political historians writing about "the rise of a 'new nation' without adequately explaining the social and economic …

Review Of Garth Brooks: The Road Out Of Santa Fe By Matt O'Meilia, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Garth Brooks has been a musical phenomenon. By various counts, admittedly unreliable and difficult to verify, his record sales between 1989 and 1996 topped sixty million, surpassing those of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and making him the best selling solo musical act ever. Brooks not only dominated the country music genre; he is often credited with being the main force behind the country music revival of the 1990s, even with being a key factor in the overall growth of the popular music industry early in the decade.

Brooks is an important figure for students of the American West and …