Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of The Power Of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography By Luke E. Lassiter, Victoria Lindsay Levine

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his informative and innovative exploration of Kiowa music, Luke Lassiter focuses on intersubjective, phenomenological, and experiential aspects of Kiowa song. Employing collaborative ethnography, a method that "fully embraces dialogue in both ethnographic practice and ethnographic writing," he discloses the ways in which his own social interactions with Kiowa consultants have informed his ethnography.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Experience, Dialogue, and Ethnography," recounts Lassiter's early impressions of Plains Indians and the gradual transformation of his understanding. The second, "Powwows, the Gourd Dance, and Kiowa Song," offers his interpretation of the social worlds in which Kiowa …

Review Of The Lakota Ritual Of The Sweat Lodge: History And Contemporary Practice By Raymond A. Bucko, Martin Brokenleg

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Native Americans, including the Lakota of the Great Plains, are mistrustful of anthropologists. For four centuries, white explorers, settlers, and scholars have defined Native American life, culture, and values. Because these cultural records are kept in writing, people from western cultures regard them as authoritative. The result is the current tendency for readers to trust the records of a white investigator more than the spoken word of a Lakota. The mistrust Lakotas have of anthropologists is the result not only of inaccurate accounts but also the assumption that the recording authority has a "true" understanding that is more accurate than …

Review Of Spirit Capture: Photographs From The National Museum Of The American Indian Edited By Tim Johnson, Mick Gidley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features.

First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection's editor has avoided reproducing too …

Review Of Charles M. Russell, Legacy: Printed And Published Works Of Monwna's Cowboy Artist Text By Larry Len Peterson, Martha H. Kennedy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Larry L. Peterson has for many years collected art by Charles M. Russell (1865-1926) as well as printed and published works of the "cowboy artist." A native of Montana where the artist lived most of his life, Peterson is highly knowledgeable about Russell's work and has published numerous articles on the subject in Russell's West, a periodical of the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. As Peterson traces examples of the printed appearances of Russell's work in varied forms, he underscores how the artist's vision of the American West was not limited in its appeal to an …

A Week Of Music And Dance An Introduction, Randall Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the second week of April 1999, the Center for Great Plains Studies hosted The Great Plains Music & Dance Festival and Symposium. This undertaking, three years in the planning, co-chaired by Ron Bowlin and myself with suggestions of various committees of local advocates, resulted in a multidisciplinary event which showcased the diversity of our music and dance heritage in the Great Plains. Performances of Plains music and dance ranging from Northern and Southern Native Drums to Jazz, Folk, Gospel and Classical were featured at a variety of venues in Lincoln. This phase of the symposium culminated in a premier …

Review Of State Of Mind: Texas Literature And Culture By T Om Pilkington, Jose E. Limon

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Those of us who teach college courses in Texas literature have need of a scholarly study-a critical survey-that would closely attend to its subject in a learned, critical, and theorize well-written manner; deal with this literature in an ample historical and cultural context; and the connection between literature and context in a manner that would at least gesture in the direction of recent developments in literary critical theory. Pilkington's book is superb in the first instance, disappoints in the second, and is almost wholly unresponsive in the third.

This is a clearly written, intelligent, and relatively comprehensive account of the …

Review Of Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros: A Celebration Of Nebraska's Mexican Heritage/Una Celebración De La Herencia Mexicana De Nebraska By Ralph F. Grajeda, Et Al, Juan R. García

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Our Treasures/Nuestros Tesoros is part of a grant funded project designed to collect and preserve the cultural heritage of Mexican Americans in Nebraska. The information presented is largely drawn from oral histories and interviews of residents living in Grand Island, Lincoln, Omaha, and Scottsbluff.

The published volume consists of five parts. "Mexicans in Nebraska," by Ralph Grajeda, provides a general survey of Mexican immigration into the state. Much of the information covers the period before Wodd War II and focuses on the first two waves of immigration of Mexicans into the US and Nebraska. Although those familiar with the history …

Review Of Jazz Of The Southwest: An Oral History Of Western Swing By Jean A. Boyd, Cary Ginell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her preface to Jazz of the Southwest, Jean Boyd explains that she was only introduced to western swing in 1990. A musicologist at Baylor University's School of Music, Boyd is well-schooled in music theory, as evidenced by her frequent lapses into musicological jargon. But she is painfully unschooled not only in western swing's history, but the record industry in general during the period in which the genre thrived. Boyd's assumption that western swing is an offshoot of jazz is simplistic, yet she spends the entire book trying to prove this point rather than coming to a conclusion based …

Review Of Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art In The Midwest Edited By Barbara Brackman And Cathy Dwigans, Karen Janovy

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Always eager to plunge into books with enticing epigraphs (such as Archibald MacLeish's "A world ends when its metaphor has died"), I was not disappointed with Brackman and Dwigans's Backyard Visionaries. Beautifully illustrated, it not only documents, with excellent notes, a kind of "visionary" art, much of which exists on site rather than in museums, but also highlights model preservation efforts by the Kansas Grassroots Art Association (KGAA) of historically significant outsider art. Elizabeth Broun's illuminating introduction states that this art, first coined "outsider" art in 1972, has found an "exceptional environment throughout the Midwest" since the …

The Omaha Gospel Complex In Historical Perspective, Tom Jack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In this article, I document the introduction and development of gospel music within the African-American Christian community of Omaha, Nebraska. The 116 predominantly black congregations in Omaha represent twenty-five percent of the churches in a city where African-Americans comprise thirteen percent of the overall population.¹ Within these institutions the gospel music genre has been and continues to be a dynamic reflection of African-American spiritual values and aesthetic sensibilities. By focusing the research on perceptions and descriptions provided by the music's practitioners, an examination of this genre at the local level will shed insight into the development and dissemination of …

Notes And News- Summer 2000

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Call For Papers: "Rhetoric On The Great Plains"

Sacred Lands: Plains Indian Seminar

Greatplains.Org

Omaha Indian Music

Association For Canadian Studies Colloquium

Northern Great Plains History Conference

Internet Resources On The Great Plains

The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920

Review Of New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian And American Landscapes By Elizabeth Johns, Andrew Sayers, And Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, With Amy Ellis, Julie K. Brown

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

An exhibition of nineteenth-century landscape art from the United States and Australia (the latter a British colony until federation in 1901) is such an excellent idea one wonders why it has not been done before. Such an ambitious and challenging project, however, has some inherent dangers in collapsing historical differences for the sake of presentation. Assessing cultural productions must take into account distinct histories in these two "settler countries," especially in the creation of their respective national identities-as Lyn Spillman has already demonstrated in her excellent Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (1997).

New …

Review Of Contemporary American Indian Literatures And The Oral Tradition By Susan Berry Brill De Ramirez, James H. Cox

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Brill de Ramirez's work addresses at least two crucial issues that scholars of Native American literatures must consider every time they read: what cultural contexts are informing the texts, and what critical approaches to these contexts and texts will not perpetuate academic or intellectual colonialism. In Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), Greg Sarris explains that in addition to a careful consideration of American Indian cultural and historical contexts, a reader must also consider the history of her or his own readings. Slug Woman, an important precursor to Brill de Ramirez's study, proposes that …

Review Of A Sense Of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism In Canadian And American Writing Edited By Christian Riegel And Herb Wyile, Heidi L. Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In their introduction to A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, the editors assert that for most North Americans, identity is "a complex mix of a feeling of community, a shared cultural, ethnic and social background, and an attachment to place-a mix that is much more localized than the feeling of being Canadian or being American." Great Plains studies rely upon regionalism and the assumption that national, provincial, and state boundaries can be transcended through a shared geographical region. As the editors write, "current global trends are investing the term [regionalism] with new significance, necessitating …

Review Of Community Music In Alberta: Some Good Schoolhouse Stuff! By George W. Lyon, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

If you have any Alberta connections, you will not be able to resist paging through this engaging, photo-full book looking for people and places you know. I found my grandfather on page 43, but still can't make out if my grandmothers are in the background of some of the other scenes.

Most of Community Music in Alberta is given over to photographs of a stunning variety of music groups from the 1880s to the present. Not only are there the fiddlers, dance bands, brass bands, pipers, CFCN and CKUA radio groups, cowboy singers (including Wilf Carter), powwow drums, little theater …

Review Of Chokecherry Places: Essays From The High Plains By Merrill Gilfillan, Douglas Unger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For fifteen years, poet Merrill Gilfillan has been driving "in long misshapen circles" through the High Plains of the American West. The result is Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains, a collection not so much of essays as of poetic meditations on prairie landscape and fauna recalling in its intentions passages of Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, and John Donne.

What is also impressive about this book winner of the 1999 Western States Book Award for non-fiction-is its lack of pretense, its avoidance of highly politicized cause or preservationist polemic so common in recent prose explorations of a sense …

The Musical Landscape Of Sinclair Ross's As For Me And My House, Philip R. Coleman-Hull

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his essay "Sinclair Ross in Letters and Conversation," David Stouck recounts Ross's humble reactions to the array of criticism given to his first and most famous novel, As For Me and My House:

"You understand the [Bendeys] perhaps better than I do, or at least did when I was writing. For when I was writing I was participating and when you participate you often don't understand or see. More was coming I suppose than I knew." In this same vein he has often remarked that critical articles about the novel amaze him-discuss ions of Chopin and George Sand, …

This Week At The Opera House Popular Musical Entertainment At Great Plains Opera Houses, 1887-1917, D. Layne Ehlers

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Americans in the years immediately preceding the twentieth century clung to a naivete reminiscent of the manifest destiny days. Novels, newspaper accounts, and old-fashioned, rousing melodramas on the stage all displayed a predilection for an American way which showed that moral good, coupled with patience, would triumph, providing it remained within carefully proscribed social and ethical limits. "Home Sweet Home," the most popular song of its time, celebrated the simple virtues of hearth and family.

Nowhere was this vision of life more apparent than in the Great Plains. By 1877 the days when Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff welcomed trail-weary …

Powerful Feelings Recollected In Tranquility Literary Criticism And Lakota Social Song Poetry, R. D. Theisz

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist William K. Powers, in his Beyond the Vision: Essays on American Indian Culture, laments that the discipline of ethnomusicology-and music pedagogy-with its emphasis on the vocal and instrumental "art music" traditions of musically literate peoples has been lax in accepting anthropological theory. Thus, Powers points out that ethnomusicology, where it is concerned with the music of oral, indigenous cultures, adheres to outdated theories on "primitive" music and displays a telling absence of ethnographic abilities.¹ Reflecting Powers' judgment, it seems to me that the conceptual seams between anthropology, ethnomusicology, and musicology are rather formidable.

At …

The Power Of Symbolism: Disarmament In Northern Ireland, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article explores recent events in Northern Ireland to highlight the import of symbolism in the resolution of political conflict.

"Wild Men" And Dissenting Voices: Narrative Disruption In Little House On The Prairie, Donna M. Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Long considered to be a work celebrating traditional pioneer values, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has in recent years come under increasing attack for its stereotypic racial representations and attitudes. In one notable instance, novelist Michael Dorris describes trying to read the novels to his daughters and stopping because of the unfavorable depictions of Native American characters and Ma's "unreconstructed" bigotry. Dorris and others present a compelling argument about the potential negative effects of such representations, yet to dismiss the work as though Wilder's vision of other races represents a …

Citizenship And Treaty Rights: The Indian Association Of Alberta And The Canadian Indian Act, 1946-1948, Laurie Meijer Drees

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the spring of 1946, J. Allison Glen announced a public inquiry into Canada's federal administration of Indian Affairs and the Indian Act. In Parliament on 13 May 1946 this minister of Mines and Resources responsible for Indian Affairs moved "That a joint committee of the senate and house of commons be appointed to examine and consider the Indian Act ... with authority to investigate and report upon Indian administration in general" including treaty rights, band membership, enfranchisement of Indians, Indian schools, and "any other matter or thing pertaining to the social and economic status of Indians and their advancement."! …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Contents:

Frederick C. Luebke Award 2000
California Indian Conference
Internships at the American Folklife Center
Intertribal Bison Cooperative Conference 2000

"Going To Indian Territory": Attitudes Toward Native Americans In Little House On The Prairie, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Since its first printing in 1935, Little House on the Prairie has been a perennial favorite among countless readers. The Little House series itself ranks consistently as one of the most commercially popular of all times. However, Little House on the Prairie, the second book in the series, has become the center of numerous controversies. Yellow Medicine East School District, in Granite, Minnesota, which serves a portion of the Upper Sioux Community of that region, stopped class reading of the book, citing disgust with the text's portrayals of Native Americans. Such action follows a similar banning of the text …

Little Squatter On The Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Kansas Indians, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a person of her time and place. She fictionalized her memories to give what she honestly believed was the truest possible account-true in deeply human ways as well as in accurate details-of one family's settlement history on the Great Plains frontier. I have never really liked her work. While my sister read all the Little House books, I read ... Zane Grey. That I do not share Wilder's values and point of view is no argument against the books-I do not share Zane Grey's values and point of view, either. But Zane Grey is not held …

The Pre-Settlement Platte: Wooded Or Prairie River?, W. Carter Johnson, Susan E. Boettcher

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

The pre-settlement Platte River is commonly described as a mostly unwooded prairie river, comprised of water, sand, and wet grassland. However, primary historical accounts do not support this prairie river concept. Instead, the early accounts and quantitative information from the General Land Office survey indicate that, prior to settlement by European immigrants, the Platte was a wooded river traversing a prairie landscape. Woodland was reported as dense on innumerable islands in the channel, but scattered along on the outer banks. This woodland was cleared during exploration and early settlement. Thus, the openness of the post-settlement river observed early in the …

Strengths And Stresses Of Omaha Indian Families Living On The Reservation, Douglas A. Abbott, Glenna Slater

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

We studied current strengths and contemporary stresses of Omaha Indian families living on the reservation in northeast Nebraska. Interviews with 60 tribal members revealed that major family and tribal strengths included: extended family support, spiritual values and religious practices, community generosity and support, Omaha culture and traditions, and a determination of many tribal members to recognize and overcome their problems. Respondents also identified major stresses that included: alcohol use, family breakdown, tribal leadership, unemployment and their children's education. Social Interaction Theory suggests that the identification of stresses should be more common than the identification of strengths by an oppressed minority. …

Great Plains Research, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2000 – News And Notes

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

Contents:

Call for papers
Conferences

Review Of Hazardous Wastes In Rural America: Impacts, Implications, And Options For Rural Communities By Steven H. Murdock, Richard S. Krannich, And F. Larry Leistritz. Lanham, Larry E. Erickson

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

Hazardous Wastes describes the goals, methods, results, and conclusions of a research study, funded by the US Department of Agriculture, on the consequences of hazardous waste processing and storage sites in rural America. The inquiry compared current conditions and patterns of recent socioeconomic change in communities affected by waste facility siting and development with those that have experienced other types of recent development and with communities that have experienced only baseline patterns of change. Fifteen communities in five states (Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah) provided information for the study.

Review Of The Making Of The 1996 Farm Act By Lyle P. Schertz And Otto C. Doering Iii, Roy Frederick

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

Schertz and Doering have produced a useful, comprehensive volume that details key actions leading to passage of the 1996 Farm Act. Although both authors are distinguished economists, the book is more about the political process-and associated policymakers-than economics. It should have lasting value, if for no other reason than that the 1996 legislation differed greatly from the twenty or so farm acts preceding it. For anyone who has wondered why the outcome was different in 1996, this book is must reading.

The authors begin, correctly, with a chapter on the 1994-95 setting for farm legislation, since farm bills are typically …