Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Surveys Of Calling Amphibians In North Dakota, Douglas H. Johnson, Ronald D. Batie

United States Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center: Publications

Amphibians have received increased attention in recent years from the scientific community and general public alike. Many populations throughout the world have declined or have been extirpated, often without an apparent cause. Concern about the status of amphibians has translated into a growing interest in systematic and statistically sound monitoring programs. Several extensive efforts to monitor populations of calling amphibians are in place, and more are under development. Necessary for the design of appropriate surveys is an understanding of the behavior, especially vocalization, of the various species, and how it varies by geographic location and environmental conditions. In 1995 we …

Darkness In Anthropology, Peter Van Arsdale

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An essay covering Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon by Patrick Tierney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 417 pp. and related documents.

Growth, Condition, And Mortality Of Black Crappie, Bluegill, And Yellow Perch In Nebraska Sand Hills Lakes, Craig P. Paukert, David W. Willis, Andrew L. Glidden

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

The growth, condition, and mortality of black crappie, bluegill, and yellow perch were measured in 30 Nebraska Sand Hills lakes (1998, 1999) to determine the value of these parameters in these fish populations compared to other Great Plains populations. Growth was variable for all three fish species, but similar to or higher than populations in other midwestern states. Bluegill condition, as measured by mean relative weight, ranged from 115 to 123, indicating these populations were in very good condition. Mean relative weight by length for black crappie ranged from 94 to 114, but only 83 to 95 for yellow perch. …

Abundance And Habitat Associations Of Birds Wintering In The Platte River Valley, Nebraska, Craig Davis

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

The abundance and habitat associations of overwintering birds in Platte River Valley of central Nebraska may influence their long-term survival. I observed a total of 51 species over a three-year period in shrub-grassland, forest, grassland, and cropland habitats during the winter. Grassland habitats had the lowest abundance of wintering birds, while abundances in shrub-grassland, forest, and cropland habitats were higher and similar. Species richness was highest in forests ( x= 2.97 species) and lowest in grasslands (x = 0.73 species) and croplands (x = 0.57 species). Overall, horned larks (Eremophila alpestris), American tree sparrows (Spizella arborea), …

Review Of Insecticide Resistance: From Mechanisms To Management Edited By I. Denholm, J. A. Pickett, And A. L. Devonshire, Charles F. Chilcutt

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

When asked to review this volume, I feared it might be an overly long and involved textbook on pesticide resistance. Happily, the book is actually a collection of papers by some of the world's top resistance researchers. Written in scientific journal style, it contains fourteen concise, articulate, informative papers divided into two sections: "Genes and Mechanisms" and "Ecological Genetics and Management." The book is heavily geared toward resistance researchers, although geneticists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists may also find it instructive. The general reader would be wise to start with papers in the second section, which offer longer introductions and more …

Review Of American Indian Grandmothers: Traditions And Transitions Edited By Marjorie M. Schweitzer, Paula Bennett

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

This well-researched and deeply warm series of essays is intended to acquaint readers with twentieth-century Indian grandmothers as familial bridges between past cultural embeddedness and an increasingly dismembered culture stretched from its roots in myth and practice. The essays range from sociological monographs replete with statistics to intimate first-hand interpretive accounts from the grandmothers themselves. The historical, geographic, and psychological breadth of the vignettes assures their appeal to a wide range of scholars and ethno-elderphiles.

Schweitzer emphasizes that even when biology is the triggering event for becoming a grandmother, the context of Indian grandmotherhood is culturally construed. Kinship patterns determine …

Relationships Between Community Attributes And Residential Preference In Nonmetropolitan Nebraska, John C. Allen, Rebecca J. Vogt, Soonchul Ko

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

This paper examines the residential preferences of rural Nebraskans. Data from the 1998 Nebraska Rural Poll were analyzed at two levels. First, the residential preferences of rural Nebraskans were compared to those of the general population of the United States. Second, the relationships between the attributes of the respondents' current community and their residential preferences were examined. Current community size, the social attributes of the community, and evaluations of local community services were all determined to be important influences on residential preferences. The findings illustrate the possible positive impact on rural Great Plains communities of enhancing social interaction and creatively …

Review Of Standard Soil Methods For Long-Term Ecological Research Edited By G. Philip Robertson, David E. Coleman, Caroline S. Bledsoe, And Phillip Sollins, Mary Ann Vinton

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

Standard Soil Methods for Long-Term Ecological Research is the second in a series of books dedicated to summarizing the research results and methods of ecological studies being conducted at sites around North America and Antarctica under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. The twenty-one sites range from arctic tundra to hot desert and from natural tropical rainforest to urban and suburban areas.

Review Of Swine Source Book: Alternatives For Pork Producers Edited By Julie Tranquilla, Daniel Schmidt

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

This is a book that should be on every Ag teacher's desk in the country. Instead of espousing the factory production of hogs, the norm for the industry today, it gives alternative production techniques that should be useful to starting farmers, niche producers (including organic farmers), and anyone else who might want to raise hogs in a more ecologically sound and humane fashion.

The volume is a compilation of articles by various authors originally appearing as research papers or in magazines and journals. While each author has a different reason for presenting his or her system, all are alternatives to …

Review Of The Economics Of Organic Grain And Soybean Production In The Midwestern United States By Rick Welsh, Glenn A. Helmers

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

Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, this short report, its foreword claims, "synthesizes and interprets economic studies of organic grain and soybean production by Midwestern universities." In so doing it reviews and analyzes previously completed studies from Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota, along with two earlier studies of the Corn Belt.

The titles of the chapters that follow the introduction offer a clear idea of the report's attempt at coverage: " The Growing Organic Industry"; "Is Organic Agriculture Productive and Profitable?'; "Review of Midwestern Organic Grain and Soybean Studies"; "Additional Considerations"; and "Policy Implications." The work was completed …

Review Of The Black Elk Reader Edited By Clyde Holler, John R. Schneider

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1931, Nicholas Black Elk gave Nebraska/ Missouri writer John G. Neihardt his spiritual story. His hope was that this white man would send forth words good and true, that the book he made would help the "tree" of his suffering people to grow and bloom again. Now, seventy summers hence, we can but wonder what Black Elk would think of the outcome. To be sure, the book known as Black Elk Speaks has gained great fame and almost canonical stature worldwide, but its faithfulness to Black Elk's vision is now much in doubt. This collection of sixteen scholarly essays …

"We Anishinaabeg Are The Keepers Of The Names Of The Earth" Louise Erdrich's Great Plains, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

With these words, Louise Erdrich sets forth her own manifesto for writing about her place. A Native of the Northern Plains, Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa nation. In a stunning production of seven novels, six with interwoven tales and characters, two poetry collections, a memoir, and two coauthored books, Erdrich has created a vision of the Great Plains that spans the horizon of time and space and ontologically defines the people of her heritage.

ERDRICH'S NORTH DAKOTA

The literary impact is remarkable. Louise Erdrich's North Dakota cycle of novels includes the award-winning Love Medicine (1984), The …

Review Of Cowboys, Gentlemen And Cattle Thieves By Warren M. Elofson, Patrick A. Dunae

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This book focuses on the golden age of the ranching industry in western Canada from the early 1880s to the early 1900s. During that period large ranches were established in what is now southwestern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta, many of them owned by wealthy investors in England and eastern Canada; some of the spreads were managed by graduates of prestigious agricultural colleges. The owners, the managers and their families, and the cowboys they employed comprised a community that was cultured, conservative, and generally law-abiding.

Warren Elofson doesn't see it that way. He argues that the ranching frontier in the Canadian …

Review Of Noble, Wretched, & Redeemable: Protestant Missionaries To The Indians In Canada And The United States, 1820-1900 By C. L. Higham, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

By exploring how nineteenth-century Canadian and American missionaries wrote about Indians, this book examines a little-known aspect of mission work. Their accounts reveal remarkably similar-and increasingly negative- ideas about Indians that helped create the images policymakers and the public alike embraced. In their letters, diaries, official reports, and scholarly essays, Protestant missionaries "shaped the stereotypes that the literate Christian public had of the Indians in both Canada and the United States."

Although Canadian and United States Indian policies were motivated by different strategies and environments (at least until the late nineteenth century)' missionaries on both sides of the border had …

Review Of The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Journal By Stephen R. Jones, Ron Block

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In The Last Prairie: A Sandhills Joumal, naturalist Stephen R. Jones provides an informed and passionate portrait of the Sandhills of western Nebraska, "the last remaining relic of the boundless grasslands that once extended from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains." These grass-fixed sand dunes have not only provided Jones with his subject but also a style, since these twenty essays are as graceful, diverse, and startling in their transitions as the Sandhills themselves.

A representative essay may begin in first person, emphasizing the sensual complexity of directly experiencing the Sandhills. But then by subtle shifts and turns, …

Review Of Art Of The North American Indians: The Thaw Collection Edited By Gilbert T. Vincent, Sherry Brydon, And Ralph T. Coe, Joyce M. Szabo

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This spectacular volume, with 260 works in color and 510 in black and white, records the Eugene and Clare Thaw collection of Native American art now housed in a wing of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Introductory essays by Eugene Thaw, Gilbert Vincent, and Ralph Coe exploring the origins of the collection and its eventual move to Cooperstown set the stage for eight individual essays by various scholars introducing each of the cultural areas into which the holdings are divided. The Thaw collection was built around the collectors' aesthetic responses to individual works rather than anthropological interest, …

Review Of Wagons For The Santa Fe Trade: Wheeled Vehicles And Their Makers, 1822-1880 By Mark L. Gardner, Mike Capps

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1821, William Becknell and his companions from Missouri arrived in Santa Fe with a few pack animals loaded with an assortment of trade goods. The response they received from goods-starved New Mexicans was so enthusiastic they quickly returned to Missouri for another load to sell in this new market. Operating on the theory that the more supplies they carried the greater their profits would be, Becknell's 1822 company loaded three wagons this time and again reaped a tremendous reward for their efforts. When news of his success spread he was quickly joined by others, and a trading enterprise to …

From Feikema To Manfred, From The Big Sioux Basin To The Northern Plains, Arthur R. Huseboe

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In 1991, when he had just turned seventy-nine years old, Frederick Manfred was interviewed at his Luverne, Minnesota, home by three young writers for an article that was to appear in the Agassiz Review that spring.¹ He answered questions about his earliest urges to become a novelist when he was writing under the pen name Feike Feikema, questions about people who had encouraged his ambitions, and about the autobiographical sources for his novels, or his rumes, as he preferred to call them. He was asked about his writing methods and the motivations for some of his characters and …

Review Of Happy As A Big Sunflower: Adventures In The West, 1876-1880. By Rolf Johnson., H. Arnold Barton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In December 1876, Rolf Johnson, the twenty-year-old son of the Swedish immigrant parents in Henderson Grove, Illinois, began writing a diary he would continue until it ended without explanation four years later in Cubero, New Mexico. In March 1876, the family moved, with other Swedish settlers from Knox County, Illinois, out to Phelps County, Nebraska. Rolf recounts the excitement and hardships of pioneering of the Plains, including plagues of grasshoppers, prairie fires, lawlessness, and Indian unrest. But he also tells of courage, neighborliness, and community building. He works the harvests in eastern Nebraska and hunts buffalo to the west.

Review Of The Wichita Indians: Traders Of Texas And The Southern Plains, 1540-1845 By F. Todd Smith, Howard Meredith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The perception of order in seeming chaos in The Wichita Indians arises from the historical discipline of Todd Smith. Building upon the studies of Elizabeth A. Harper John and the work of several archaeologists, Smith states that his study is not intended to be the final word on the Wichita Nations, but an attempt at an objective point of view providing a base of diplomatic and military historical interpretation for future work by "other scholars to build upon and produce more detailed studies .... " These will include Anglo-American historians and Wichita scholars and leaders such as Gary McAdams and …

Review Of Baum's Road To Oz: The Dakota Years Edited By Nancy Tystad Koupal, Patricia Dimond

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Students of Baum will appreciate Koupal's text, which not only provides samplings of his early writings, ranging from newspaper editorials to poetry to children's stories, but also furnishes critical essays preceding Baum's work. In addition to representing the multiple genres Baum employed, the volume offers insight into the writer's personal perspectives regarding religion, women's suffrage, and race. Illustrations and photographs compliment the text, serving the Baum scholar as well as anyone interested in a historical perspective of early South Dakota.

Readers will find in-depth coverage of the burgeoning town of Aberdeen and brief commentary on surrounding areas. Climate, scenery, recreation, …

Review Of Reclaiming Indigenous Voice And Vision Edited By Marie Battiste, Dennis Martinez

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The eighteen essays collected in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision provide, finally and in one volume, a substantive and reasonably comprehensive analysis by the first generation of Indigenous scholars of the present and future role of Indigenous Knowledge and the emerging Indigenous cultural renaissance in the global context of neocolonial Western culture and science. The book springs from an International Summer Institute at the University of Saskatchewan on the cultural restoration of oppressed Indigenous peoples held in 1996 and attended by mostly Indigenous scholars from Canada, the US, India, and New Zealand.

This is not yet another book, produced by …

Notes And News- Fall 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes and News- Fall 2001

CALL FOR SPEAKERS

CALL FOR PAPERS

VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM

CALL FOR PAPERS

Review Of The Texas Sheriff; Lord Of The County Line By Thad Sitton, Nail Sapper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Thad Sitton's The Texas Sheriff, an anecdotal collage of reminiscences about local law enforcement in Texas in the first half of the twentieth century, is based upon extensive interviews with more than thirty retired Texas county sheriffs as well as articles from the Sheriffs' Association of Texas Magazine and the Texas Lawman. Sitton also draws upon memoirs and newspaper columns written by former Texas county sheriffs and reportage in the popular press.

Unfortunately for this book, Texas is a large state with 254 counties. The Texas Sheriff focuses on only a few counties with colorful or communicative sheriffs. In …

"No Place To Hide" Wright Morris's Great Plains, Joseph J. Wydeven

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Perhaps echoing Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," Wright Morris begins his finest novel, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), with an invitation to the reader: "Come to the window," we are beckoned, and then we are told what is there to be seen: not much. But what is there is a view of the Great Plains that is highly conceptual and paradoxically suggestive in its emptiness. Outside the window, "[t]he view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky." With us inside the hotel is an old man, Tom Scanlon, who, soured on experience and addicted to nostalgia, has …

Review Of The Frontier World Of Edgar Dewdney By Brian Titley, J. William Brennan

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

As a bureaucrat and politician, Edgar Dewdney figures prominently in the history of the Canadian West during the late nineteenth century. He was by turns Indian Commissioner (1879-1888), Lieutenant Governor of the North West Territories (1881-1888), a Member of Parliament (representing Assiniboia East), and Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (1888- 1892). This slim volume sheds new light on Dewdney and his legacy.

Dewdney's success in public life was, his biographer argues, the result of good luck, timing, and ability in various degrees. His appointment as Indian Commissioner was a case in point. Dewdney did have …

Review Of The American West: Out Of Myth, Into Reality By Peter H. Hassrick & Visions Of The West: Art And Artifacts From The Private Collection Of J. P. Bryan, Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated And Others Edited By Melissa Baldridge, With An Introduction By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Brian W. Dippie

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

WESTERN ART'S BIG TENT

Western art continues on its own distinctive path: disdained and ignored by art critics, especially in the East; beloved by a huge public, especially in the West. Western art museums display their treasures, traveling exhibitions spread the word, and those with money vote with their wallets. If price is a gage of popularity, then historic and contemporary Western art has never been more popular.

The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality is the catalog of a remarkable achievement- a touring exhibition, featuring 127 works of Western art, that, from inception to realization, was mounted in …

Review Of Frederic Remington: The Writer By Roscoe L. Buckland, Fred Erisman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Roscoe L. Buckland's Frederic Remington: The Writer sets out to introduce the literary side of the well-known painter-sculptor. It achieves an overview of Remington's life, fiction, and journalism, including a helpful bibliography of critical studies (especially those appearing after 1975), but ultimately proves disappointing.

Part of the disappointment derives from its organization. After a thoughtful preface and a biographical chapter, the book offers six topical chapters focusing on Remington's writings: "Soldiering in the West," "Indians," "Cowboys," "The Strenuous Life," "The Martial Spirit," and "John Ermine of the Yellowstone." The arrangement emphasizes Remington's principal topics, but leads to an …

The Earth Says Have A Place William Stafford And A Place Of Language, Thomas Fox Averill

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the spring of 1986, my daughter was almost four years old and my wife and I were to have poet William Stafford to dinner during a visit he made to Washburn University. I searched for a short Stafford poem our daughter might memorize as a welcome and a tribute. We came across this simple gem, and she spoke it to him at the table.

Later in his visit, Stafford told a story about "Note." He traveled extensively all over the world. Once, in Pakistan, he opened his bags for a customs official. "Books," the man observed. "I am a …

A Conversation With Jane Smiley, Jonis Agee

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

JANE SMILEY: LOCATION AND A GEOGRAPHER OF LOVE

In her essay on place, Eudora Welty points out that "Henry James once said there isn't any difference between 'the English novel' and 'the American novel,' since there are only two kinds of novels at all: the good and the bad." Then Welty responds to him stating that for good novels "fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place .... The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving …