Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of The Prairie People: Forgotten Anabaptists By Rod Janzen, Courtney Muir Wallner

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In his latest book, The Prairie People: Forgotten Anabaptists, Rod Janzen examines the Prairieleut, a sect of Germanic Anabaptists who have largely escaped the public view, even as researchers have focused on their relatives, the Hutterites.

The Prairieleut and modern-day Hutterites are descendants of a small group of radical Christians who rejected the orthodox doctrines of infant baptism and Transubstantiation and began living communally in 1528. After more than three centuries of religious persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Hutterites fled overseas in the 1870s and settled on the northern Great Plains. They selected a sparsely populated area …

Review Of Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen: Reflections At Sixty And Beyond By Larry Mcmurtry, University Of Texas At Austin Westbrook

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Larry McMurtry's question for Walter Benjamin is "what kind of stories arise in a place where nothing has ever happened . . . ?" All that happens in Archer County are "accidents, injuries, bad choices, good choices, mistakes made with horses, misjudgments of neighbors, and the like."

What McMurty occasionally realizes, but often forgets, is that he is writing about his personal experience, not about the American West. For him, the most important characteristic of prairie life is "emptiness." What "rodeos, movies, Western art, and pulp fiction all miss is the overwhelming loneliness of the westering experience."

Reflecting on his …

Review Of Gentle Eminence: A Life Of Cardinal Flahiff By P. Wallace Platt, Johannes C. Wolfart

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is a very odd book. It is also very interesting- remarkably so. What I cannot determine is whether it is interesting merely because it is odd. Certainly its main subject, George Bernard Flahiff, once Cardinal and Archbishop of Winnipeg, does not appear to have been a very interesting man.

What is interesting, however, is the relationship of the biographer to his subject, a man whom P. Wallace Platt obviously admires. Flahiff was Platt's Basilian confrere and spiritual director. It should be no surprise, then, that Platt has much to say about the essential goodness of the man. Indeed, he …

The New Deal's Land Utilization Program In The Great Plains, Geoff Cunfer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Drive the remote highways of the Great Plains and you will find signs marking US Forest Service property in the midst of the nation's vast interior grassland, a place where it could be miles to the next tree, let alone a forest. In fact, the Forest Service (USFS) manages several million acres of land in the Great Plains, public land designated "National Grasslands" and committed to grazing by private cattle ranchers. The National Grasslands are remnants of the Great Plains past, their story rooted in pioneer homesteads and in the drought and depression of the 1930s. USFS brochures explain the …

"The Worst Floods In History" Federal Government And The Floods Of 1944 In The Elkhorn River Basin, Todd Kerstetter

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Water has played a critical, even defining, role in the history of the American West. Typically, scarcity determined water's significance. Farmers descended of European stock found too little water in the West to continue their traditional agriculture. Battles linger to this day over water rights for irrigation and urban usage. In a less-examined phenomenon, excess water has shaped the otherwise arid Plains by influencing the relationship between humans and their environment. In Nebraska's Elkhorn River Basin, a steady history of flooding led humans to alter the basin in attempts to control or mitigate flooding. Record flooding in 1944 revealed the …

Managing Bison To Restore Biodiversity, Joe C. Truett, Michael Phillips, Kyran Kunkel, Russell Miller

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

Prior to their demise in the late 1800s, bison coexisted with and helped sustain a diverse and spectacular assemblage of animals and plant communities on the Great Plains. Bison, in concert with fire, exerted strong control on the structure of the vegetation by grazing, trampling, and wallowing. The changes in the vegetation induced changes in many animal populations. These impacts, coupled with the bison's role as the major converter of grass to meat, so greatly affected other species that some have called bison a "keystone" species in the Great Plains ecosystem. The black-tailed prairie dog, dependent on bison grazing over …

Nutrient Composition Of Grass- And Grain-Finished Bison, Martin Marchello

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

The North American buffalo (Bison bison) has survived near extinction to become a commodity (meat, hides, and hair) in a consumer-driven market. Since this is a growth industry, primarily young bulls are slaughtered for meat, while most females are used to build the herd. Bison meat is highly palatable, and previous research showed that grain-finished bison meat is low in fat and high in protein. However, bison may be grain- or grass-finished. In this study we found few differences in nutrient content of the meat between grain- or grass-finished bison. Grass-finished animals had a little more moisture (75.9 …

Carbon And Nitrogen Isotopes In Archeological Bison Remains As Indicators Of Paleoenvironmental Change In Southern Alberta, Jeremy J. Leyden, Gerald Oetelaar

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

Between 1995 and 1997, archeological excavations in northwest Calgary, Alberta, uncovered cultural materials from several occupations dating back 8,500 years. Samples of bison bone recovered at the sites were chemically prepared and analyzed for isotopic ratios. Using the resultant carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios, we reconstructed the diet of bison from four different cultural occupations spanning the last 8,500 years. Based on current and established models of bison subsistence behavior, this dietary information was used to infer large-scale environmental changes during this time interval in our study area. The inferred changes in vegetation and climate were compared with paleoenvironmental reconstructions …

Review Of Great Texas Birds , Paul A. Johnsgard

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

John O'Neill is unique: the only active professional bird artist who is also a world-class ornithologist. He is thus a kind of reincarnation of George M. Sutton, O'Neill's mentor and the idol of thousands of lovers of birds and fine bird art. Since graduating from the University of Oklahoma, O'Neill has repeatedly visited the Peruvian tropics, discovering more than a dozen species (more than any other living biologist) and illustrating hundreds more for field guides and other ornithological books. His subjects are generally more detailed, and his palette brighter, than Sutton's, but he is able to use white space and …

Review Of Gatherings Of Angels: Migrating Birds And Their Ecology Edited By Kenneth P. Able, Gary Lingle

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

Who among us has not marveled at the mystery of bird migration? I know the sights and sounds of vast skeins of geese plying northward, or the kettles of cranes or raptors floating on thermals across the prairie skies, or even the sudden appearance of gaudily clad Baltimore orioles or bobolinks in the spring still quicken my pulse. How do they navigate across the vast expanses of the globe? What cues tell them when it's time to begin their treks? And, more fundamentally, why do birds migrate? These are simply a few of the myriad questions surrounding this natural phenomenon.

Review Of Black Eyes All The Time: Intimate Violence, Aboriginal Women, And The Justice System Byanne Mcgillivray And Brenda Comaskey, Ross Gordon Green

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

Many books have documented the history of colonization and oppression faced by Aboriginal people in Canada, often within the context of discord between First Nations communities and the prevailing justice system. Black Eyes All the Time pushes this analysis to a new and challenging level. Based on a study of twenty-six Aboriginal women interviewed in Winnipeg, this work provides an in-depth and sensitive consideration of the painful topic of intimate violence within Canadian Aboriginal communities.

The women interviewed had all been victims of spousal violence. Quotations from these interviews are effectively interspersed throughout the text. The authors' research findings are …

Review Of Indian Reservations In The United States: Territory, Sovereignty, And Socioeconomic Change By Klaus Frantz, James Riding In

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

This book addresses complicated social, economic, and political factors that have shaped the development of American Indian reservations. Authored by an Austrian geographer, it is a revised translation of the second edition in German. Its interdisciplinary approach is relevant to geography, history, American Indian studies, sociology, economics, anthropology, and political science.

Review Of Tribal Government Today: Politics On Montana Indian Reservations, Walter C. Fleming

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

In this revision of their 1990 Westview Press edition, the authors state that their aim "is not only to scrutinize the workings of Montana's seven reservation governments but also to identify what is representative of tribal politics throughout the West" (5). A chapter is therefore devoted to an overview of tribal governance in each reservation in Montana.

The major difference here (aside from a much-needed index) is the inclusion of an epilogue, "Tribal Governments in Transition." Users must therefore be cautious: since the authors have not revised each chapter, the information and observations about individual reservations is current only to …

Review Of Passage Of Discovery: The American Rivers Guide To The Missouri River Of Lewis And Clark By Daniel B. Botkin, Bruce A. Barton

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

In Passage of Discovery, well-known ecologist and noted author Daniel Botkin takes the reader on a historic and ecological journey up the Missouri River from its confluence near St. Charles, Missouri, to its source at Three Forks, Montana, following the route of Lewis and Clark in 1804-05. Apparent throughout is Botkin's justifiably high regard for the observational, intuitive, and leadership skills demonstrated by both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their monumental expedition. The fact that only one member of the party died, and that due to circumstances beyond their control, is a tribute to those skills.

Review Of Theorizing The Americanist Tradition Edited By Lisa Philips Valentine And Regna Darnell, Thomas C. Patterson

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

The twenty-five essays in this volume enhance our understanding and appreciation of the Americanist tradition of anthropological theory and practice. The Americanist tradition, as several authors point out, has been concerned historically with Native-language texts and the knowledge they encode about the culture of Native communities and the individuals who compose them. The Americanists' concern with texts was manifested in the efforts of Albert Gatschet, George Dorsey, James Dorsey, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document and preserve the oral knowledge of cultures that were being rapidly transformed or erased altogether. …

Review Of The Destruction Of The Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 By Andrew C. Isenberg, William A. Dobak

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The transformation of the Great Plains through the introduction of new plants and animals and the restriction or near-eradication of native species is one of the great environmental events of the past two hundred years. In The Destruction of the Bison, Andrew C. Isenberg describes the nineteenth-century decline and near-extinction of one species and early twentieth-century attempts to regenerate and reintroduce it to its former habitat. Isenberg deals with cultural, ecological, and economic factors, stressing the "volatile" nature of the Plains and declaring that "the destruction of the bison was not merely the result of human agency, but the …

Review Of George Washington Grayson And The Creek Nation, 1843-1920 By Mary Jane Warde, Michael D. Green

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Late in his long and illustrious life, George Washington Grayson wrote a memoir. W. David Baird edited and published it in 1988 under the title A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy. Grayson had written mostly about his service in the Civil War but included enough about his life as politician and businessman to suggest he would be an excellent candidate for a biography. Mary Jane Warde, who began this study as a graduate student under Baird's direction, has done her subject justice.

Warde says Grayson was a progressive nationalist and a cultural broker. Well-educated, he represents a type in …

Review Of Massacre Along The Medicine Road: A Social History Of The Indian War Of 1864 In Nebraska Territory By Ronald Becher, Eli Paul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Indian War of 1864 provides the historian of the West with a wealth of sources, as one may imagine after nearly a century-and-ahalf of accumulation. Official army reports and contemporary newspaper accounts join later reminiscences and oral histories to form a sizeable, if not formidable, body of information. Add to these some newly appreciated sources, such as the vast bureaucratic paperwork generated by the 1890s Indian depredation claims found in the National Archives, and it could only be a matter of time before a book like Massacre along the Medicine Road: A Social History of the Indian War of …

Bison: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Great Plains, An Introduction, Kenneth J. Winkle

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Throughout history, bison have exerted a fundamental influence on life and culture on the Great Plains, as both an ever-present reality and an enduring symbol. When planning the Center for Great Plains Studies' Interdisciplinary Symposium for the spring of 2000, Charlene Porsild, now with the Montana Historical Society, and I wanted to choose a topic with relevance that spanned the millennia, and so we selected the bison. Three years in planning, "Bison: The Past, Present, and Future of the Great Plains" brought over five hundred people to discuss, debate, analyze, and celebrate the bison as perhaps the premier symbol of …

Review Of European Immigrants In The American West: Community Histories Edited By Frederick Luebke, Jon Gjerde

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

European immigrants, Frederick Luebke argues correctly in his introduction to this collection of previously published essays, have been all but ignored by Western historians. Earlier Turnerian historians expected European immigrants to assimilate because this accorded well with their American frontier narrative. "New Western historians," focused as they are on race, also overlooked Europeans. Because European immigrants were "white," these revisionists of Turner similarly anticipated the Europeans' assimilation into the white majority. For their part, labor historians who have concentrated on class have rued the failure of Western workers, in part because of their attachment to ethnic group, to develop a …

Title And Contents- Spring 2001

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 21/ Number 2 / Spring 2001

CONTENTS

BISON: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF THE GREAT PLAINS AN INTRODUCTION Kenneth Winkle

THE FIRST PHASE OF DESTRUCTION: KILLING THE SOUTHERN PLAINS BUFFALO, 1790-1840 Pekka Hamalainen

"THE LAST BUFFALO HUNT" AND BEYOND: PLAINS SIOUX ECONOMIC STRATEGIES IN THE EARLY RESERVATION PERIOD Jeffrey Ostler

"WHEN WE WERE FIRST PAID": THE BLACKFOOT TREATY, THE WESTERN TRIBES, AND THE CREATION OF THE COMMON HUNTING GROUND, 1855 William E. Farr

REVIEW ESSAY: THE GREAT PLATTE RIVER ROAD ARCHWAY MONUMENT Susan Wunder and John Wunder

BOOK REVIEWS

Andrew C. Isenberg The Destruction of …

"When We Were First Paid" The Blackfoot Treaty, The Western Tribes, And The Creation Of The Common Hunting Ground, 1855, William E. Farr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In mid-October of 1855, Blackfoot Treaty commissioner Isaac 1. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory and ex-officio its superintendent of Indian Affairs, and his co-commissioner Colonel Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Superintendency including Nebraska Territory, finally assembled the Blackfoot Peace Council just below the confluence of the Judith and Missouri Rivers. The federal government through the Office of Indian Affairs by then had already pieced together a new reservation policy for the West. This "new order of things," largely designed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny, hoped to reduce white conflicts with Indians, to prevent, if possible, expensive military …

Review Of The Earth Shall Weep: A History Of Native America By James Wilson, Clara Sue Kidwell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This general history proposes to offer a Native American perspective on Indian-Anglo contact. Wilson's approach is now fairly standard. He includes substantial quotes from collections of Indian origin traditions and general ethnographic descriptions of elements of Indian cultures, bringing the narrative into the 1970s with accounts of the Indian occupations of Alcatraz in 1969 and the Wounded Knee trading post in 1972 .

Wilson's sympathetic telling of Native history leads to certain problematic interpretations. He describes Aztec leaders, for example, as holding flowers to their noses to counteract the unpleasant body odor of Spanish conquistadors who did not bathe, although …

Review Of Something In The Soil: Legacies And Reckonings In The New West By Patricia Nelson Limerick, Mark Daniel Barringer

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Stories matter.

That simple statement is at the heart of the now decades-old struggle between the "Old" and "New" Western histories. The stories people hear about their pasts contribute to the construction of both personal and collective identities. In other words, what we believe about who we are is, to a significant extent, determined by the stories we are told about where we came from. The dominant story of the past two centuries in American history has been the tale of the frontier-for most Americans, the "winning" of the West. It has become the creation myth of the United States. …

Review Of Into The West: The Story Of Lts People By Walter Nugent, Anne M. Butler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Walter Nugent's Into the West: The Story of Its People adds an outstanding volume to the canon of Western history, reminding readers of the intellectual vitality that fuels this discipline. The book undertakes a grand sweep of Western history, from the speculative past of prehistoric tribes to the speculative future of the twenty-first century. On this epic journey across and through the American West, Nugent delivers exactly what he promises: a book about people.

Despite romantic notions about the region that haunt Americans, Nugent sees the West as a definable place with a history larger than images of a "frontier …

Review Of A Country In The Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard Devoto, History, And The American Land By John L. Thomas, Frank J. Popper

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

John Thomas, a historian at Brown University, offers a conservation-focused portrait of two of the last century's most distinguished men of American Western letters, Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) and Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). Both grew up amid the ambivalent legacy of the boomer frontier. Both became prolific historians, novelists, journalists, and public intellectuals with touchy ties to academia. Both rank among the creators of modern environmentalism.

Thomas's sharply written, often evocative account of their life, work, and friendship deals largely with their efforts to preserve the public domain-that is, the federal lands of the intermountain West, what Thomas calls the national commons. …

Review Of Documents Of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, And Conventions, 1775-1979 Edited By Vine Deloriajr. And Raymond J. Demallie, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The relationship of Indian tribes to the federal government constitutes a legal maze since federal Indian law is embodied in a vast array of Congressional Acts, treaties and agreements, executive orders, rulings, conventions, and judicial opinions. Charles Kappler's Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties has been a standard reference for important documents relating to American Indian diplomacy. In their impressive two-volume set, part of the Legal History of North America series, Deloria and DeMallie have reproduced hundreds of treaties and agreements made by Indian nations that are unavailable in Kappler.

Volume one's twelve chapters range from the Pre-Revolutionary War period to …

Review Of The American West: A New Interpretive History By Robert V. Hine And John Mack Faragher, Keith Edgerton

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

This is flat out the best, most inclusive, least partisan textbook on Western American history available to contemporary professionals and the general public. Lack of a suitable, comprehensive, apolemical text has long constrained teachers of Western US history; this one is something of an anomaly too: a textbook that is actually compelling to read.

The book is a substantial revision of Hine's 1984 The American West: An Interpretative History, second edition. It is comprehensive and capacious in its sweep-incorporating a great deal of important new scholarship on gender, the environment, ethnicity, and Native Americans-generous in detail, replete with superb …

Review Of Buffalo Soldiers And Officers Of The Ninth Cavalry, 1867-1898: Black & White Together By Charles L. Kenner, Tom Phillips

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Charles Kenner presents a vivid portrait of some of the men and officers of one of the four regiments of black enlisted men and mostly white officers in the post-Civil War army. This regimental cast runs the gamut from the dedicated and gallant to bigots and bullies. There is Colonel Edward Hatch, who commanded the Ninth for twenty-three years, and Major Guy V. Henry, a tireless cheerleader for the regiment and his own career. Here, too, are rankers "of all degrees of competence," such as Emanuel Stance, a Medal of Honor winner so hated he was probably murdered by fellow …

Review Of The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology And Animal Kinship By Howard L. Harrod, Christopher Vecsey

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Over the past several decades Howard Harrod-Oberlin Alumni Professor of Social Ethics and Sociology at Vanderbilt University- has published widely and well regarding the religious history of Great Plains Indians. His latest work examines what he calls "'sacred ecology' ... the sensibility, evident in North Plains cultures, that the world was constituted by powers that took the form of Persons. In hunting cultures, these Persons often appeared in animal form." A non-Indian (indeed, a non-hunter), Harrod has written his book because he thinks that these Native Americans have valuable insights for us all in "reimagining our relationships with the nonhuman …