Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

Review Of Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance And American Literature, 1824-1932, By Joshua David Bellin, Edward W. Huffstetler

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The central metaphor of Joshua David Bellin's study is an intriguing one, that the BOOK REVIEWS 157 interaction between "sacred performance by Indians and the performance of Indianness by Indians and whites alike" functions as a kind of cross-cultural repository, or Amedicine bundle," for the emerging America of the nineteenth century. His argument, in a nutshell, is that the co-opting of Indian sacred performance by the dominant white culture has shaped the evolution of both Indian and white notions of spirituality and cultural identity these performances help create. And while this is unquestionably true, the argument in the end seems …

Review Of Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, The Battle To Save The Buffalo, And The Birth Of The New West. By Michael Punke., Phillip Drennon Thomas

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Although the decline of the American bison is an often-told story, Michael Punke's meticulously researched work provides an engaging and careful delineation of George Bird Grinnell's singular role in marshaling the resources and support that led to the preservation and protection of the buffalo. -It's a story with many chapters, including the hunting and near extermination of the buffalo by hide hunters after the Civil War; the experiences of Grinnell in the lands beyond the Mississippi beginning in 1870 and his evolving interest in the region's wildlife and natural history; the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and the …

Review Of "Picturing A Different West: Vision, Illustration, And The Tradition Of Cather And Austin," By Janis P. Stout, Thomas Austenfeld

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Janis Stout's credentials are impeccable: as the author of biographies {of Cather and Katherine Anne Porter} and of critical studies of American women novelists, and as denizen of the West and Southwest, she knows her topic. Starting from what she terms Willa Cather's and Mary Austin's "highly visual prose," Stout builds upon an argument about gender in the West made by Cather scholar Susan Rosowski in her 1999 book, Birthing a Nation. Stout posits that Austin and Cather encountered a West already pictorially determined by the monumental imagery of white, Anglo-Saxon, adventuresome, imperialist, violent, rugged, and most of all …

"You Have To Be Involved ... To Play A Part In It" Assessing Kainai Attitudes About Voting In Canadian Elections, Yale D. Belanger

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Two days prior to the federal election on June 28, 2004, the Lethbridge Herald ran an article in which the renowned Cree leader and former Member of Parliament Elijah Harper (Churchill electoral district in Manitoba, 1993-97) publicly implored First Nations people in Canada to participate in the forthcoming vote. Citing the recent demographic shift showing a dramatic increase in the number of young First Nations people nationally and their potential ability to influence provincial and federal electoral results, Harper proclaimed that "Native people have a positive role to play in this process." Referring to the endemic lack of voter turnout …

Review Of "Playing Ourselves: Interpreting Native Histories At Historic Reconstructions." By Laura Peers, Sandra Dudley

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Based on research carried out over a decade into enactment at five North American reconstructed historic sites in the Great Plains and around the Great Lakes, this is essentially a book about encounters: encounters between Native interpreters and visitors at historic sites, of course-but also encounters between differing preconceptions of history, between ways of life, between people and things, and between the present and the past. Indeed, the chapters are interspersed with "vignettes" or snapshots of such encounters.

All the sites discussed in the book depict the people, activity, and material culture associated with missions and fur trading. They were …

Review Of "Lynching To Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence," By Cynthia Skove Nevels, Alwyn Barr

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

From the Civil War to the early twentieth century the growing population of Brazos County, Texas included about equal numbers of white and black southerners. That division contributed to tense political campaigns between Democrats and Republicans as well as acts of political and racial violence. Among new settlers came Bohemian, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Anglos did not immediately accept them as white because of cultural differences. The immigrants sought white status in several ways, including racial violence.

In 1896 a mob seized three African Americans from jail and hanged them. Two had been accused of assaulting a white girl. The …

Review Of "North American Indians In The Great War." By Susan Applegate Krouse, Thomas A. Britten

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Anthropologist Susan Applegate Krouse employs the records of Joseph Kossuth Dixon to shed light on the experiences of American Indian servicemen during the First World War. A former Baptist preacher, Dixon waged a twodecade- long campaign before and after WWI to preserve a record of Indian cultures and traditions before Native Americans "vanished" as distinctive peoples. To this end, Dixon traveled extensively to photograph and film reservation Indians, at times choreographing or staging scenes that fit his somewhat romanticized view of indigenous life. On the eve of the U.S. entry into WWI, he argued for the creation of segregated Indian …

Review Of "The Cypress Hills: An Island By Itself." By Walter Hildebrandt And Brian Hubner, George Colpitts

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The Cypress Hills, rising as outliers in the northern portion of the Missouri Coteau and dominating the mixed xeric grasslands of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta, have a vast human story of their own. They are certainly worthy of their own history book. This new edition of Hildebrandt and Hubner's 1994 book has been "rewritten and reshaped" to retell the story of the prehistory, aboriginal, early trade, and mounted police history of the region. Originally serving as historians and guides of the Fort Walsh National Historic Site, the authors were well placed to provide it. The Cypress Hills presents a …

Review Of "Landscapes Of Colorado: Mountains And Plains." By Ann Scarlett Daley And Michael Paglia, Rose Glaser Fredrick

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Landscapes of Colorado: Mountains and Plains, with a historical overview by Ann Scarlett Daley, the book's curator, and text by Michael Paglia, is a handsome survey of contemporary landscape painters and photographers working in the state. One could argue with a choice here and there. For example, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, European installation artists who have lived in New York since 1964 and created just one major work for Colorado in 1972, Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, with one more in the planning stages for 2011, are said to have "a long commitment to Colorado." Though their work is seminal, …

Review Of "So This Is The World & Here I Am In It," By Di Brandt, Tanis Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

When Di Brandt speaks about poetryand its political dimensions, people listen, sometimes with their mouths agape, at her audacity and at her long looping ecoerotic sentences. Brandt's literary, ecocritical, and philosophical stances are well represented in So this is the world, as are her poetics, emphasized here through her reading of the prairie as both aesthetic and consciousness, a local that has much to teach us about the global. The collection is bracketed by two luminous essays-"This land that I love, this wide, wide prairie" and the title essay, "So this is the world and here I am in …

Review Of "Buffalo Soldiers In The West: A Black Soldiers Anthology." Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud And Michael N. Searles, Dwayne Mack

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the Civil War, some 180,000 African Americans served with courage in the Union Army, and more than 40,000 died. Following the war, as the United States moved to secure its Western territories, African American infantry and cavalry, whom the Cheyennes and Comanches of the Plains called "Buffalo Soldiers," helped in this endeavor. The Army Reorganization Act of 1866 approved the formation of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry. In Buffalo Soldiers in the West, Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles collect previously published essays on these intrepid servicemen. The collection describes how Buffalo …

Review Of "Forty Acres And A Fool: How To Live In The Country And Still Keep Your Sanity." By Roger Welsch, Gwendolyn K. Meister

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

These recent books by longtime Nebraska author, folklorist, and humorist Roger Welsch examine life in the Great Plains from two quite different perspectives. Forty Acres and a Fool, ostensibly a how-to book on moving to the country, is written in a personal, conversational style from the start. In the introduction Welsch relates the story of his own physical (and mental) relocation to Dannebrog, a village of 352 in central Nebraska. Although the book offers practical advice on everything from moving buildings to fitting in with the social life of one's chosen rural community, it feels essentially like sitting down …

Review Of "Nuclear Nebraska: The Remarkable Story Of The Little County That Couldn't Be Bought." By Susan Cragin., Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

For nearly twenty-five years after Congress passed the 1980 Federal Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, Nebraska was torn by controversy over where a waste dump should be spotted in the state. The final act came in 2005, when Nebraska sent $146 million in damages to the five-state Central Compact Commission in charge of constructing the facility. Nothing was built.

Susan Cragin's book is a highly readable, well-researched, and very one-sided look at the uproar that cost all those millions of dollars, left a small Great Plains county irredeemably split, and caused years of newspaper headlines, angry meetings and hearings, and …

Jim, Antonia, And The Wolves Displacement In Cather's My Antonia, Robin Cohen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In one of the most frequently noted incidents in Willa Cather's My Antonia, Russian immigrant Pavel reveals on his deathbed that, when driving his friend's wedding party sledge, he saved his own life and companion Peter's by throwing the bride and groom to the attacking wolves. Antonia and Jim are fascinated by this story, and readers are haunted and intrigued by it. The tale holds the obvious appeal (both for the children and Cather's reader) of the drama of the incident, the color of its remote foreign setting, and the morbid satisfaction of learning the mysterious past of the …

Review Of "The Choctaws In Oklahoma: From Tribe To Nation, 1855-1970." By Clara Sue Kidwell, Robert Keith Collins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Scholars of anthropology (particularly historical anthropology), history, and Native American studies interested in Choctaw history, cultural changes, everyday life choices, and contributions to American culture should find The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855-1970 and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World important new contributions to the historical literature articulated by strong Choctaw voices. And readers interested in the complexities of Choctaw life in the Southern Plains, how Choctaws interacted with the region's other Indigenous groups (e.g., Kiowas and Comanches), and the inconsistencies between federal policies and Choctaw lived realities over time will be …

Title And Contents

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 29 / Number 1 / Winter 2009

THE METHODISTS' GREAT 1869 CAMP MEETING AND ABORIGINAL CONSERVATION STRATEGIES IN THE NORTH SASKATCHEWAN RIVER VALLEY

"YOU HAVE TO BE INVOLVED ... TO PLAY A PART IN IT": ASSESSING KAINAI ATTITUDES ABOUT VOTING IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

JIM, ANTONIA, AND THE WOLVES: DISPLACEMENT IN CATHER'S MY ANTONIA

REVIEW ESSAY: WHAT'S CHOCTAW HISTORY-AND WHO GETS TO SAY?

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Interior Places." By Lisa Knopp, Becky Faber

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"I collect geodes," Lisa Knopp states at the beginning of her first essay, making for an engaging introduction to the entire collection that also encapsulates her vision of the world. She loves the natural world and the complexities of each situation that make it unique.

Later in her text she asks, "How does something firmly lodged in the periphery move to the center of one's awareness?" The question is cogent. Her essays consistently consider some peripheral topic-such as the moon or corn or one's childhood neighborhood-and then shift it forward, urging readers to remember, to think, to consider, to appreciate. …

Review Of Dark Storm Moving West, By Barbara Belyea, Arn Keeling

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the freshet of scholarly and popular studies accompanying the recent bicentennials of Lewis and Clark's and David Thompson's westward explorations, Dark Storm Moving West forms an eddy of reflection on the practical, communicative, and philosophical challenges of understanding Euro-American exploration in western North America. English professor turned exploration historian Barbara Belyea eschews traditional narratives or grand theses in favor of dense rumination on particular episodes, personalities, and questions. Swirling and riffled at the surface, these waters yet find more subtle coherences in their depths than Belyea herself admits.

Her essays are focused loosely on the figure of Peter Fidler, …