Other International and Area Studies Commons^™

The Flora Of The Cottonwood Lake Study Area, Stutsman County, North Dakota, David M. Mushet, Ned H. Euliss Jr., Stephen P. Lane, Christopher M. Goldade

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

The 92 ha Cottonwood Lake Study Area is located in south-central North Dakota along the eastern edge of a glacial stagnation moraine known as the Missouri Coteau. The study area has been the focus of biological and hydrological research since the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service purchased the site in 1963. We studied the plant communities of the Cottonwood Lake Study Area from 1992 to 2001. During this time period, the vascular flora of the study area consisted of 220 species representing 52 families. Over half of the species were perennial forbs (117 species). Perennial grasses (26 species) and …

Effects Of Distance From Cattle Water Developments On Grassland Birds, Andrea L. Fontaine, Patricia L. Kennedy, Douglas H. Johnson

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

Many North American grassland bird populations appear to be declining, which may be due to changes in grazing regimes on their breeding areas. Establishment of water developments and confining cattle (Bos taurus L.) to small pastures often minimizes spatial heterogeneity of cattle forage consumption, which may lead to uniformity in vegetative structure. This increased uniformity may provide suitable habitat for some bird species but not others. We assessed how cattle use, vegetative structure, and bird population densities varied with increasing distance from water developments (0-800 m) on the Little Missouri National Grassland (LMNG) in North Dakota. Lark buntings ( …

What Hypothesis Tests Are Not: A Response To Colegrave And Ruxton, Douglas H. Johnson

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

It is always flattering to see one’s work cited by others. Not only does it boost the ego, but it provides a satisfying feeling that one’s efforts are both appreciated and contributing to the advance of science. So I was pleased when a colleague pointed out that Colegrave and Ruxton (2003) had cited a recent paper of mine, ‘‘The insignificance of statistical significance testing’’ ( Johnson, 1999). In that article I argued, as did Colegrave and Ruxton, that confidence intervals often are much more informative than are p values associated with hypothesis tests.

Guidelines For Managing Lesser Prairie-Chicken Populations And Their Habitats, Christian A. Hagen, Brent E. Jamison, Kenneth M. Giesen, Terry Z. Riley

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

Lesser prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus paidicinctus) populations have declined by >90% since the 1800s. These declines have concerned both biologists and private conservation groups and led to a petition to list the lesser prairie-chicken as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Most of the land in the current range of the lesser prairie-chicken is privately owned, and declines have been primarily attributed to anthropogenic factors. Conversion of native rangeland to cropland and excessive grazing have been implicated as leading causes in the species' decline. Periodic drought probably has exacerbated these problems. Little research on habitat requirements was conducted prior to …

Patterns Of Variation In Clutch Sizes In A Guild Of Temperate-Nesting Dabbling Ducks, Gary Krapu, Ronald Reynolds, Glen Sargeant, Randy Renner

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

We investigated patterns and causes of variation in clutch sizes in a guild of five species of temperate-nesting dabbling ducks (Mallard [Anas platyrhynchos], Northern Pintail [“pintail,” A. acuta], Gadwall [A. strepera], Blue-winged Teal [“teal,” A. discors], and Northern Shoveler [“shoveler,” A. clypeata]) during 1993–1995 in the Prairie Pothole Region of midcontinental North America. Clutch sizes (mean ± SE) were largest for teal (10.80 ± 0.03), followed in descending order by those of shoveler (10.31 ± 0.05), Gadwall (9.92 ± 0.04), Mallard (8.91 ± 0.04), and pintail (7.66 ± 0.06). In Mallard, pintail, and …

Less Waste Corn, More Land In Soybeans, And The Switch To Genetically Modified Crops: Trends With Important Implications For Wildlife Management, Gary L. Krapu, David A. Brandt, Robert R. Cox Jr.

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

American agriculture has provided abundant high-energy foods for migratory and resident wildlife populations since the onset of modern wildlife management. Responding to anecdotal evidence that corn residues are declining in cropland, we remeasured waste corn postharvest in the Central Platte River Valley (CPRV) of Nebraska during 1997 and 1998 to compare with 1978. Post-harvest waste corn averaged 2.6% and 1.8% of yield in 1997 and 1998, respectively. After accounting for a 20% increase in yield, waste corn in 1997 and 1998 was reduced 24% and 47% from 1978. We also evaluated use of soybeans by spring-staging sandhill cranes ( Grus …

Tracking Of White-Tailed Deer Migration By Global Positioning System, Michael Nelson, L. David Mech, Paul F. Frame

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

We used global positioning system (GPS) radiocollars on female white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to document details of onsets of migrations, rates of travel, patterns of travel, durations of migrations, and distances traveled by 8 deer in spring and 4 deer in autumn in northeastern Minnesota in 1998, 1999, and 2001. In spring, deer migrated 23–45 km during 31–356 h, deviating a maximum 1.6–4.0 km perpendicular from a straight line of travel between their seasonal ranges. They migrated a minimum of 2.1–18.6 km/day over 11–56 h during 2–14 periods of travel. Minimum travel during 1-h intervals averaged 1.5 km/h …

Is Climate Change Affecting Wolf Populations In The High Artic?, L. David Mech

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

Gobal climate change may affect wolves in Canada’s High Arctic (80◦ N) acting through three trophic levels (vegetation, herbivores, and wolves). A wolf pack dependent on muskoxen and arctic hares in the Eureka area of Ellesmere Island denned and produced pups most years from at least 1986 through 1997. However, when summer snow covered vegetation in 1997 and 2000 for the first time since records were kept, halving the herbivore nutrition-replenishment period, muskox and hare numbers dropped drastically, and the area stopped supporting denning wolves through 2003. The unusual weather triggering these events was consistent with global-climate-change phenomena.

Temporal Dynamics Of Leafy Sspurge (Euphorbia Esula) And Two Species Of Flea Beetles (Aphthona Spp.) Used As Biological Control Agents, Diane L. Larson, James B. Grace

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

The goal of this study was to evaluate the biological control program of leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula) in a large natural area, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, western North Dakota, USA. Aphthona lacertosa and Aphthona nigriscutis have been released at more than 1800 points in the 18,600-ha South Unit of the park beginning in 1989; most releases have occurred since 1994. We established permanent vegetation plots throughout the infested area of the park and determined stem counts and biomass of leafy spurge and abundance of the two flea beetle species at these plots each year from 1999 to 2001. …

Effects Of Management Practices On Grassland Birds: American Bittern, Jill A. Dechant, Marriah L. Sondreal, Douglas H. Johnson, Lawrence D. Igl, Christopher M. Goldade, Amy L. Zimmerman, Betty R. Euliss

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

Information on the habitat requirements and effects of habitat management on grassland birds were summarized from information in more than 4,000 published and unpublished papers. A range map is provided to indicate the relative densities of the species in North America, based on Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data. Although birds frequently are observed outside the breeding range indicated, the maps are intended to show areas where managers might concentrate their attention. It may be ineffectual to manage habitat at a site for a species that rarely occurs in an area. The species account begins with a brief capsule statement, which …

Pinochet’S Chile: The United States, Human Rights, And International Terrorism, Todd Landman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile by Darren Hawkins. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 259 pp.

and

The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier of Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh. New York and London: The New Press, 2003. 551 pp.

and

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges. New York: The New Press, 2004. 322 pp.

Global Economic Forces And Individual Labor Rights: An Uneasy Coexistence, Alice De Jonge

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Workers’ Rights as Human Rights edited by James A. Gross. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 272pp.

and

International Labor Standards: Globalization, Trade, and Public Policy edited by Robert J. Flanagan and William B. Gould IV. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. 275pp.

Lewis And Clark And The Geology Of The Great Plains, Robert F. Diffendal Jr., Anne P. Diffendal

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark undertook their journey with the Corps of Discovery in 1804-1806 in order to explore the area that the United States had purchased from France in 1803. Then known as Louisiana, this region included almost everything west of the Mississippi to the continental divide. In order to find the best route across the continent, President Thomas Jefferson charged Lewis with following the Missouri River to its headwaters and then locating rivers flowing down the west side of the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River and into the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson's written instructions further specified that the …

New Nesting Dates For Some Breeding Birds In North Dakota, Lawrence D. Igl, Harold A. Kantrud

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

There have been few published nest records for North Dakota (e.g., Haas 1985, Kantrud 1992, Buhl and Shaffer 2000) since Robert E. Stewart published Breeding Birds of North Dakota in 1975. For several species, we report dates for eggs, nestlings, or fledglings that occurred outside the intervals reported by Stewart (1975). For comparison, we provide nesting dates for breeding birds in South Dakota (Tallman et aI. 2002).

Reviews Of Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy Of Industrial Agriculture And The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy Of Industrial Agriculture, Edited By Andrew Kimbrell, Charles A. Francis

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

Fatal Harvest introduces and dispels key myths about industrial agriculture: greater efficiency; safe and nutritious food that is cheap to consumers; benefits to wildlife and environment; how biotechnology will save the world. In essays by leading proponents of a more equitable and sustainable food system, the book presents compelling evidence that alternative systems guided by an agrarian ethic will better address our food needs while protecting our natural environment and soil resources.

Wendell Berry cites the separation of people from their food supply and natural environment as a causal factor in our ready acceptance of today's industrial agriculture. When we …

Review Of The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, And Indian Hymns By Luke Eric Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, And Ralph Kotay, Benjamin R. Kracht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Christianity, metaphorically referred to as the "Jesus road," came to the Kiowas of southwestern Oklahoma towards the end of the nineteenth century. Today, most Kiowas are at least nominally Christian, and, like other Oklahoma Indians, render prayers and hymns in their Native tongue in services that are otherwise Baptist, Methodist, or Pentecostal. In explaining why the Kiowas accepted Christianity and how Kiowa hymns still play a vital part in Kiowa community life, The Jesus Road contributes to a growing body of literature about Native American Christians who have not abandoned their personal and cultural identity. Anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter, historian …

Review Of Fort Robinson And The American Century, 1900- 1948 By Thomas R. Buecker, Paul H. Carlson

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Fort Robinson, located along the upper reaches of the White River in far northwest Nebraska, enjoyed a long and eventful history. Founded in 1874 and not closed as a military base until 1948, the post played vital roles in the last wars with the Plains Indians: the so-called Sioux war of 1876-77 and the Ghost Dance "outbreak" of 1890-91. In the twentieth century it was a quartermaster remount depot for a time, and during World War II it served as a K-9 training base and a prisoner of war camp.

After 1948 the United States Department of Agriculture used the …

Review Of The Light Crust Doughboys Are On The Air: Celebrating Seventy Years Of Texas Music By John Mark Dempsey, Joe W. Specht

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

During the 1930s and 1940s radio played a huge role in the development and dissemination of American popular music, especially country music. Regular live exposure on the radio was often more important for a country music performer's career than were recording opportunities. And there is no better example of how the interaction of radio with recordings and public appearances helped to sustain a career than that of the Light Crust Doughboys. Of course it helps if you have a longtime sponsor, too.

The Light Crust Doughboys were formed in 1930 by the Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, …

Review Of Father Francis M. Craft: Missionary To The Sioux By Thomas W. Foley, Michael F. Steltenkamp

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The bland title of this biography might not attract the many readers the book deserves since Craft's name is known only from occasional footnotes related to the Ghost Dance religion that ended with tragic bloodletting at Wounded Knee in 1890. Using the priest's journals and researching references contained within them, the author draws from obscurity a life that should inspire scholars to tap similar material reposited in Marquette University's Catholic Indian mission archives. Diaries and journals stored there are a treasure trove of ethnographic and historical information that still awaits baring. Biographers can use Foley's work as a standard to …

Review Of Muskekowuck Athinuwick: Original People Of The Great Swampy Land By Victor P. Lytwyn, Peter Geller

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In Muskekowuck Athinuwick, Victor Lytwyn provides a detailed study of the indigenous people of the Hudson Bay lowlands. At its core is the author's extensive historical research in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg; the academic context is the scholarly debate over the effects of the fur trade on indigenous peoples. As a historical geographer, Lytwyn brings an important spatial understanding to the Cree past, which is conveyed through the accompanying maps.

The first half of the book is the more methodologically diverse, as it examines pre-contact history, international relations (particularly the alliances with neighboring Cree and northern …

Notes And News- Fall 2003

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Notes And News

Call For Papers

20th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Visiting Scholars Program

Willa Cather Literary A Ward 2004

Map Correction

Review Of America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education And The Ownership Of English, 1860- 1900 By Ruth Spack, P. Jane Hafen

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Ruth Spack's thoroughly researched study of English education in Indian boarding schools goes beyond historical investigation. Spack shows how the methodology of teaching English imposed American ideologies in Native students. Then she closely examines the primary writings of Indian students and teachers who had learned English in the boarding school system. The result is a fine linguistic and cultural analysis of the complicated transitions from Native languages to the second language of the book's title, English.

Much has been written about the assimilative mission of boarding schools. Their purpose, as stated by Richard H. Pratt, was to "Kill the Indian; …

Review Of The Indian Frontier, 1763-1846 By R. Douglas Hurt, Victoria Smith

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Frontiers have dominated American historiography ever since Frederick Jackson Turner placed the term into the academic lexicon in the early twentieth century. Historians such as Bolton and Webb built entire careers around the ideology of the American western frontier, and the concept has grown exponentially since the mid-twentieth century.

Today's scholar can choose from a host of publications focused on geographical frontiers. The American South, the Appalachians, Spanish Borderlands, colonial America, Canada, even Alaska and Hawaii, have all been dissected under the frontier scalpel. But surprisingly few scholars have focused on Native American frontiers.

Dale Van Every broke ground in …

Review Of "They Treated Us Just Like Indians": The Worlds Of Bennett County, South Dakota By Paula L. Wagoner, Larry J. Zimmerman

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The land is at the core and "in charge" of the overlapping cultures of the Lakota and whites of Bennett County, South Dakota. The challenging Plains environment is a major element of personal and group identity, a force that "measures one's worth." In her ethnology derived from fieldwork in the county between 1993-1996 and in 2001, Paula Wagoner had expected to find sharp social contrasts between groups. As she discovered, residents had more in common than they might wish to admit.

Fear of loss of the land and the identity rooted to it are behind most tensions and disputes between …

Ancient Way In A New Land: Benedictine Education In The Great Plains, Marielle Frigge O.S.B.

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In the first half of the sixth century, an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia, provided a framework for Christian monastic life. In the last half of the nineteenth century, his descendants arrived in the Great Plains, part of the westward movement of Christian missionaries in North America. What could this ancient way of life offer to a new land of Native tribes and immigrant farmers, traders, and soldiers? And what might this new land contribute to the shaping of a uniquely American form of monastic life?

These Benedictine men and women brought with them centuries of experience as learners and …

Religion, Idealism, And African American Autobiography In The Northern Plains: Era Bell Thompson’S American Daughter, Kevin L. Cole, Leah Weins

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

In her introduction to American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, Margo Culley writes, “It would be hard to point to a field of contemporary literary studies more vibrant than autobiography studies. Where else does one find a wealth of primary material still mostly unread and unranked?” “Unread and unranked” aptly describes Era Bell Thompson’s American Daughter, an autobiographical account of an African American woman who comes of age on the plains of North Dakota in the early twentieth century. It is one of those almost forgotten autobiographies that deserves to be read, ranked, and reconsidered, especially in the …

Review Of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir By Bob Kerrey, Marilyn B. Young

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

Bob Kerrey's memoir begins with a promise to his dying father to find out what happened to the father's brother, lost in the Philippines during WWII. This Kerrey did, but instead of writing his uncle's story, he wrote his own, of growing up in the 1950s in Lincoln, Nebraska, one of seven children in a solid, church-going, middle-class family. "We biked everywhere," Kerrey writes. "The edge of the universe lay at the ends of the dirt roads leading to those places where the wild and wooly frontier began." The fearful things in this safe place were either abstract (Soviet and …

Review Of Laura Ingalls Wilder And The American Frontier: Five Perspectives Edited By Dwight M. Miller, Philip Heldrich

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

One of the most interesting literary figures of the twentieth century, Laura Ingalls Wilder, through her books about the American heartland, examines in many ways the heart of America. She questions the Euroamerican pioneer experience, the racial tensions of the contested West, and assumptions about gender roles. Even her relationship with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, asks readers to reconsider the privileging of authorial autonomy; and, with respect to genre aesthetics, Wilder's mimesis of autobiography blurs the line between fact and fiction. Laura Ingalls Wilder and the American Frontier: Five Perspectives, a collection of essays that originated at the …

Review Of Breaking Clean By Judy Blunt, Linda Karell

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

"Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience." In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt's memoir of her life as a Montana rancher's daughter, and eventually as a Montana rancher's wife, she reminds us that storytelling mines the minute and the particular in order to unearth larger truths. In this memoir, those truths are about the cramped inarticulateness of women's lives and the paucity of real, vibrant choices, as well as the ranching community's support for its members during the inevitable crises that occur on the windswept Montana Plains.

Now …

Fairy Castle Or Steamer Trunk? Creating Place In O. E. Rølvaag’S Giants In The Earth, Diane D. Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

What happens when humans move beyond the boundaries of civilization? Does the very act transform them? How do they define themselves in apparently empty space? Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of Americans headed west to the frontier, the borderland between civilization and wilderness. Most went willingly, confident or desperately hopeful that they would have the freedom to create a place of their own and, in the process, recreate themselves. Before they set out for the frontier, they imagined it a garden, based on the myths of plenty and entitlement that were described in boosters’ letters, newspaper accounts, railroad brochures, and …