Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Pageant Of Paha Sapa An Origin Myth Of White Settlement In The American West, Linea Sundstrom

Great Plains Quarterly

As a literary work initiated and directed by a committee of women, The Pageant of Paha Sapa captures the zeitgeist of the post Arontier era through the eyes of the influential women of one small town. Like all origin myths, this script presented the current populace as the rightful heirs of the place and its resources, having won them through persistence, struggle, and divinely ordained destiny. The pageant's message was that "civilizing" influences had transformed the former Indian paradise and frontier hell-on-wheels into a respectable modern community. This theme of social evolution was typical of the larger pageant movement; however, …

Review Of Taking Charge: Native American Self-Determination And Federal Indian Policy, 1975-1993 By George Pierre Castile., Larry Burt

Great Plains Quarterly

In Taking Charge George Pierre Castile extends his earlier work, To Show Heart: Native American Self-Determination and Federal Indian Policy, 1960-1975 (1998), and carries the story of federal Indian policy through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Castile begins with how President Jimmy Carter's efforts to streamline federal government bureaucracy led to the creation of a new office, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs. Carter continued self-determination, but his delegating nearly all Indian matters disappointed most Indians. Issues given most attention involved land and fishing claims, the claims of several eastern tribes for federal recognition, and the …

Review Of Riding To The Rescue: The Transformation Of The Rcmp In Alberta And Saskatchewan, 1914- 1939. By Steve Hewitt, Michael Dawson

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a timely book. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which has served as a popular symbol of Canadian identity since the late nineteenth century, is today awash with financial scandals and accusations of corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups. The police force that has its roots in the creation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 is now perceived by many Canadians as just one more example of a modern, bureaucratic organization that has fallen victim to the misuse and abuse of power. Of particular concern is the RCMP's controversial role in monitoring and detaining suspected threats to national security. …

Review Of Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape By Courtney Milne, Terry Graff

Great Plains Quarterly

Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape is a compelling photographic anthology of the diverse and complex topography of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan. Published to commemorate Saskatchewan's centenary in 2006, this handsome coffee-table book comprises 225 sumptuous full-color photographs by the internationally acclaimed master photographer Courtney Milne. Six chapters of stunningly beautiful imagery, combined with personal commentary, chronicle Milne's intimate relationship to his home place, which extends back to his childhood growing up on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River.

For Milne, landscape photography has served as a sustaining inspiration in a remarkable photographic and writing career that has taken …

Review Of Forging An American Identity: The Art Of William Ranney: With A Catalogue Of His Works. By Linda Bantel And Peter H. Hassrick, Kenneth Haltman

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the appearance of Francis S. Grubar's William Ranney, Painter of the Early West, a catalogue raisonne published to accompany the artist's 1962 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ranney's reputation has revolved around the thirty-odd images of western trappers, hunters, and pioneers he worked up in New York {and later in an impressive two-story studio he kept across the river in West Hoboken} during the 1840s and early 1850s, at least in part from sketches dating to the time of his enlistment as a soldier in the Texan war for independence more than a decade earlier. The …

Review Of The Force Of Vocation, By Adele Wiseman, Leslie Ianno

Great Plains Quarterly

Adele Wiseman's literary career began with the publication of her acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, in 1956. Public success and scholarly praise of the novel were followed by the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Though Wiseman continued to write plays, fiction, memoirs, and essays throughout her career, she never again enjoyed the success of her earliest novel. In The Force of Vocation, the first booklength study of Wiseman's work, Ruth Panofsky attempts to account for the rise and fall of this Jewish Canadian woman of letters.

Responding to the lack of attention to the publishing side of …

Review Of War Dance At Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. By Brad D. Lookingbill, Michael Jordan

Great Plains Quarterly

Fort Marion in San Augustine, Florida, 'may seem far removed from the Great Plains, but as Brad Lookingbill ably demonstrates the events that transpired there between 1875 and 1878 form an important chapter in the history of several Plains Indian communities. In April 1875, thirty-three Cheyenne, twenty-seven Kiowa, nine Comanche, two Arapaho, and one Caddo prisoners departed Fort Sill, Indian Territory, destined for imprisonment in Florida. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a staunch proponent of forced Indian assimilation, was placed in charge of them. At Fort Marion he implemented a regimen designed to erase any vestiges of the prisoners' Indian identities …

Table Of Contents- Winter 2008

Great Plains Quarterly

GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY

Volume 28 / Number 1 / Winter 2008

THE PAGEANT OF PAHA SAPA: AN ORIGIN MYTH OF WHITE SETTLEMENT IN THE AMERICAN WEST

U.S. INDIAN POLICY, 1865-1890: AS ILLUMINATED THROUGH THE LIVES OF CHARLES A. EASTMAN AND ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN

NAMING A PLACE NICODEMUS

REVIEW ESSAY: THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTES AND NEWS

Review Of "Injuns!": Native Americans In The Movies By Edward Buscombe Killing The Indian Maiden: Images Of Native American Women In Film. By M. Elise Marubbio, S. Elizabeth Bird

Great Plains Quarterly

THE PERSISTENCE OF POPULAR MEMORY: THE CINEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

These two books, while having significant subject matter in common, are very different in style. Buscombe's small volume serves as an effective review of much that has already been written about cinematic representation of "Injuns," offering some useful new interpretations, but apparently not primarily with a scholarly audience in mind. Marubbio's book is very much a specialized work of scholarship, with a much narrower focus, being essentially the first full-length treatment of the cinematic representation of Native American women.

Buscombe is known for his works in film criticism, …

Review Of Texas Women On The Cattle Trails. Edited By Sara R. Massey, Judy Alter

Great Plains Quarterly

It's been almost twenty years since Patricia Limerick debunked myths of the Old West and forced us to look at the role of women, Native Americans, and minorities in the American West. But if the new history brought women to prominence, it was as stoic homemakers in difficult, almost impossible circumstances. We see them walking patiently beside wagon trains, collecting buffalo chips for fuel, hoeing rock-hard ground for a vegetable garden, but never on cattle drives, never on horseback. Men-Anglo men-drove those cattle north. This book demonstrates that many women in the Great Plains, specifically Texas, did indeed work and …

Review Of Fire In The Water, Earth In The Air: Legends Of West Texas Music By Christopher J. Oglesby, Kent Blaser

Great Plains Quarterly

From Bob Wills, Buddy Holly, and Waylon Jennings to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Ely, and Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks, Lubbock and its greater West Texas environs have been home to an unusually eclectic and creative musical community. Defining precisely what constitutes West Texas music is difficult, and diversity and variety often overshadow common features, but a West Texas "sound," blending elements of country, western, blues, early rock and roll, and folk and roots traditions into an identifiable if multifaceted genre, is widely accepted. The list of music "legends" associated with this region is indeed long and impressive and …

Review Of Cather Studies 6: History, Memory, And War Edited By Steven Trout, Margaret Doane

Great Plains Quarterly

Steven Trout's engrossing History, Memory, and War, volume 6 of the acclaimed Cather Studies series, is a collection of essays showing how pervasively war appears in Cather's works: the "sheer number of armed conflicts evoked in her fiction is perhaps unprecedented in American literature." Trout's wide-ranging volume shows "the ubiquity of armed conflict . . . as a major theme or as a background feature in Cather's writing" as well as showing that she personally "thought of war on a regular basis."

The collection includes essays by fourteen Cather scholars and moves from the Civil War through World War …

Review Of Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer And Her Work By Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly

In her career as critic and scholar, Lou Rodenberger has made a significant contribution to the study of Texas literature. Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own (1997), which she co-edited with Sylvia Grider, is in particular a readable and extremely useful literary history. Rodenberger's new book, Jane Gilmore Rushing, offers a full-scale biography and critical assessment of one of the most important Texas women writers of the twentieth century.

Rushing's engaging memoir, Starting from Pyron (1992), supplies much of what we know about the author's beginnings. Jane Gilmore was born in 1925 and grew up in the …

Review Of 900 Miles From Nowhere: Voices From The Homestead Frontier. By Steven R. Kinsella, Thomas Isern

Great Plains Quarterly

Steven R. Kinsella's work is an uneasy admixture. On the one hand it is fresh, because it goes to the grassroots, sampling the writings of settlers up and down the Plains. On the other it's stale, stereotypical. The documents, stirring as individual pieces, are arranged into categories and schema as predictable as they are questionable.

Plains pioneers were, the title says, 900 miles from nowhere. They were "sturdy and determined people" who battled a "harsh, inhospitable landscape," a place of "loneliness and homesickness." The "constant roar" of the wind "drove some settlers mad" on a day-today basis, while the "troublesome …

Review Of In The Days Of Our Grandmothers: A Reader In Aboriginal Women's History In Canada Edited By Mary-Ellen Keim And Lorna Townsend, Gillian Poulter

Great Plains Quarterly

This collection of articles published since the early 1990s makes a welcome contribution to the range of texts available for both Native Studies and Women's Studies courses at the upper and graduate leveL In an excellent short introductory essay, Mary-Ellen KeIrn and Lorna Townsend provide a useful historiographic context for the collection and explain their desire to bring Aboriginal women "out of the shadows" by choosing essays that reflect contemporary scholarship and illustrate the diversity of Aboriginal women's histories. They take contributor Jean Barman at her word in turning the past on its head and making Aboriginal women rather than …

Review Of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora In Indian Country Edited By Tiya Miles And Sharon P. Holland, Susan Stebbins

Great Plains Quarterly

This edited volume grew out of presentations made at the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot': Relating Black and Native (Hi)stories" conference held at Dartmouth in 1998, which examined the intersecting histories of American Indians and African Americans.

The collection includes fifteen essays, with an afterword by Robert Warrior, who reflects both on the essays and the '''Eating Out of the Same Pot'" conference. The introduction, co-edited by Miles and Holland, nicely summarizes some of the issues that gave rise to the Dartmouth conference and the essay collection. Cultural artifacts such as "doing things in an Indian way" may be …

U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through The Lives Of Charles A. Eastman And Elaine Goodale Eastman, Gretchen Cassel Eick

Great Plains Quarterly

Rapid change, passionate convictions, acute regional differences, ethnic conflict, and an army looking for a mission characterized the United States from 1865 to 1890. The Civil War was over and most of the soldiers had mustered out and gone home. The others were assigned either to the South to oversee reconstruction or, the larger number of them, to the area between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains-the Great Plains. The U.S. Army's new mission was to "pacify" the Great Plains, to protect the thousands of migrants enticed there by Congress's offer through the Homestead Act of 160 acres-free, contingent upon …

Naming A Place Nicodemus, Rosamond C. Rodman

Great Plains Quarterly

Nicodemus, one of the first all-black settlements in Kansas, and the sole remaining western town founded by and for African Americans at the end of Reconstruction, has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Yet one basic matter about it remains unclear: how the town came by its unusual name. Most scholars now think that the name of the town derives from a legendary slave rather than the biblical character.

This essay challenges that consensus, contending the name Nicodemus indeed refers to the biblical character, and in doing so exemplifies the way that the dominated disguise their speech, making it …

Review Of Out Of The West: The Gund Collection Of Western Art By Suzan Campbell, Anne Morand

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1985, the final year of its travels, the Gund Collection of Western Art was exhibited at the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. Museum visitors still talk about the show more than twenty years later. I was fortunate enough to view it at several venues, including the Oklahoma Museum of Art in 1980, and was struck not only by the wealth of western art, but also by the vision and perseverance of collectors like George Gund. It is a great pleasure to know that his collection will reside in perpetuity for the public to enjoy along with …

Review Of From Prairie Farmer To Entrepreneur: The Transformation Of Midwestern Agriculture By Dennis S. Nordin And Roy V. Scott, Kimberly Porter

Great Plains Quarterly

Students of agricultural history should be familiar with the works of Roy Scott (railroads, extension) and Dennis Nordin (the Grange). Similarly, students of agricultural history will find no immediate challenges to the familiar narrative of twentieth-century American agriculture in From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur. Indeed, chapters devoted to the story of the Great Depression and the rise of agricultural technology provide few if any challenges to the traditional canon.

No reader should lay this book aside, however, before arriving at its conclusion. For, according to Nordin and Scott, "Painful as the tragedies of failure were for individuals, their net …

Review Of Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance To Termination, 1950-59 By Edward Charles Valandra, Patrice H. Kunesh

Great Plains Quarterly

In the vein of Vine Deloria Jr., the preeminent American Indian intellectual who in 1969 forced a raw consciousness about the tragic history and political status of Native peoples with Custer Died for Our Sins, Edward Valandra reminds us in Not Without Our Consent of the continuing importance of documenting twentieth- century American Indian history lest the Indian story be forgotten. Deloria, whose Lakota heritage and national leadership in Indian affairs significantly informed Valandra's work, contributed the foreword, setting the backdrop for one of the book's main themes, the federal government's "Indian Problem" in the 1950s and its imprudent plan …

Review Of The Louisiana Purchase And American Expansion, 1803-1898 Edited By Sanford Levinson And Bartholomew H. Sparrow, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly

Editors Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow are unequivocal about their book's mission: to use the territory of Louisiana, hence, much of the Great Plains, as a catalyst to study United States expansionism, particularly in regards to expansion's constitutionality.

With one exception, these essays were first presented at a symposium at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003 by scholars representing such diverse fields as constitutional law, history, sociology, government, and political science. Besides the editors' wonderful introduction, which clearly explains that the purchase of Louisiana served as an example for further American expansion during the nineteenth century, there …

Review Of Becoming Western: Stories Of Culture And Identity In The Cowboy State By Liza J. Nicholas, Eric J. Sandeen

Great Plains Quarterly

Becoming Western presents representative moments in the development of Wyoming, among these the waging of the Johnson County War, the development of dude ranches, the memorialization of Buffalo Bill in his eponymous town site, the founding of an academic program at the University of Wyoming, and a campaign for state-wide office in the late 1970s. Along the way, we meet the writers, entrepreneurs, and artists one would expect to see in a cultural history of Wyoming. We see few of the contemporary scholars and critics, however, whose nuanced handling of the same material might have cautioned Liza Nicholas against the …

Review Of Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings And Celebrated Trials By Bill Neal, Paul N. Spellman

Great Plains Quarterly

"Courthouses are supposed to be temples of justice, places where disputes are peaceably resolved by reliance on reason, logic, and law, places where violent crimes are punished-not perpetrated." So begins one of Bill Neal's chapters, a reasonable definition of the American seat of jurisprudence. But not so, the author quickly reminds his reader, at least not on the Texas frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only was there little resolution in a West Texas courtroom beyond a hung jury or a mismanaged trial and a killer set free, but often that room became the site of …

Deadwood And The English Language, Brad Benz

Great Plains Quarterly

In "The New Language of the Old West," Deadwood's creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language:

Language-both obscene and complicated- was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people .... It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was striking, but the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable, and there was a reason for that which had to do with the very fundamental quality of their behavior. They were raping the land. They weren't growing anything. They weren't respecting the cycles of nature. They …

No Law: Deadwood And The State, Mark L. Berrettini

Great Plains Quarterly

Deadwood's final episode of season 3 opens with a monologue from theater operator Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), a relative newcomer to the camp of Deadwood. Shown in a wide shot that spotlights him on the dark stage of his nascent theater, Langrishe ostensibly speaks to one of his companions, the actress Claudia (Cynthia Ettinger), shown in one medium reverse-shot. Yet Langrishe also speaks and performs beyond the theater to the residents of Deadwood and to the program's viewers extradiagetically as he sums up the tense state of affairs within the camp:

This camp is in mortal danger. The man …

Book Notes- Fall 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary. By August Scherneckau

The Life of Yellowstone Kelly. By Jerry Keenan

Washita Memories: Eyewitness Views of Custer's Attack on Black Kettle's Village. Compiled and edited by Richard G. Hardorff.

Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. By Donovin Arleigh Sprague

The Papers of Will Rogers. Volume Five: The Final Years August 1928-August 1935. Edited by Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson.

On the Drafting of Tribal Constitutions. By Felix S. Cohen

Road, River, and 01' Boy Politics: A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb. By Linda Scarbrough.

Literary Austin. Edited …

Review Of Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life On The Cherokee Border By James W. Parins, Brad Agnew

Great Plains Quarterly

Few Native Americans are more enigmatic than Elias Cornelius Boudinot, a nineteenth century Cherokee mixed-blood who championed policies opposed by most members of his tribe. The motivation of this complex individual whose actions undercut tribal sovereignty continues to intrigue those familiar with his life. James Parins, professor of English and associate director of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, traces the life of Boudinot and explores influences that shaped his character in a well written and carefully researched biography.

Controversy, a continuing theme in Boudinot's life, swirled around the interracial marriage of his parents in …

Review Of Next Year Country: Dust To Dust In Western Kansas, 1890-1940 By Craig Miner, Brian Cannon

Great Plains Quarterly

In this delightful book, historian Craig Miner of Wichita State University narrates the history of western Kansas, a sixty-county region lying west of Highway 81. Written as a sequel to his 1986 West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas, 1865-1890, this volume traces the area's history up to 1940. Constructing a richly detailed, lively, and thoroughly engaging narrative, Miner draws on extensive research in thirty-five local newspapers and over twenty manuscript collections in the Kansas State Historical Society.

Newspaper reporters and editors were some of the most trenchant observers of life in their communities. But they often …

Review Of Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, And The Role Of The American West In National Belonging By Dan Moos, Kalenda Eaton

Great Plains Quarterly

Outside America offers a perceptive analysis of racial and ethnic undercurrents integral to the shaping of American western history. Its chapters revisit "rough riding" Theodore Roosevelt, African American narratives of homesteading and prosperity on the Great Plains and further West, Mormon literature, and the dubious position of Native American "performers" in Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows.

The opening chapter on Roosevelt places the president in the midst of burgeoning conversations about the mythical West and includes passages from Roosevelt's writings on his experiences as a hunter and rancher, often citing his frequent trips to the Dakotas and other locales in …