Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Review Of Hidden In Plain Sight: Contributions Of Aboriginal Peoples To Canadian Identity And Culture, Volume L Edited By David R. Newhouse, Cora J. Voyageur, And Dan Beavon, Robin Brownlie

Great Plains Quarterly

Hidden in Plain Sight is a book with an unusual agenda: to discuss and publicize the many constructive, meaningful contributions that Aboriginal peoples have made to Canadian society. Aimed primarily at the general public, students, and Aboriginal people themselves, the book contains essays from treaty researchers, civil servants, lawyers, teachers, curators, artists, writers, undergraduate students, and academics. The book's impetus arose from its editors' frustration over the constant equation of Aboriginal people with pain, problems, and struggle. Widely absent from public discourse and academic writing, they felt, was attention to the strengths and capacity of Aboriginal peoples, their achievements in …

Review Of John Brown To Bob Dole: Movers And Shakers In Kansas History Edited By Virgil W. Dean, O. Gene Clanton

Great Plains Quarterly

For nearly half of its existence as a political entity, it would seem that Kansas was assigned a larger-thanlife role on the national stage and-arguably-was on the right side of history, or at least aspired to be on the side of a common humanity; since then, especially from the 1920s and New Deal eras to the present, one might contend the state has been lodged within a backwater of time, in need of a new "crop of leaders" capable of dealing with modern exigencies. But according to this study's introductory essay, "this commodity seems in short supply at present .... …

Review Of The Shawnees And Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 By Stephen Warren, Christopher Arris Oakley

Great Plains Quarterly

In The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, historian Stephen Warren skillfully examines the various ways that the Shawnees responded to the expansion of the United States during the nineteenth century. According to Warren, for most of the 1700s the Shawnees lived in small to medium-sized politically autonomous villages governed by hereditary chiefs. After removal in the 1830s from Ohio to a reservation in Kansas, however, Indian agents and other federal officials encouraged the creation of a centralized Shawnee tribal government under a national council. This led to a struggle among the Shawnees between the descendants of the old village chiefs …

Review Of We Know Who We Are: Metis Identity In A Montana Community By Martha Harroun Foster, James M. Pitsula

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is a rigorous, yet readable, exploration of Metis ethnic identity in Montana. It focuses on the Spring Creek community near Lewiston, tracing its Red River antecedents, analyzing responses to changing economic conditions, and examining ethnicity in the context of a variety of factors. The U.S., unlike Canada, has never given its Metis population official recognition. Despite this omission, Foster argues that the community has retained a strong sense of its core identity. As the title states, "We Know Who We Are." At the same time, this identity is complex, multilayered, and situational. The boundaries are porous, enabling the …

Review Of Wild Prairie: A Photographer's Personal Journey By James R. Page, Larry Schwarm

Great Plains Quarterly

The landscape of the prairie is often overlooked in favor of more dramatic mountain ranges and wild forests, yet it is an ecosystem teaming with life and beauty. Grasslands are the backbone of our planet, but to appreciate the prairie takes time. Photographer James R. Page immersed himself in the prairie to observe and understand its vastness and subtleties, using his camera to record his vision. He shares these photographs, and thoughtfully written observations, in his US-page book, Wild Prairie: A Photographer's Personal Journey.

Early in the text, Page states that "Everything on the prairie seems either" huge or …

Review Of Chasing The Rodeo: On Wild Rides And Big Dreams, Broken Hearts And Broken Bones, And One Man's Search For The West By W. K. Stratton, Wayne S. Wooden

Great Plains Quarterly

Chasing the Rodeo involves one man's year-long search for himself, his father, and both the rodeo of his childhood past (during the classical period of the 1950s) and of today.

W. K. Stratton skillfully weaves what might look like disparate themes into a riveting, coherent book of introspection and renewal. In part, the book focuses on his personal chase to explore the ways of a shiftless father who left the family in the author's childhood to follow dreams of booze, bulls, and bucks. In part, it is a story of the author at midlife coming to terms with this haunt …

Notes And News- Winter 2007

Great Plains Quarterly

Notes and News

Call For Papers

Call For Papers

Larom Summer Institute In Western American Studies

50th Annual Missouri Valley History Conference

11th International Cather Seminar

Mormon History Association 41st Annual Meeting

Centennial Meeting Of Organization Of American Historians

Homestead Conference

The Art Of Open Spaces Contemporary Sea And Prairiescapes, Elizabeth Schultz

Great Plains Quarterly

Once part of a great inland sea, Kansas and other Great Plains states have been landlocked for millennia. Yet the prairies' "grassy waves" and "islands of cottonwoods" continue to evoke these ancient waters. Diane Quantic in The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction points out that "[ilt is a rare plains writer who does not invoke the image of the sea of grass, and a rare critic or observer [of the plains] who does not comment upon [this image's] ubiquity." In his index for The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, under "Prairie, likened to ocean," …

Book Review: Travelling Knowledges: Positioning The Immigrant Reader Of Aboriginal Literatures In Canada, Rob Appleford

Great Plains Quarterly

Canadian Aboriginal writing has blossomed in the past two decades and made a major contribution to the cultural life of both Aboriginal peoples and the general public. Given this wealth, it becomes necessary for the non-Aboriginal literary critic to develop sensitive models for approaching this creative and critical work, both in the classroom and in academic research. The question becomes: how can a non-Aboriginal critic use her "outsider" status in an enabling way when teaching and studying this culturally-specific material? In Travelling Knowledges: Positioning the 1m/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada, Renate Eigenbrod has attempted to use her …

Book Review: Flood Stage And Rising, Shiela Coghill

Great Plains Quarterly

Jane Varley's Flood Stage and Rising opens with what becomes the haunting echo of the narrative, "how far north should we go?" The "north" of the Great Plains impresses itself on Varley's consciousness immediately when she observes, "the land was flat. So flat it looked bizarre." In order to begin her PhD studies, she and her husband Gary move from one landscape (the lush greenery and hills of Virginia) to the rich diluvian river bed of Grand Forks, North Dakota. A Great Plains town that inspires tall tales, Grand Forks is built on the edge of the Red River, the …

Book Review: As For Sinclair Ross, Peter Dickinson

Great Plains Quarterly

Long admired by academics and fellow writers for his finely wrought portraits of small-town prairie life in Canada between the wars, and of the restless, complex, desiring souls contained within and by this landscape, Sinclair Ross was an intensely private man who nevertheless craved a wider popular audience for his work. It is thus somewhat ironic that his greatest public notoriety should have come as a result of his posthumous outing by Keath Fraser in As for Me and My Body (1997), a memoir documenting Fraser's twenty-seven-year friendship with the author that was affectionately written but rather salaciously reviewed. Even …

Book Review: Calamity Jane: The Woman And The Legend, Herbert T. Hoover

Great Plains Quarterly

No scholar might be better qualified to write a biography of Calamity Jane than James McLaird. During a protracted career as a professor of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, he prepared a grassroots bibliography for South Dakota and published articles about exploration west of the Missouri River while he collected and marketed rare books about the history of the northern Great Plains. He makes the point that had Calamity Jane never existed, substantive themes in either state or regional history would not have been affected but western folklore would have diminished.

Book Review: Keeping Heart On Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, And The Sacred, Harvey Markowitz

Great Plains Quarterly

For most outsiders to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, the subtitle of Vic Glover's book will probably seem little more than an odd (and slightly blasphemous) melange of disassociated categories. For the Oglala Lakota residents of Pine Ridge, however, these categories are bound together by a cultural and spiritual logic embedded in their daily experiences. It is a testimony to Glover's status as a participant in and keen observer of Pine Ridge life that readers of the forty-four vignettes comprising his collection will come away with a deep appreciation of the strengths, weaknesses, tragedies, and joys that characterize this American …

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion To Willa Cather, Mary R. Ryder

Great Plains Quarterly

In this collection of thirteen essays Lindemann successfully meets her goal of offering recent criticism that recenters Cather as a writer who responded fully to the "changing social and demographic conditions" of her time. The essays indeed encourage reading "against the grain of Cather's escapism" in a range of "interpretative possibilities." Particularly useful are essays exploring little-examined areas of Cather scholarship, including the late Susan Rosowski's study of the comic sense of self in Cather's works and Lisa Marcus's discussion of Cather and the "geography of Jewishness." Rosowski resituates Claude Wheeler's yearning for something splendid in One of Ours within …

Book Review: At Home On This Moveable Earth, David R. Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly

In this third of a projected four-book memoir, William Kloefkorn examines his late high school and early college years, a time of physical growth and intellectual exploration, of redefining relationships with parents and community, and of laying the foundation for his career as a teacher, scholar, and Nebraska State Poet. Adolescence is the time for what Robert Bly aptly calls "the road of ashes," a period of metaphorical "basement work in the kitchen" (Iron John: A Book About Men). Kloefkorn's reminiscences focus on basement and earth and tedious physical exertion: excavating a foundation for the Zenda Co-op Grain …

Review Essay: The Making Of Margaret Laurence's Epic Voice, David Stouck

Great Plains Quarterly

George Woodcock, international man of letters, once referred to Margaret Laurence as Canada's Tolstoy. To some the comparison seems far-fetched, out of scale, but for others it has substance. Certainly, both writers were from continental plains and were drawn to large events in their country's history; they wrote at length about the relations of the sexes, about injustice and the harsh impact of war, and about the plight of poor people. One could also note they both turned away from writing fiction in midcareer, feeling they had lost the gift, and instead addressed with moral authority the pressing issues of …

Book Review: Powwow, Clifford E. Trafzer

Great Plains Quarterly

Powwow invites readers into the dancing circle where a cornucopia of information, analysis, and interpretation vibrates, telling us about the popular intertribal celebration. The topic of American Indian powwows creates strong emotions and colorful stories, and the editors invite several authors into the "dance arena" of this book to share their research and experiences. As a result, readers will hear the drum, see traditional and fancy dancers, smell the sizzling fry bread, and feel the spirit that is the American Indian powwow. The editors point out that powwows vary in size from the larger Red Earth gathering on the Great …

Book Review: Westerns In A Changing America, 1955-2000, Edward Buscombe

Great Plains Quarterly

This is a survey of Western movies made over the past half century which attempts to plot their meanings against the social and political history of America during that time. Using his own personal observations and the ideas of a small number of historians, the author finds that the films closely reflect changes in American society during this period.

Book Review: Promise: Bozeman's Trail To Destiny, Michael Cassity

Great Plains Quarterly

The transformation of the area along the Bozeman Trail through Wyoming and Montana in the 1860s provides a key to understanding the larger forces at work reshaping the American West in the late nineteenth century. The complex dynamics at work within the Native American cultures in the area and between them and the intruders hold a great potential for substantive historical inquiry. The present volume is a broad collection, a miscellany, of historical documents, personal reminiscences, and oral histories, as well as observations by professional historians; it even contains some fictional narratives drawing on the events at hand. Not surprisingly, …

Book Review: Challenging Frontiers: The Canadian West, Molly P. Rozum

Great Plains Quarterly

"To me what is most important is to come to grips with both colonial history and contemporary life," writes Emma LaRocque in her essay, "When the 'Wild West' Is Me," on de-mythologizing the cowboys and Indians of popular culture. What makes this new collection fresh is its emphasis on connections between past and present communities in the Canadian West. Eighteen thought-provoking articles are organized in three parts: "Images of the West," "Challenging Western History and Frontier Myth-Making," and "New Frontiers." A scholarly introduction and editorial analyses between the various sections bind the articles to key themes of community building and …

Great Plains Quarterly Editorial Matter, Summer 2006

Great Plains Quarterly

Table of Contents, Notes and News.

Book Review: Imagining The African American West, Jere W. Roberson

Great Plains Quarterly

Blake Allmendinger invites us into an old/new West that is not a place on a map, but rather a place in the psyche-always imagined, out there, over there, someplace, not here. He challenges us to cease thinking of the West only in geographic terms and to envision it as an image, this time with black figures in it and writing about it.

Book Review: Writing Out Of Place: Regionalism, Women, And American Literary Culture, Kathleen Boardman

Great Plains Quarterly

Although it has everything to do with location, nineteenth-century American literary regionalism is nor "about" natural geographic boundaries, according to Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. That is, issues of vantage point, marginalization, and gender and racial positioning are crucial to this literature, and the lens of feminist standpoint theory brings it sharply into focus. In contrast, the habit of categorizing by setting - Sarah Orne Jewett and the Maine coast or Mary Austin in the California desert - suggests geographic determinism and distracts us from what these writers might have in common: regionalism as "a discourse or a mode elf …

Book Review: Myself And Strangers: A Memoir Of Apprenticeship, Mark Busby

Great Plains Quarterly

Over the years John Graves, Texas's most noted environmental writer, has lamented time wasted on trying to produce a major work of fiction, a subject that becomes especially clear in Graves's memoir, Myself and Strangers, where he suggests that he should have produced more but was too often distracted.

Book Review: Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, And The 1864 Massacre Site, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly

Metal detritus of war and an old map, recently discovered in Chicago helped an interdisciplinary team of historians, archeologists, geomorphologists, ethnographers, remote imagers, and descendants of the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre to find the exact site where that atrocity was enacted; so this book reports,

Great Plains Quarterly Winter 2006 Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly Winter 2006 Editorial Matter, Table of Contents, and Book Notes.

Book Review: Viet Cong At Wounded Knee: The Trail Of A Blackfeet Activist, Tom Holm

Great Plains Quarterly

Woody Kipp's life story is a reflection of a new generation of Native writers and activists. His autobiography has nothing to do with trying to save the white world from itself or to explain Indians to a curious and perhaps even sympathetic white audience. The white world literally and figuratively took aim at Woody Kipp (and a number of other American Indian Vietnam veterans) for daring to oppose the injustices he saw in Indian life. He became, as the title of his book indicates, the then-current enemy of the American state. He was, ironically, a domestic version of the Viet …

Book Review: Alien Heart: The Life And Work Of Margaret Laurence, Frances W. Kaye

Great Plains Quarterly

The best introduction to Margaret Laurence will always be the writings of Margaret Laurence, especially the five Manawaka books, the three published volumes of her correspondence, and her memoir. But after one has become acquainted with that complex, vulnerable, wise, generous, and conflicted woman/writer, Alien Heart is a good source for recapitulation and further detail. Without blinking at or emphasizing Margaret's drinking and sometimes self-destructive relationships, Powers strongly recalls her kindness, her passion, her idiom, and her "place to stand upon."

Book Review: The Bar U And Canadian Ranching History, A. A. Den Otter

Great Plains Quarterly

Located almost directly south of Calgary, Alberta, the North West Cattle Company, or Bar U, is one of the longest surviving large ranches on the Canadian Prairies, Founded in 1881 during a land rush, it was one of several to acquire large leases on government land, Under the management of Fred Stimson, an experienced farmer from Quebec, the Bar U prospered, partly because of cheap land hut mainly because of solid management and good marketing and transportation strategies,

Book Review: Standing Bear Is A Person: The True Story Of A Native American's Quest For Justice, Kyle C. Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly

Poncas still remember the events surrounding the 1879 verdict that first recognized Constitutionally protected Native rights. Descendants - some only one generation removed from the forced march that preceded the trial - continue to live on the Great Plains and share the stories of the long walk to Indian Territory. Unfortunately, this text docs not attempt to incorporate contemporary Native voices that can enrich such an important historical narrative.