Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Indigenizing The Academy: Transforming Scholarship And Empowering Communities, William D. Demmert, Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

Indigenizing the Academy is a thought-provoking collection of articles by Native American scholars regarding the intellectual and psychological environments they encountered as students, university faculty, researchers, and authors. It reviews whether their knowledge, their scholarship, their professional understandings, and their personal priorities were understood, accepted, ignored, or trivialized by faculty with whom, and institutions in which, they were associated. The authors also address issues of colonialism, ethnic fraud, research, university curricula, international partnerships, and sovereignty.

Book Review: American Indian Education: A History, Clyde Ellis

Great Plains Quarterly

Do we need another history of Indian schools? After reading this book - a revision of Reyhner and Eder's 1989 study of Indian education - the answer is yes and no. Not surprisingly, they harshly criticize education's role in the United States government's coercive assimilation campaigns, but offer only a limited assessment of how students, parents, and communities negotiated the cultural battleground of education between the end of the Civil War and the Indian Reorganization Act. The authors do their best work addressing events since the 1950s, a period yet to receive a full treatment. Their discussion of those years …

Book Review: American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, Sandy Grande

Great Plains Quarterly

As Anne Waters notes, her volume is the first published collection of essays on American Indian philosophy written by American Indians with PhDs in philosophy. As such, it is a landmark, a significant juncture in the continual evolution of Native intellectual life. While all contributors share a common academic interest in philosophy, they vary greatly in their disciplinary and tribal affiliations, providing a broad range of topics, approaches, and methodologies.

Book Review: On The River With Lewis And Clark, Carol Medlicott

Great Plains Quarterly

Verne Huser, a lifelong professional guide on western rivers, provides an interesting addition to the Lewis and Clark literature by aiming to reveal "how rivers figured in every aspect of the journey." His familiarity with running rivers in hand-powered craft well equips him to provide authoritative background for anyone wishing to interpret Lewis and Clark's journey as "essentially a river trip." Huser's strength is his ability to enliven the expedition journals' accounts of daily struggles with handling the various watercraft, with river conditions, and with the broader natural environments the expedition encountered in various river ecosystems. A substantial portion of …

"Her Heritage Is Helpful": Race, Ethnicity, And Gender In The Politicization Of Ladonna Harris, Sarah Eppler Janda

Great Plains Quarterly

"What is it like to live in a tent?" asked Robert Kennedy's five-year-old daughter, Kerry, when she met LaDonna Harris for the first time in 1965. LaDonna assured her that Indians no longer lived in "tents" and Kerry's mother, Ethel, jokingly told LaDonna not to disillusion the child. LaDonna insisted that she wanted Kerry to have an accurate understanding of what Indians were like, to which Kerry responded by asking if she shot a bow and arrow. The exchange speaks volumes about the ignorance through which mainstream society viewed Native Americans, and mirrored many of Harris's other experiences with the …

Gendering The Frontier In O. E. Rölvaag's Giants In The Earth, John Muthyala

Great Plains Quarterly

Translated from the Norwegian into English, O. E. Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth narrates the saga of pioneer life on the American prairies. It is a saga that has the sanction of official ideology and the authority of a religious edict: to go on an "errand into the wilderness," explore and subdue the frontier, which was the "basic conditioning factor" of American experience, and, in so doing, cultivate a new civilization. Indeed, it is hard not to read the novel as dramatizing the power of Turner's frontier thesis because it seems to unabashedly affirm the frontier as the great American …

Book Review: Folk Furniture Of Canada's Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites And Ukrainians, Ervin Beck

Great Plains Quarterly

Folk Furniture makes a fine coffee-table book, with its oversize format and more than one hundred gorgeous color photographs by James A. Chambers. Leafing through it is a visual feast, with otherwise humble pieces of furniture dignified by dramatic lighting that discloses the texture, line, and form of historic everyday household items. But the book is an important contribution to material cultural studies, since it not only places furniture in its cultural context but also "reads" furniture like a "text" to discover how it expresses the history, psychology, and ideology of the people who made and used it.

Book Review: "We're The Light Crust Doughboys From Burrus Mill": An Oral History, Kevin Coffey

Great Plains Quarterly

As the millennium turned, Texas's Light Crust Doughboys approached seventy years of (almost) continuous existence. A '90s rejuvenation that culminated with the first of several Grammy nominations rescued them from museum-piece status, though celebrations were tempered by the death of the band's linchpin, banjo virtuoso Smokey Montgomery, a member from 1935, who lost a long battle with leukemia in 2001.

Book Review: The Anguish Of Snails: Native American Folklore In The West, Raymond J. Demallie

Great Plains Quarterly

For half a century Barre Toelken has studied Native American cultures in the West. In this volume he offers a perspective on how outsiders can approach the study of Native Americans using methods developed by the discipline of folklore. In doing so he displays a rare humility, exemplified by the book's title. The structure of its shell, he tells us, records "the ongoing responses of the living snail"; over time these form patterns whose meanings can be explored. Taking the snail shell as his metaphor for culture, he proposes that just as we can learn from studying the patterns in …

Book Review: The Strange Career Of Bilingual Education In Texas, Elaine K. Horwitz

Great Plains Quarterly

Arriving in Texas as a recently graduated Title VII Bilingual Education Doctoral Fellow in the latter part of 1980, I was particularly eager to learn more about the history of bilingual education in the state, especially the strange career alluded to in this volume's title. Before my arrival, I had worked in bilingual education in Illinois and western New York. Was the history of bilingual education in Texas stranger than in other states?

Book Review: Discovering Lewis And Clark From The Air, Gary Huibregtse

Great Plains Quarterly

When acclaimed photo historian Beaumont Newhall published the fourth edition of The History of Photography in 1964, he included (in a chapter titled "The Quest of Form") an aerial photograph, made by a Royal Air Force photographer, that showed German forces plowing up a Libyan airfield to render it useless for advancing allied forces. This strange, abstract image, consisting largely of linear plowed patterns, though by no means the first example of a photograph made from an airplane, was most likely included in this largely aesthetic tracing of the medium's history as an illustration of the visual power potently available …

Book Review: Confronting Race: Women And Indians On The Frontier, Margaret Jacobs

Great Plains Quarterly

In this update of her 1984 book, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915, Glenda Riley has provided a new introduction and framework for her earlier research on white women's interactions with American Indians in the American West. Riley has copiously compared 150 European-American men's documents and 150 white women's sources to gain insight into how white men and women may have viewed and interacted with Indians differently. Riley originally argued that white women "saw Indians more clearly and related to them more intimately than most men." Having read recent work that emphasizes European-American women's complicity in colonialism, she …

Book Review: Magic Off Main: The Art Of Esther Warkov, Eleanor Lazare

Great Plains Quarterly

Beverly J. Rasporich discusses the work of one of western Canada's most intriguing artists, placing it in a contemporary art context. Warkov's art is beautifully documented, offering the reader excellent illustrations of the detail, color, and fine technical workmanship of the original pieces. Dividing the book into three main sections-"An Artist's Life," in which Warkov's early influences are considered in terms of her family, art education, and life experiences; the "Early and Middle Years"; and the artist's "Mature Work"- Rasporich discusses the intricate and detailed narratives in Warkov's creations and relates them to both surrealism and the postmodern.

Book Review: Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers In The Sixties And Beyond, Tom Pilkington

Great Plains Quarterly

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Texas literature, like that of other Great Plains states, was largely rural in setting and perspective. The period from the 1920s through the 1950s has been dubbed, by one Texas critic, the "Age of Dobie," in reference to J. Frank Dobie, once the most famous litterateur in the state. Dobie wrote about ranching, lost mines and buried treasure, and the Southwestern folk tradition, and was much admired and much imitated by other Texas writers. That began to change in the early 1960s.

Book Review: Harm's Way: Disasters In Western Canada, Patricia E. Roy

Great Plains Quarterly

Anthony Rasporich says that a "sense of struggle, of painful discovery, and loss of innocence" in the face of disasters is "embedded in the Canadian consciousness" with the same sense of urgency felt south of the border but with "a different collective sense." Some essays in this collection on the Prairie West do allude to that comparison. Hugh Dempsey shows that nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics did not respect the border and weakened the ability of the Native peoples to resist European settlement. Janice Dickin's analysis of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918-19 in Calgary, however, only suggests that Canadians and Americans …

Book Review: Willa Cather And Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing The Real World, Steven Trout

Great Plains Quarterly

This tightly edited collection has two objectives: first, to underscore the importance of material objects in Cather's supposedly unfurnished fiction; second, to remind us of the material conditions under which her work - work that seems, at first sight, aloof from commercial consideration - was marketed and sold. Packed with original research (never before, for example, has anyone bothered to consider how much wealth Myra Henshaw's gold-stuffed "kit gloves" contain or to examine where Cather's name appears in advertising for the 1934 film version of A Lost Lady), the volume achieves both goals. Cather specialists and scholars interested in …

Book Review: Windmill Tales: Stories From The American Wind Power Center, Tom White

Great Plains Quarterly

In the 1850s a Connecticut mechanic named Daniel Halladay invented a windmill that could pump water from the ground without constant human attention. As the breeze changed direction, the Halladay Standard Windmill turned to face the wind and automatically regulated its speed of operation. His invention and the refined mills that followed were literally the wheels to Euro-American settlement on the Great Plains. By pumping groundwater, they allowed people to live in areas without running streams and springs.

"We Will Talk Of Nothing Else": Dakota Interpretations Of The Treaty Of 1837, Linda M. Clemmons

Great Plains Quarterly

During treaty negotiations with federal Indian agents in 1851, Taoyateduta (Little Crow), a Dakota representative, warned that the council members would "talk of nothing else" until conflicts related to the previous Treaty of 1837 had been resolved. His statement is surprising, given that government officials at the time, as well as subsequent historians, have interpreted the Treaty of 1837 as an uncontroversial, even positive, event for both the Dakota and the federal government. However, Taoyateduta and the other Dakota did not view the Treaty of 1837 in the same way. Instead, Taoyateduta's words illustrate the continued Dakota disillusionment and anger …

Alexandra's Dreams: "The Mightiest Of All Lovers" In Willa Cather's 'O Pioneers!', Maire Mullins

Great Plains Quarterly

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."l Lorde notes that women often deny the erotic within themselves because of the suspicion in which it is held by western society; she exhorts her readers to challenge the artificial dichotomy between the spiritual and the erotic and to recognize this connection in their lives. …

Book Review: The Lewis And Clark Expedition: Then And Now, Barton H. Barbour

Great Plains Quarterly

With the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition in full swing, books dealing with every aspect of the Corps of Discovery are appearing in profusion. Such a book is this one, which offers a collection of papers selected from several South Dakota history conferences spanning from 1998 to 2002. Eighteen authors have contributed articles dealing with a broad array of issues bearing upon the Corps of Discovery.

Book Review: Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence And The Work Of Mourning, Helen M. Buss

Great Plains Quarterly

Writing Grief promises two departures in Laurence criticism: a study of the literary output in the context of the author's life, and a theoretically informed work on the psychology of grief. In his introduction the author asserts that mourning is pervasive in Margaret Laurence's work and that "her personal life was deeply informed by her first hand experience of death"; he then proposes that "for Laurence, this work of mourning involved writing texts that explored autobiographical materials." One expects, therefore, an exploration of fictional texts informed at each turn by biographical and autobiographical materials, an innovation in Laurence study that …

Book Review: Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King Of The Tulsa Bootleggers, Suzanne Jones Crawford

Great Plains Quarterly

Oklahoma Tough celebrates the life and career of Wayne Padgett, a thief, fence, arsonist, wife-beater, and alleged murderer. The author, his son Ron Padgett, designed this biography as a tribute to his father, whom he sees as a daring and cunning desperado who was "an extraordinary, generous, exciting, charismatic, man." Relying heavily on interviews with his father's associates, relations, and his own childhood memories, Padgett chronicles the length and breath of his father's criminal involvement as well as the gaudy but sordid way of life of small-time gangsters and their molls.

Book Review: Weldon Kees And The Arts At Midcentury, Stephen C. Foster

Great Plains Quarterly

Weldon Kees as a person, the decentralization of artistic myths, and various issues involving the demography of the arts are some of the central concerns of this essay collection. Such inquiry suggests that Kees criticism could be productively pursued in the context of individuals such as Midwestern critic Gene Swenson and might help explain why the book's comparisons of Kees with many of his New York peers ends up being unproductive.

Book Review: The Old Iron Road: An Epic Of Rails, Roads, And The Urge To Go West, H. Roger Grant

Great Plains Quarterly

David Haward Bain has written a different book. The author of the widely-acclaimed study of construction of the Central Pacific-Union Pacific, Empire Express: Building of the First Transcontinental Railroad (1999), took his wife and two children in the summer of 2000 on an extensive cross-country tour of more than 7,000 miles. His overall intention was to trace large sections of historic emigrant trails of the mid-nineteenth century that once hosted thousands of seekers after a better life. The family journey also involved following the first transcontinental rail route and the much later Lincoln Highway (U.S. 30), which at times shadowed …

Book Review: Sheheke, Mandan Indian Diplomat: The Story Of White Coyote, Thomas Jefferson, And Lewis And Clark, Joseph C. Jastrzembski

Great Plains Quarterly

Long before Lewis and Clark launched their journey of exploration up the Missouri, Native peoples used the river to penetrate and open the Northern Plains to settlement and trade. As a result, the American explorers came across people with sophisticated understandings of the social and geopolitical situation of the Northern Plains, people whose calculated agendas spoke to different and independent visions of the West than the vision advocated by Lewis and Clark. It was such calculation that led one man, Sheheke, or White Coyote, of the Mandan to embark on his own epic voyage of exploration down the river and …

Book Review: College Rodeo: From Show To Sport, George H. Pfeiffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Clearly, college rodeo has meant much to the life of Sylvia Gann Mahoney. She was a college rodeo coach herself. She married a rodeo coach. She is a founder of an intercollegiate Rodeo alumni group. Perhaps her close association with college rodeo and her obvious love for the sport is the reason she should not have written this book.

Book Review: Western Rider: Views From A Car Window, David Taylor

Great Plains Quarterly

The history of the American West and its unique American-ness is intimately associated with our advances in mobility. Foot travel, wagon and ox, railroad, and, finally, automobile. Nothing has come to symbolize the vastness of the West more than a stretch of two-lane highway racing arrow-straight toward the distant horizon. Robert Frank codified that image in his book The Americans (1959), the first photographic meditation on, among other things, postwar car culture.

Review Of Hope And Dread In Montana Literature By Ken Egan Jr., Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly

While the title of this perceptive study of hope and dread in Montana literature might seem to limit his audience, Ken Egan takes care to point out that the boom-and-bust cycle so well known to his fellow Montanans and so well documented by many of the state's authors is a familiar pattern throughout the Great Plains states whose economies and lifestyles have also depended on extractive industries and agricultural pursuits.

Egan makes this clear in his discussion of Joseph Kinsey Howard's Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (1943). Howard's book of essays, Egan says, recapitulates the trends that Hope and Dread …

Review Of Vote Your Conscience: The Last Campaign Of George Mcgovern By Richard Michael Marano, John Miller

Great Plains Quarterly

In the two-party system of the United States, political candidates are fated to be separated into "winners" and "losers." The broad narrative of American political history defines George McGovern as one of its biggest losers, the victim of Richard Nixon's 1972 steamroller re-election campaign, which pulled out all the stops, legal and illegal, to convert the moment into a new Republican majority. Ironically, despite Watergate, Nixon remains in the minds of many Americans as more of a political statesman than his defeated opponent.

This recounting of McGovern's abortive 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination by the senator's Connecticut coordinator …

Review Of The Fate Of The Corps: What Became Of The Lewis And Clark Explorers After The Expedition By Larry E. Morris, Roger Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

This book is yet another result of the Lewis and Clark mania that has swept across much of the West and through the scholarly publishing community with interests in that region. It approaches the topic from an unexplored angle by looking at what members of the expedition did after their 1806 return to St. Louis. To do so, Larry Morris tries to focus on what he describes as "fascinating events" rather than merely giving the reader a string of mini-biographies. This approach allows him to range widely in time and place as he follows events in people's lives. At the …