Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Waltzing With The Ghost Of Tom Joad: Poverty, Myth, And Low-Wage Labor In Oklahoma By Robert Lee Maril, Robert Fulton

Great Plains Quarterly

The title of this book seeks to link the people whose lives it examines with the tale of the Joad family in John Steinbeck's classic The Grapes of Wrath. In addition, the author sets forth four ambitious goals.

The book reports on research funded by the Oklahoma Department of Commerce and conducted by sociologist Robert Lee Maril, assisted by staff and students from Oklahoma State University. The researchers examined the daily lives of Oklahomans in three households in each of four low-income neighborhoods in two cities and two small towns. Interestingly, no truly rural households were included.

Book Review: Âh-Âyîtaw Isi Ê-Kî-Kiskêyihtahkik Maskihkiy . They Knew Both Sides Of Medicine: Cree Tales Of Curing And Cursing. Told By Alice Ahenakew, Rory M. Larson

Great Plains Quarterly

Linguists and students of reservation-period Indian lore should welcome this finely crafted book. The heart of the work is a series of recordings of Alice Ahenakew, a prominent elderly Plains Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan. These are the memoirs of her life, lived in a haunted half-way world between a subarctic foraging culture and the twentieth- century industrial West.

Book Review: The Novels Of Louise Erdrich: Stories Of Her People By Connie A. Jacobs, Catherine Rainwater

Great Plains Quarterly

Jacobs offers readers abundant contextual information pertinent to a critical understanding of Erdrich's novels. Her purpose is similar to Susan Scarberry-Garcia's in Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn (1990); both books are valuable reference tools for newcomers to their authors' works and to American Indian Literature in general. This volume will be of particular benefit to teachers of introductory courses in Native American literature covering Erdrich's fiction.

Book Review: Lourneys To The Land Of Gold: Emigrant Diaries From The Bozeman Trail, 1863-1866, Sherry L. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

Most students of Western history know something about the Bozeman Trail, the 1860s-era cut-off from the Platte River trails bisecting the Powder River Basin before heading toward the Montana goldfields. Usually the Bozeman's story enters our consciousness in the context of the Northern Plains Indian Wars-Red's Cloud's War and the Sioux War of 1876. This outstanding two-volume collection of diaries and memoirs reminds us, however, that the Bozeman was an emigrant pathway before it became a hotly contested military road. Susan Badger Doyle's painstaking efforts to locate, research, and edit these documents reasserts the role played by the ambitions of …

Book Review: Alberta Society Of Artists: The First Seventy Years By Kathy E. Zimon, Colleen Skidmore

Great Plains Quarterly

Kathy E. Zimon, Fine Arts Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, has launched a new career as a researcher on Alberta art and artists. Her first major work, on the Alberta Society of Artists, is a valuable accounting of names, dates, issues, and images of an important aspect of the history of art in Alberta and a timely contribution to the study of art institutions in Canada.

Book Review: Naming The Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship By Caroline Marwitz, Stefani Jaye Farris

Great Plains Quarterly

"To love the land was all," concludes Caroline Marwitz in Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship. Indeed, Marwitz's unlikely love for the dry sagebrush steppe surrounding Laramie, Wyoming, where she spent her youth, anchors this memoir. Focusing on the friendship and guidance of an older woman named Nasim, who serves as a kind of spiritual mentor, Marwitz traces her haphazard path to the realization that the place where she grew up-"that rough, left-alone land" where "the wind was blowing so hard we could barely stand up”-holds a unique and inescapable beauty all its own. "Even the most barren …

Book Review: Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice In The Fields By Sharon Butala, Bill Draper Finlaw

Great Plains Quarterly

In the aftermath of September 11th, the recommendation of a book by what the Toronto Star called "one of this country's true visionaries" may seem an ill-afforded luxury. Butala's odyssey may become all the more suspect when we realize that her book centers on walking in a field in southwest Saskatchewan. How might such a book address the smell of burning metal and flesh?

Actually, quite well. Wild Stone Heart asks us to descend into an underworld of both grief and possibility which works in, with, and under the land upon which Butala traverses. She envisions "layers of presence" where …

Book Review: The Native American Oral Tradition: Voices Of The Spirit And Soul By Lois J. Einhorn, Randall A. Lake

Great Plains Quarterly

This excellent, albeit imperfect, book reexamines indigenous North American oral traditions as alternatives to mainstream Western discourses. Neither a literary anthology of Native myths nor an oral history of storytellers, it treats these traditions as persuasive messages addressed to audiences. Einhorn, rhetoric professor at Binghamton University, combines "transtextual" analysis of metaphor and symbol with "contextual" considerations of time, place, and cultural assumptions in an ambitious study of indigenous rhetoric spanning myriad speakers, nations, regions, and periods.

William Jennings Bryan: Boy Orator, Broken Man, And The "Evolution" Of America's Public Philosophy, Troy A. Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

Perhaps more than any other figure in American history, William Jennings Bryan is remembered for specific and identifiable moments of rhetorical action: the much-revered 1896 "Cross of Gold" speech and the much-maligned Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925. The dissonance between these two events, at least with respect to the ways in which political and rhetorical history has traditionally recorded them, could not be more striking. Bryan, the "Boy Orator," was, at thirty-six years, the youngest and most left-leaning candidate ever to receive a major party nomination for the US presidency. He is often regarded as the founder of the modern …

Casting The Buffalo Commons: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Print Media Coverage Of The Buffalo Commons Proposal For The Great Plains, Mary L. Umberger

Great Plains Quarterly

T hey filed into the auditorium and found seats, waiting politely for what they expected to be a preposterous talk. The featured speaker rose and began his prepared speech. The audience took note of his attire, his educated vocabulary, his "eastern" ways. Their scrutiny became vocal as he proposed his dream for the Great Plains.

Book Review: Tent Show: Arthur Names And His "Famous" Players By Donald W. Whisenhunt, Terry Wunder

Great Plains Quarterly

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tent shows traveled throughout much of the United States, achieving their greatest success prior to the 1920s and gradually disappearing by the 1950s. Small towns in areas like the Great Plains looked forward with great anticipation to their form of entertainment tailored specially for rural audiences.

Tent Show is the story of Art Names and how he and his partner William Whisenhunt managed to maintain a traveling tent show until Names's death in 1945. Donald W. Whisenhunt, through research in Names's papers and interviews with his family members and friends, gives an …

Book Review: Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook , Robert Bensen

Great Plains Quarterly

To readers raised on the literary Great Plains of Rolvaag and Cather, or in the West of Native writers Momaday, Welsh, and Silko, the North Dakota of Louise Erdrich's Ojibwa and mixed-blood characters in Love Medicine (1984, 1993) may seem a comically alien and tragically magical place. Hertha D. Wong's casebook will prove a welcome and reliable guide to the strange practices of Love Medicine. These thirteen critical studies (complemented, even upstaged, by two Erdrich essays and interviews with her and Michael Dorris) address important questions concerning history and culture, identity and narrativity, oral and literary structure, and Erdrich's 1993 …

Booknotes- May 2002

Great Plains Quarterly

Ner Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis. By Jerome A. Greene.

In Custer's Shadow: Major Marcus Reno. By Ronald H. Nichols.

Regional Studies in LDS Church History: Western Canada. Edited by Dennis A. Wright, Robert C. Freeman, Andrew H. Hedges, and Matthew 0. Richardson.

Coyote at Large: Humor in American Nature Writing. By Katrina Schimmoeller Peiffer.

Book Review: Tell Them We Are Going Home: The Odyssey Of The Northern Cheyennes. By John H. Monnett., Alan Boye

Great Plains Quarterly

In September 1878 about three hundred Northern Cheyenne men, women, and children under the leadership of Dull Knife and Little Wolf fled Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma in an attempt to return to their homeland in present-day Montana. Thousands of soldiers were eventually involved in a chase that turned into a 1,200 mile running battle of pain and sorrow. The following April less than half of the starving and sick Cheyenne reached Montana. Eventually they were granted a reservation there. Many of the others, mostly women, children, and old men, had been captured in Nebraska, and many of …

Book Review: Dream A Little: Land And Social Justice In Modern America By Dorothee E. Kocks., Betsy Downey

Great Plains Quarterly

In the beginning was land. Lots of land. "Before there was a welfare state, there was a frontier state," which distributed land in hopes of ending poverty. Dream a Little explores what Dorothee Kocks calls the "geographic embrace": the dream that nature has a moral function and offers "a blueprint to a good society." The first part of her book examines the frontier state, finding many similarities with the welfare state. Most Americans seem blind to the parallels, believing that nature and land are good; land is a "birthright," and a homestead is not a handout. "Asking for land is …

Book Review: Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940 By Sherry L. Smith, Lincoln Faller

Great Plains Quarterly

Without Indians-or, rather, their imaginings of them-white Americans would hardly know how to define themselves. This well-researched and clearly written book offers biographical sketches of six men and four women who, writing about Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seem to have done as much if not more to reimagine themselves.

Book Review: The Natural West: Environmental History In The Great Plains And Rocky Mountains By Dan Flores, Emily Greenwald

Great Plains Quarterly

Prolific environmental historian Dan Flores has gathered together and revised many of his previously-published short works in The Natural West. Two ideas link the essays together: genetic evolution that has produced ingrained, even instinctive, environmental behaviors in humans; and the West's distinctiveness, deriving not from aridity but from the ecological (and historical) interrelationships of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

Drawing from the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Flores argues that humans are revolutionarily adapted to transform the environment in order to perpetuate the species. But, he admits, "I can't imagine that many historians are going to …

Book Review: The Urban Indian Experience In America By Donald L. Fixico, Liz Grobsmith

Great Plains Quarterly

Donald Fixico's study of urban Indians may seem at first to be a review of a well-known and well-documented period: the shift from reservation life to urban relocation as a result of the US government's deliberate assimilationist policies of the 1950s. Surely the historical attitudes regarding reservation termination and urban relocation have been amply documented in the last half century. But Fixico takes us beyond the historical realities to an in-depth look at Indian life in urban America, focusing on the variety of concerns with which these populations have had to cope: economic viability; employment and financial stability; access to …

Book Review: Spirit Beings And Sun Dancers: Black Hawk’S Vision Of The Lakota World By Janet Catherine Berlo, James D. Keyser

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1880 the Lakota warrior Black Hawk drew a series of seventy-six ledger drawings in exchange for credit at William Caton’s Cheyenne River Reservation trade store. In 1994, these drawings were purchased for the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Working with Sioux elders, Janet Berlo has analyzed Black Hawk’s drawings in a beautiful book that will interest Plains scholars. As an artist, Black Hawk drew seventeen typical ledger art warfare scenes, but probably more valuable are the drawings of his visions, Sioux cosmology and ceremonies, and even enemy Crow warriors. He also drew seventeen natural history studies showing …

Mending The Sacred Hoop: Identity Enactment And The Occupation Of Wounded Knee, Sheryl L. Lindsley, Charles Braithwaite, Kristin L. Ahlberg

Great Plains Quarterly

This account by Oglala holy man Black Elk of the 1890 US cavalry massacre of three hundred Sioux Indians, mainly women and children, helps us understand the rhetorical importance of the American Indian Movement's return to Wounded Knee eighty-three years later. The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) represented a culmination of frustration felt by Native Americans. Magazines as diverse as Time and National Review reported the incident as a staged "pseudo-event" designed to amplify the oppressor/oppressed relationship. News coverage of Wounded Knee included headlines of mockery: "Of Fallen …

Notes And News

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents:

Call for Papers
Graduate Fellowships
Call for Papers
Arts and Culture of the Ute Indians
2002 Great Plains Chautauqua

Book Review: Dust Bowl Usa: Depression America And The Ecological Imagination, 1929-1 941 By Brad D. Lookingbill, Diane Quantic

Great Plains Quarterly

In his introduction to Dust Bowl USA, Brad Lookingbill states that a historian "makes an archeological expedition into the ecological imagination, ending with stories about stories quite different from where each actually began." Lookingbill's book catalogs these stories about stories; accounts of the Dust Bowl and Depression in newspapers, popular magazines, novels, personal accounts, art, photography, and government documents create a history of the changes in our understanding of Great Plains ecology.

The book is divided into chapters with such titles as "Survivor" and "Legacy" that focus on the persistent attitudes each label reflects. In the chapter "Fall," for …

Book Review: Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, And African Americans In Oklahoma, 1865- 1907. By Murray R. Wickett, Linda W. Reese

Great Plains Quarterly

Many historians have recognized the tripartite nature of race relations in the Great Plains region and the aggressive negotiation for power this created in the post Civil War period, but each has selected a manageable portion of the story to interpret. Murray Wickett deserves recognition for intertwining the central issues affecting all three races into a meaningful analysis. The choice of Oklahoma as the site of interaction is rich with possibilities but fraught with complexity. Acculturated and non-acculturated Indians, mixed-bloods and full-bloods, Indian freedmen and southern migrant freedmen, Twin Territories, Democrats and Republicans, white entrepreneurs and white tenant farmers- each …

Book Review: Willa Cather's Southern Connections: New Essays On Cather And The South, Marcia Robertson

Great Plains Quarterly

The cover of Willa Cather's Southern Connections reproduces one square of what is Known as the Robinson-Cather quilt, an image that testifies to a communal-and female-artistic tradition in which Cather's Back Creek, Virginia, kinswomen participated and with which her often heroic literary fictions seem to have little relation. Ann Romines participates in a quilting process of her own, piecing together seventeen revised essays from the seventh of a series of international conferences on Willa Cather held in 1997. Both conference and volume recontextualize a writer so often seen as Nebraskan or Western within a Southern matrix, asking Cather's readers to …

Book Review: General Crook And The Western Frontier By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Michael L. Tate

Great Plains Quarterly

Few frontier military officers could claim a more varied and significant combat career during the second half of the nineteenth century than George Crook. Beginning with service as a young lieutenant in the Rogue River War and the Yakima War of the 1850s, he learned quickly about the weaknesses of an army that suffered from underfunding, congressional neglect, low morale, and petty bickering among its officer corps. Despite his commanding troops during the next three decades in some of the most celebrated Indian wars of the Great Plains and Southwest, he also developed an empathy for his adversaries who suffered …

Book Review: Telling Tales: Essays In Western Women's History, Jane Reid Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly

This new collection of essays is a welcome contribution to the literature on women in the Canadian West from 1880 to 1940. It continues the fine work the editors started in their 1993 collection Standing on New Ground: Women in Alberta. Both the essays themselves and the editors' cogent and insightful introduction "show the diversity of newcomer women's experiences while highlighting common themes in the construction and reshaping of gender relationships during the colonization and settlement of western Canada." This volume will be of interest not just to scholars of Canadian women's history but of women in the North …

Book Review: The Arikara War: The First Plains Indian War, 1823 By William R. Nester, Victoria A.O. Smith

Great Plains Quarterly

The history of the Great Plains has been dominated by scholars focused on the journey of Lewis and Clark, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Ghost Dance phenomenon. Fortunately, William R. Nester has brought historians' attention to an overlooked episode of Plains history, the Arikara War of 1823.

Strategically situated on the middle Missouri River, the Arikaras had served as middlemen between the colonial arms trade flowing south from the Great Lakes region and the horse trade pushing north from the Southern Plains since the late 1600s. When smallpox decimated the tribe in the late 1700s, however, …

Book Review: Winning The Dust Bowl By Carter Revard, Norma Wilson

Great Plains Quarterly

Carter Revard says of Winning the Dust Bowl, "I've made this a home of new and selected poems, and put a meadow around it of history and autobiography, by looking out from these poems at the people, places and happenings from 1931 to the present." The vast meadow of memories allows his poems to sing more clearly.

Thirty-eight chapters surround forty-four poems in various forms, from the Old English riddle to free verse. His songs and metaphors range across time and place. Having drunk from the springs of the Greek gods and muses, Revard writes "To the Muse, in …

Review Of Losing Matt Shepard: Life And Politics In The Aftermath Of Anti-Gay Murder By Beth Loffreda, John Gilgun

Great Plains Quarterly

The book is about illusion and reality. It attempts, through interviews and rational analysis, to describe "Laramie in the October of Matt's death-the rush of protests and memorials, the arraignments of the killers, the arrival of the media, and the stunning transformation of Matthew into martyr, fueled by a surreal mixture of heartfelt identification, opportunistic politicking, and factual error."

It is also an attempt to describe the state of Wyoming, which exists in the national mind (when it exists at all) as a cowboy state. Check the Wyoming license plate with its cowboy on a bucking bronco. But the reality …

Review Of Listening To Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy For Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 By Amanda J. Cobb, Mary Jane Warde

Great Plains Quarterly

Conventional wisdom among scholars of Indian history holds that the boarding school experience for most Indian children was grim, a forced isolation from family and community in a misguided attempt to eradicate Native cultures and identity with the aim of assimilating Indian peoples. The researcher who has spent time interviewing boarding school alumni in Oklahoma, however, often hears a positive perspective composed of life-long relationships, fond memories, and gratitude to the institution. That positive perspective toward Bloomfield Academy is the starting point of Amanda J. Cobb's history of the Chickasaw institution, whose students were proud to be "Bloomfield Blossoms" from …