Great Plains Quarterly最新文献

Abstract:

“The Farmer Is the Man,” a balladic statement of farm fundamentalism that resonated with agrarian movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originated as a granger ballad in Kansas in 1874. The original text was first published January 7, 1874 in the Osage Mission Journal, with a clear author attribution: Knowles Shaw, the well-known revivalist preacher and hymn writer. Its message that “the farmer is the man who feeds them all,” with its attendant disparagement of other, lesser occupational classes, was more representative of grassroots grangerism than of Grange leadership. The song is representative not only of the general efflorescence of balladry in the Great Plains during the late nineteenth century but also on the reinterpretation of such literature by scholars such as Louise Pound as folk art rather than anthropological curiosity. During the summer of 2023, youth campers still sang “The Farmer Is the Man” from their official camp songbook.

Abstract:

This study examines Jim Crow practices and the Black Freedom Struggle in Kansas between 1945 and 1960, focusing at the state level. It proceeds in three sections. First, it examines Jim Crow in housing, employment, schools, public accommodations, and sundown towns. Second, it addresses the enforcement of these practices through mob violence and, to a greater degree, police violence. Third, it investigates the activism of Black Kansans who were, irrespective of age, gender, or class, determined to destroy Jim Crow through public protests, legal strategies, and physical self-defense, even if they represented considerable ideological, methodological, and strategic diversity. The study is based primarily on extensive research in regional and local newspapers, in public and university archives, and in oral histories with contemporary Black activists. Because of the limited time period involved, it utilizes a topical approach overall but, within this framework, addresses change over time. Before proceeding, the study briefly examines the long history of racism against Blacks and Black resistance to it in Kansas before 1945.

• Losing Ty
• Lorna Milne (bio)

Look at the gift of being, now . . . And what will our time leave?

—Robert Macfarlane, geophysicist and author

How much evidence needs to be present before something is done? And who gets to decide?

—Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author

On a cool spring day in 1967, our parents away on a trip, we lose our little brother Ty John. I’m not sure why we called Ty by his first two names, likely because Mom did. Sometimes we simply said TJ, a hard and soft sound with a lyrical ring to it. When we were in a hurry, it was simply Ty. At any rate, Ty is missing, and our parents aren’t home to lead the search through our eastern Montana town.

None of us four older children remember the babysitter from that weekend. Perhaps it is Mrs. Hehn, who is kind and never spanks us. She also bakes gingerbread cookies, laying them out on racks to cool before helping us decorate them. Our parents rarely go away— once a year at most. And Ty getting lost is no fault of the babysitter. He’s a hard child to keep track of.

I look in all our hiding spots in the backyard, then scour the neighborhood. I play with my brothers; I know their haunts.

As time goes on with no sign of him, the search intensifies. Mrs. Hehn asks for help from other adults in the neighborhood. My mother’s best friend drives up and questions me: where did I last see Ty? The babysitter calls the police, who stop by in their black car to question us as well. I overhear the babysitter ask the police if she should ring our parents, which makes me think of the river. Two blocks from our house flows the Yellowstone River. Ty loves to fish at the river; however, at age three he’s too young to go alone. We are most certainly not allowed to go in the spring, when the banks aren’t exposed.

My sister Darcy and I, ages eight and nine, walk down the hill to the river. Standing on the high bank I fear Ty is lost for good. Huge blocks of ice crash and swirl downstream. In 1967 breakup of the Yellowstone was an event. Townspeople congregated along the hilltops to watch the drama of ice-cake collision; our friends who lived close to the river evacuated their homes. The county sheriff woke Dad in the middle of the night if the water crested the railroad embankment behind his farm implement business. We’d hear Dad hurriedly dress and leave to move machinery out of the path of overflow and ice. All this is far from my mind as I peer over the edge looking for a small boy [End Page 419] making his way down the deer path with his fishing pole. The image is impossible, though, as ice wedges litter the hillside and the bank is underwater.

Abstract:

The role of African Americans in the homesteading movement is an emerging topic in US history. This article explores an episode of African American homesteading near Las Cruces, New Mexico, from the late 1920s through the 1930s. In this period, at least twenty-six African American families successfully homesteaded some 23,000 acres of desert land, largely under the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916. Local knowledge about this homesteading episode exists but is limited and is somewhat overshadowed by other Black homesteading and community-building episodes in the region. The purpose here is to document the episode to bring it into the historical record and provide a foundation for others who might be interested in exploring the topic further.

Abstract:

African American women helped make Historic Greenwood into the thriving community popularly known as “Black Wall Street.” Despite their rich and varied contributions as business owners and operators and church and community activists, their experiences are frequently ignored in historical and contemporary narratives. Women of Black Wall Street (WBWS), a digital humanities project released for the centennial commemoration in May 2021, reifies this by tracking and analyzing the social, intellectual, and economic contributions of Black women in Greenwood. Through this project, my student research team and I restore the visibility of Black women in the community, including writers like Mary Jones Parrish, who provided the first written account of the massacre, and Blanche M. Woodford, whose newspaper articles about Black Wall Street were read throughout the country. Using historical research and digital methods and tools, WBWS features contextual essays, biographies of ten Green-wood women, maps of their homes and businesses, and interviews with contemporary female business owners in the district. In this article, I discuss the site and the importance of bringing Historic Greenwood’s overlooked women online and to the public. I present how the project transforms the Black Wall Street story and joins digital recovery projects that bring forth the full humanity of marginalized people.

• “We Belong to the Land!”Revisiting Black Oklahoma
• Kalenda Eaton, Guest Editor

This special issue is devoted to undertold stories about Black experience in Oklahoma. The contributions reflect the resilience and determination of people tied to the land and its history. Over the past few years, the state of Oklahoma has experienced a renaissance among cultural historians, sociologists, politicians, entertainers, and community activists. The state, situated in what is pejoratively known as “flyover country,” has commanded wide-ranging national and international attention for its uncanny ability to remain at the forefront of historical studies, political debates, and contemporary popular culture. Yet, among the list of politicians, performers, and movie producers using Oklahoma as a platform for their own agendas are those residents who have worked to preserve the sanctity of the state and its communities.

Much of the recent attention misses the fact that since the mid-nineteenth century, Oklahoma has been one of the most politically important places in the United States. Nearly every part of modern American history found its way into Indian Territory and later Oklahoma. From the forced relocation of Indigenous and African-descended people to the territory, the Civil War battle fought at Honey Springs, decades of migration and westward expansion, the railroad and oil industries, the rise of white supremacist organizations, economic depression and agricultural devastation, residential redlining, civil rights and social action, school desegregation, Supreme Court nominations, domestic terrorism, tribal sovereignty, and more, the progress of the nation can be measured by what happens in Oklahoma. And, African Americans have been embedded in these stories from the beginning.

The idea for Lincoln territory mapped out in 1867 and the state of Sequoyah proposed in 1905 tells us that for many, the fate of Oklahoma pre-statehood was always rooted in Black and Indigenous autonomy. In the 1890s, lawyer and politician Edward P. McCabe attempted to convince all who would listen not only that African Americans in Oklahoma and Indian Territory needed equal rights but also that a portion of the newly formed “Twin Territories” should be the foundation for an all-Black state. McCabe’s position was based on the decades-long presence of African-descended people in the territories and the recent consistent flow of African Americans moving into the region [End Page vii] from the American South. For Black people, the promise of early Oklahoma consisted of the ancestral tie to the land for some, the economic practicality of homesteading for others, and the possibility of freedom and progress for all.

History tells us that th

Reviewed by:

• Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols
• Tash Smith

Central to Roger Nichols’s Massacring Indians is the definition of the word “massacre,” a term that he believes has been used too often as propaganda against Indians to justify settler colonialism on the American frontier. By analyzing ten military-Indian conflicts in and out of the Great Plains—conflicts that range from the well known (e.g., Wounded Knee, Sand Creek) to the lesser known (e.g., Bad Axe, Ash Hollow)—Nichols argues that the actions of the United States Army and local militias clearly led to “massacres” against Native populations. In each case, Americans murdered noncombatants like women and children, killed unarmed Indians attempting to flee or surrender, and wantonly destroyed villages and property.

Moving chronologically and succinctly through these ten examples, Nichols provides the national and local context surrounding each conflict. In his telling, trouble emerges at both levels. The federal government suffered from what Nichols describes as a “national schizophrenia” (4) as it encouraged white settlement of the frontier without a clear policy of dealing with the Indian populations that whites encountered. This lack of direction at a national level contributed to local problems, where whites, growing less tolerant for Natives with every passing day, demanded more land for themselves. Treaty making, military control, and eventually, civilian oversight through the Office of Indian Affairs all failed to soothe the demands of an encroaching white population. As such, each small dispute or misunderstanding risked creating larger and deadlier problems regardless of who was responsible. Through his ten examples, Nichols identifies how these conflicts led to calls from local whites to exterminate Native populations, especially as the concepts of total war and winter campaigning took hold in the years after the Civil War, ultimately resulting in military actions that fit the definition of a “massacre.”

Taken individually, the chapters provide concise historical context for each event, easily accessible for historians and scholars of all fields, while being sure to document both white and Indian actions that led to the conflict. To be sure, no side emerges blameless in Nichols’s view. What he succeeds at, however, remains important for the literature: establishing a pattern of behavior by the federal government and local white populations based on anger, greed, and misunderstandings that too often resulted in massacres and ot

Abstract:

This article investigates one of the most litigated and controversial court cases over Dawes enrollments in Oklahoma history from the perspective of Sally Atkins (1855–1924). Atkins, born into slavery in Missouri, married into an estelvste (African Creek) family in Indian Territory after the Civil War. Atkins migrated to Canada following statehood but was drawn back to Oklahoma by 1917. She believed her son, Tommy, to be the rightful allottee of one quarter section of the Cushing-Drumright Oilfield, the richest oilfield in the nation at the time. This claim drew Atkins into conflict with some of the most powerful oilmen in the state, who believed that another woman—a “full-blood” Muscogee—was Tommy’s mother. Who was the real mother of Tommy?

State and federal officials, along with newspaper reporters, adjudicated the case based on their preconceived notions of race and “blood” in Indian Country, leading to confounding conclusions about racial categories, mineral wealth, and kinship. Many of these notions were then codified into state laws in Oklahoma. In this article, I untangle the shifting notions of bloodlines and property rights to show how the bureaucratic imperialism of the Dawes Commission fixed white supremacist notions of race for people recognized as “Black” in Indian Territory.

• Hailstone National Wildlife Refuge, with Owl and Eagle
• Cara Chamberlain (bio)

We haven’t even brought snacks for our drive to the prairie northwest of Billings. We’ve been out a lot longer than we thought we’d be, and we’re hungry, Bernie and Luke the Dog and I. It is 8:30 p.m., and after rain and clouds all day, the sun has finally slipped below the valence of dark cumulus that bedeviled the afternoon. It primps up the wheatfields, alfalfa rows, last year’s crop stubble, and the remaining tracts of shortgrass prairie with a light so wise and cleansing we might have passed into an El Greco canvas or an Ovidian myth. Long-billed curlews rise, glimmer, and shimmy like kites—white against purple clouds scuttling off to the east. They lure their beloveds and charm us.

It’s hard to comprehend that somewhere there are pavement and crowds and world affairs—and sumptuous dinners. It’s June 11, 2018. It’s also June 12 in Singapore where President Donald J. Trump is dining on beef confit with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Fittingly, confit involves the slow cooking of muscle in its own fat, leaving the flesh tender and moist. The process usually happens to some sort of tough creature, like duck. But Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump are above the consumption of birds. Castrated cattle for those two. A dish for autocrats and despots.

Not that we don’t have our own sort of despots here. The owl, for example. A short-eared owl, to be specific, on a ragged fencepost. We pull over and stop. He stares back at us with an innocent ferocity it’s hard to endure. In the golden light, he shines like a natural zircon. He’s glorious. Despite how close we are, he doesn’t move, shake his head, raise his feathers. Pale and compact, he must be a male. I take in the whole of him: round, feathers blowing, head swiveled at a sharp angle to consider his world, ourselves included.

I linger over every bit of his beauty. He has two short “ears”—tiny, dark, pointed tufts of feather right on the top of his head. His facial disk is round as a crater and more clearly marked than a great horned owl’s. His beak is a black line bisecting that disk. His eyes seem highlighted by Egyptian kohl. The owl’s feathers are white and tawny, a spangle of gold-nugget freckles across his breast and flanks. His legs and taloned feet are covered to the ankles in what look like golden fur tights. Splayed, his feet squeeze the fencepost he perches on as if he might crush it.

But I keep coming back to his eyes. Two round black pupils cut through circular yellow fields. Yellow? As in sulfur, egg yolk, sunflower, lemon, neon sign, emergency vehicle? [End Page 345] No. Nothing I can think of compares to owl yellow—its own color, simile, and metaphor. The yellow that death looks li

Abstract:

A lot of attention has been focused on the all-Black towns in Oklahoma established two decades after the Civil War. However, missing from the story of Black life on the frontier are overlooked Freedmen communities established earlier. These were not incorporated towns but were thriving communities where enslaved people in Indian Territory lived for generations. These small yet significant settlements of Black families did not voluntarily migrate to the West from the Deep South but accompanied their Indian slaveholders during the Trail of Tears. Many lived as enslaved people until the end of the Civil War. Afterward, they lived on the edge of incorporated white or Indian towns where they formed their own Freedmen settlements, established churches, built schools, and lived vibrant lives. This essay will focus on a few of these settlements, where footprints of their presence can still be found today in old “neighborhoods” that have been absorbed into other communities.