Pub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a918408
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
Abstract:
Black Americans settled in Oklahoma beginning in the 1830s; the first Black settlers were often people enslaved by Native nations. Despite the long-time Black presence in Oklahoma and the establishment of All-Black towns and thriving middle-class communities in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Ralph Ellison is the only Black writer publishing before 1940 who is commonly associated with the state. Yet Ellison’s science teacher and writing mentor, Josie Craig Berry, was a literary and journalistic powerhouse in Oklahoma City beginning in 1918. Berry published poetry, reported on cultural events, and wrote a weekly literary column for Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch newspaper from 1937 to 1939. This essay presents Berry as an accomplished poet, a literary critic, a community-based journalist, a public intellectual, and a woman whose contributions to Black literature and Oklahoma literature are immeasurable. Berry’s writings as examined in this essay also make evident the need for further research and academic publications on Black Oklahoma writers.
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Pub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a918410
Karla Slocum
Abstract:
In public portrayals of the history of Oklahoma’s rural Black towns, the iconic image of the towns’ political leadership is an upper middle-class Black man. Such an image has been especially reinforced by the widespread circulation of a photo, circa 1908, of Boley, Oklahoma’s town councilmen suited up in formal attire as prominent businessmen leading the town governance and deemed emblematic of Black town success. While Black women have always had critical roles in the community, it is not until the late twentieth century when they started taking on formal roles in town government as mayors. Redirecting this predominant gaze from the Black man as a Black town leader, this article examines Black women’s political participation in Black towns’ formal roles starting in the 1970s. Providing broader context, the article reveals how, by the late twentieth century, the boundaries of who counts as a formal Black town leader expanded along gender lines and also—in some cases—in terms of class. I discuss Black town women leaders of the 1970s–2000s, demonstrating how their leadership reflects a particular theme across Black women’s political engagement in Black towns: racial uplift through honoring place and community.
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Pub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a918414
Steven M. Fountain
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by:
Warrior Spirit: The Story of Native American Patriotism and Heroism by Herman J. Viola
Steven M. Fountain
Warrior Spirit: The Story of Native American Patriotism and Heroism. By Herman J. Viola. Foreword by Debra K. Mooney. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. ix + 149 pp. Illustrations, contributors, index. $19.95 paper.
Warrior Spirit: The Story of Native American Patriotism and Heroism delivers on its promise to reorient readers to consider the legacy of Native military service. Short biographies of more than a dozen Native Americans who served the United States Armed Forces are interspersed throughout the text. The content tilts heavily toward the modern for reasons scholars will [End Page 356] find obvious but may pass by younger readers; seven of the ten chapters range from World War I through the War on Terror.
A suitably brief introduction dispels notions that American Indians are inherently warlike, emphasizing patriotism and veterans’ reflections on war and service. The first two chapters focus on eastern tribes’ experiences from the American Revolution through the Civil War and Indian scouts in the West. The remainder of the book covers World War I and II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror alongside topics such as counting coup, code talkers, and women warriors.
Viola, the author and editor of dozens of books ranging from textbooks to academic works to mass market titles found on souvenir store bookshelves, employs a formula here that is oriented toward potential classroom use. Warrior Spirit will engage middle and high school readers, and the brief biographical chapters lend themselves to comparative readings and discussion. The chapters are short enough for classroom use and would be especially suited for use in student research projects emphasizing the continuing legacy and experiences of Native Americans.
The drawbacks of this slim volume are few. The many grayscale images are not as flashy as they might be in color. Viola and his co-contributors do not shy away from glimpses of reservation culture that may be worth investigating further, but which may also be uncomfortable for teachers without the support of curriculum under development. Emphasis on Crow pride in enemy deaths and statements that warriors don’t cry tilt toward glorification of warfare more than understanding the costs of war or the lives of soldiers. Teachers looking to emphasize Native American history beyond the nineteenth century will find ample material in the thematic chapters to pull in Native and non-Native students alike.
Pub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a918412
Brad D. Lookingbill
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by:
Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934: Reluctant Warrior by Armand S. La Potin
Brad D. Lookingbill
Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934: Reluctant Warrior. By Armand S. La Potin. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. 259 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper.
Armand S. La Potin, an emeritus professor of history at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, has written a biography of Major General Hugh Lenox Scott. While not a definitive study, La Potin’s work chronicles the career soldier from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. He examines a published memoir, family letters, military correspondence, and government records. Accordingly, the US Army officer was a “reluctant warrior.”
Born in Danville, Kentucky, in 1853, Scott graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1876. His father, an educator and minister, died of consumption when the boy was only eight years old. His mother urged him to pursue a profession such as law, medicine, or teaching. A taste for adventure drew him into armed service, yet familial connections infused his mind with the assumptions of Presbyterian theology.
Scott rose from a West Point cadet to a commissioned second lieutenant in the Ninth Cavalry. Arriving in the Great Plains after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he posted with the Seventh Cavalry. He endured cold winters as well as tiresome drills at frontier forts. He participated in campaigns to subdue Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. He saw action in the Nez Perce War and eventually commanded Troop L of the Seventh Cavalry, which was comprised of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache recruits. In 1880 he married Mary Merrill, the daughter of General Lewis Merrill. However, La Potin offers minimal information about their fifty-four-year relationship. Instead, the author focuses on the particular challenges of the military profession around the turn of the century.
La Potin details Scott’s role in military events between 1877 and 1918. Though not as renowned as other figures, Scott worked with Red Cloud, Nelson Miles, Quanah Parker, Leonard Wood, John Pershing, and Pancho Villa. He was the military governor of the Sulu Archipelago during the US occupation of the Philippines. From 1906 to 1910 he served as the superintendent of West Point. A supporter of conscription, he became both acting secretary of war and US Army chief of staff. He retired in 1919, remaining a distinguished member of the Board of Indian Commissioners. He died on April 30, 1934.
No matter the situation, La Potin finds that Scott demonstrated the ability to relate to others while recognizing different interests. Significantly, the career soldier developed expertise in sign languages and Indigenous folkways that promot
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Pub Date : 2024-01-29DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a918415
William Wyckoff
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by:
Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography ed. by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad
William Wyckoff
Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography. Edited by Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2022. ix + 215 pp. Plates, figures, select bibliography, index. $34.95 paper.
This remarkable collection of images and essays explores the shared worlds of landscape photography as they developed between 1870 and 1920, both in Norway and in the American West. Editors Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad have assembled an international collection of scholars to ponder the parallel stories of how landscape photography blossomed in both national settings in the late nineteenth century to serve a variety of commercial and scientific interests. The result—superbly illustrated and meticulously documented—is an enduring collection of ideas and images that shines fresh light on both settings and discovers fascinating similarities in how American and Norwegian imagemakers captured the landscapes they encountered.
The book opens with a set of two dozen images drawn from Norway and the American West. The work of American photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins is provocatively juxtaposed with images made by Norwegian photographers such as Knud Knudsen, Anders Wilse, and Axel Lindahl. Immediately, the reader is confronted by their common visual [End Page 357] ground. An opening essay by editor Shannon Egan points out how both groups of photographers used similar equipment, framed their subjects in parallel ways, and shared common interests in the subjects they photographed. For example, both traditions emphasized Romantic subjects of wild nature in their images, but their work also jointly celebrated the “technological sublime” of conquering nature (photographs of railroads, spectacular highways) as well as a fascination for portraying “native peoples” (Norwegian peasants and herders, American Indians) in their primitive homelands. Both traditions also promoted tourism in their respective countries and celebrated and projected a strong sense of nationalism.
The remainder of the book features four longer essays that detail particular photographers, themes, or settings in greater detail and five briefer pieces that each compare an American landscape image with a related Norwegian image. Several conclusions jointly emerge. First, there was extensive travel between the two countries by the photographers themselves. Second, many practicing photographers of this era were aware of other landscape photographers active during the late nineteenth centur
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a908054
Russell Cobb
Take Them Back to Tulsa Russell Cobb (bio) Russell Cobb was Tulsa's police and fire commissioner from 1940 to 1942. He resigned from the post and signed up to fight in World War II. The US Army sent him to Alaska to retake two small islands occupied by the Japanese, the only battles fought in North America. I have a portrait of him at the time. He sits in a white parka with a fur-lined hood, his blue eyes and tight lips registering something of a smirk. Sent to coordinate bombing runs over the islands of Kiska and Attu, he ended up flying dozens of missions himself. "Life here is rough but it seems to agree with me," he wrote to a friend in Tulsa. He returned to Tulsa as Captain Cobb, a wealthy oilman and decorated war veteran ready to take the fight to Roosevelt's New Deal. Captain Cobb detected a whiff of Bolshevism in the New Deal and took it personally. He had met his wife—my great-grandmother—while coordinating famine relief in the Soviet Union. Lenin conducted an experiment in collectivist agriculture that he came to regret in the early 1920s. The result was widespread starvation and violence. Cobb's father-in-law had been assassinated by the Revolutionary government. During the Cold War, journalists would come to the Cobbs' house to write profiles on my great-grandmother Elena, a formerly aristocratic girl whose family had been wiped out by the "red menace," a warning to any fellow traveler toying with the ideas of Marxism. Elena and Russell Cobb constituted a new form of aristocracy in Tulsa, one tied to the fortunes of the oil and gas industry. In the 1950s Tulsa still held fast to its claim as "The Oil Capital of the World." Captain Cobb died in a bathtub in the Tulsa Hotel. He ended his life with a single shot from a .38 caliber revolver. His son, Russell Cobb II, became convinced that the world's next great oil boom was in Cuba. He started a grandiose-sounding oil company, Western Hemisphere Petroleum Corporation, that poked around the marshes of central Cuba, sinking a modest fortune into drilling operations. The Cuban poet Virgilio Piñero, has a line about Cuba as cursed by the "damned circumstance of being surrounded by water everywhere." Plenty of water, virtually no oil. Fidel Castro nationalized the entire oil and gas industry. Russell Cobb II died penniless in a Veterans Administration Hospital a few years later. He blamed Fidel Castro for his failures, but there was much, much more to the story. That brings me to Russell Cobb III, a charming lawyer who counted the televangelist Oral Roberts among his clients. People around Tulsa [End Page 235] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Captain Russell Cobb, stationed in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. Author photo. [End Page 236] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Tulsa Hotel. still remember my uncle. They drank with him on Saturday night at the Brookside Bar and then prayed with him on Sunday morning. He had a special sign he gave to the barten
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a908055
Reviewed by: Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation by Louis V. Headman Beth R. Ritter Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation. By Louis V. Headman. Foreword by Sean O'Neill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. vii + 510 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $90.00 cloth. Respected Southern Ponca elder Louis Headman has produced the most remarkable book I have ever encountered in more than three decades of research as a Ponca scholar. Just as Chris Eyre famously commented on the iconic film Atanarjuat, "this is an inside job." Walks on the Ground is a rare and precious addition to the scant historical and ethnographic literature on the Ponca, particularly the Southern Ponca Tribe. Intensely rooted in the language and worldview of the Ponca, Headman has been systematically collecting scraps of Ponca language and culture to weave into this narrative history for more than seventy years. As Sean O'Neill notes in his foreword, as a distinguished elder and one of the last fluent Ponca speakers, Louis Headman speaks with both authority and intimacy. Ponca scholars and scholars of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains will experience many "aha" moments! The treatment of the fraternal order of the Heđúškà society (whose songs and dances form the backbone of modern pan-Indian powwow culture), as well as the unique history of how the Southern Ponca adopted and adapted the Native American Church in the early twentieth century, are worth the price of admission alone. Headman's exploration of the Heđúškà society, songs, and dances are one of the true strengths of this volume. Headman explains that Poncas are singers and that their oral history is embedded in Heđúškà songs that include feats of bravery on the battlefield but also chronicle important events and even notable individuals who exemplified Ponca/Heđúškà values. This insight serves to highlight just how critical it is to revitalize the Ponca language. Sadly, this volume also reveals the intentional dismantling of Ponca culture and language, most especially through the Indian boarding school movement. The poignancy of forced removal (1877) and the resulting diaspora between the Northern and Southern Ponca peoples is striking. Culture is resilient and the Southern Poncas continued to sing the songs and tell the stories with the place-names of their former village sites and sacred sites in the north. Interestingly, they also sought to reproduce their traditional lifeways from the Niobrara-Missouri homeland by gravitating toward the Arkansas, Salt Fork, and Chikaskia Rivers, where they continued to celebrate their ceremonies and riverine adaptations. This is a true reference volume that Ponca scholars will return to time and again. There are important chapters on the Ponca giveaway, family structure and kinship system, clans, Ponca names, the spirit world, funeral rites, Ponca medicine, Ponca warriors and political governance. There are man
{"title":"Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation by Louis V. Headman (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gpq.2023.a908055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gpq.2023.a908055","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation by Louis V. Headman Beth R. Ritter Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation. By Louis V. Headman. Foreword by Sean O'Neill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. vii + 510 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $90.00 cloth. Respected Southern Ponca elder Louis Headman has produced the most remarkable book I have ever encountered in more than three decades of research as a Ponca scholar. Just as Chris Eyre famously commented on the iconic film Atanarjuat, \"this is an inside job.\" Walks on the Ground is a rare and precious addition to the scant historical and ethnographic literature on the Ponca, particularly the Southern Ponca Tribe. Intensely rooted in the language and worldview of the Ponca, Headman has been systematically collecting scraps of Ponca language and culture to weave into this narrative history for more than seventy years. As Sean O'Neill notes in his foreword, as a distinguished elder and one of the last fluent Ponca speakers, Louis Headman speaks with both authority and intimacy. Ponca scholars and scholars of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains will experience many \"aha\" moments! The treatment of the fraternal order of the Heđúškà society (whose songs and dances form the backbone of modern pan-Indian powwow culture), as well as the unique history of how the Southern Ponca adopted and adapted the Native American Church in the early twentieth century, are worth the price of admission alone. Headman's exploration of the Heđúškà society, songs, and dances are one of the true strengths of this volume. Headman explains that Poncas are singers and that their oral history is embedded in Heđúškà songs that include feats of bravery on the battlefield but also chronicle important events and even notable individuals who exemplified Ponca/Heđúškà values. This insight serves to highlight just how critical it is to revitalize the Ponca language. Sadly, this volume also reveals the intentional dismantling of Ponca culture and language, most especially through the Indian boarding school movement. The poignancy of forced removal (1877) and the resulting diaspora between the Northern and Southern Ponca peoples is striking. Culture is resilient and the Southern Poncas continued to sing the songs and tell the stories with the place-names of their former village sites and sacred sites in the north. Interestingly, they also sought to reproduce their traditional lifeways from the Niobrara-Missouri homeland by gravitating toward the Arkansas, Salt Fork, and Chikaskia Rivers, where they continued to celebrate their ceremonies and riverine adaptations. This is a true reference volume that Ponca scholars will return to time and again. There are important chapters on the Ponca giveaway, family structure and kinship system, clans, Ponca names, the spirit world, funeral rites, Ponca medicine, Ponca warriors and political governance. There are man","PeriodicalId":12757,"journal":{"name":"Great Plains Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a908056
Reviewed by: Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement by Lynda Beck Fenwick Michael J. Hightower Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement By Lynda Beck Fenwick. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. vii + 247 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper. Sometime in the late 1870s, Isaac Werner left his job as a druggist in Rossville, Illinois, and made the trek to western Kansas to claim a homestead. In most respects, he was no different from countless others who relied on the Homestead Act of 1862 to carve out a slice of the American Dream, with two caveats: he lived alone, meaning that he had no dependents to help him prove up his claim, and he kept a diary that survives as a portal into the challenges of Great Plains homesteading. That diary—all 480 pages of it—became Lynda Beck Fenwick's source for a detailed and often poignant account of Werner's life between 1884 and the year he died, 1895. In her telling, historical markers are revealed in the context of Werner's day-to-day activities, from the big die-up of 1886 to 1887 (worst blizzard in seven years), ongoing expansion of the AT&SF Railway, the suffragist movement, and the Panic of 1893. Werner was clearly on the right side of history in supporting women's rights. Thanks to a copious book collection that belies stereotypes of the plodding yeoman farmer, Werner kept up with, and thought deeply about, the issues of his day. Arguably, the most important issue of Werner's day was the rise of prairie populism, a movement with striking parallels in our own time, spawned by the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Attending speeches by populist luminaries and delivering a few of his own, Werner heeded Mary Lease's call to raise less corn and more hell and joined the bandwagon. In what might be loosely defined as spare time, Werner complemented his political activism with devising machinery aimed at alleviating his and his neighbors' backbreaking work. Werner's connections extended to Kansas State College, the first federal land-grant college created by the Morrill Act. In a letter to professors W. S. Morgan and E. M. Shelton, he suggested using local Farmers' Alliances to collect soil samples, supply data on crops, and gather weather statistics to help experiment stations in their mission to improve agricultural output. Prairie Bachelor is illuminating both as a sociology of Great Plains settlement and a history, told from the bottom up, of the populist movement. At its center is a bachelor who spent his Christmases, alone and cold, on his homestead, mourning the passing of faraway relatives and tending to his beloved cats. Death came at the age of fifty-one, leaving his neighbors to remember a kind and generous homesteader who did what many of us fail to do and live to regret: keep a diary for posterity to know what we did, and why. [End Page 248] Michael J. Hightower Independent Histori
{"title":"Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement by Lynda Beck Fenwick (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gpq.2023.a908056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gpq.2023.a908056","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement by Lynda Beck Fenwick Michael J. Hightower Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement By Lynda Beck Fenwick. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. vii + 247 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper. Sometime in the late 1870s, Isaac Werner left his job as a druggist in Rossville, Illinois, and made the trek to western Kansas to claim a homestead. In most respects, he was no different from countless others who relied on the Homestead Act of 1862 to carve out a slice of the American Dream, with two caveats: he lived alone, meaning that he had no dependents to help him prove up his claim, and he kept a diary that survives as a portal into the challenges of Great Plains homesteading. That diary—all 480 pages of it—became Lynda Beck Fenwick's source for a detailed and often poignant account of Werner's life between 1884 and the year he died, 1895. In her telling, historical markers are revealed in the context of Werner's day-to-day activities, from the big die-up of 1886 to 1887 (worst blizzard in seven years), ongoing expansion of the AT&SF Railway, the suffragist movement, and the Panic of 1893. Werner was clearly on the right side of history in supporting women's rights. Thanks to a copious book collection that belies stereotypes of the plodding yeoman farmer, Werner kept up with, and thought deeply about, the issues of his day. Arguably, the most important issue of Werner's day was the rise of prairie populism, a movement with striking parallels in our own time, spawned by the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Attending speeches by populist luminaries and delivering a few of his own, Werner heeded Mary Lease's call to raise less corn and more hell and joined the bandwagon. In what might be loosely defined as spare time, Werner complemented his political activism with devising machinery aimed at alleviating his and his neighbors' backbreaking work. Werner's connections extended to Kansas State College, the first federal land-grant college created by the Morrill Act. In a letter to professors W. S. Morgan and E. M. Shelton, he suggested using local Farmers' Alliances to collect soil samples, supply data on crops, and gather weather statistics to help experiment stations in their mission to improve agricultural output. Prairie Bachelor is illuminating both as a sociology of Great Plains settlement and a history, told from the bottom up, of the populist movement. At its center is a bachelor who spent his Christmases, alone and cold, on his homestead, mourning the passing of faraway relatives and tending to his beloved cats. Death came at the age of fifty-one, leaving his neighbors to remember a kind and generous homesteader who did what many of us fail to do and live to regret: keep a diary for posterity to know what we did, and why. [End Page 248] Michael J. Hightower Independent Histori","PeriodicalId":12757,"journal":{"name":"Great Plains Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a908059
Reviewed by: Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium by Sharon Hoogstraten Robert E. Lewis Jr. Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium. By Sharon Hoogstraten. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. 304 pp. Maps, illustrations. $80.00 cloth. Over the past decade, Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Sharon Hoogstraten took portraits of Potawatomi people and their relations in their regalia in Oklahoma, Kansas, and around the Great Lakes. Additionally, she collected statements from her subjects. In Dancing for Our Tribe, Hoogstraten offers a print exhibition of these portraits and statements. Hoogstraten explains her organization of the book in the following way: "Chapters are organized to respect cultural priorities and influenced by the patterns of Grand Entry" (v). The first three chapters—veterans, grandmothers, and dancers—address and are ordered to mimic the succession of the dancers one would see as they enter the powwow arena at Grand Entry. The next five chapters—tradition, storytellers, family, elders, and seven generations—explore themes that "respect cultural priorities" in the powwow (v). The final chapter—powwow—pans out on the powwow itself. The book recreates the exhibition experience. One will find themselves first taking in a large portrait. Hoogstraten sometimes places a landscape significant to Potawatomi history as the background for the portrait. Accompanying each portrait, one will then find a handwritten statement from each subject. The statements address the subject's regalia and other topics of significance. Hoogstraten brings additional history and culture into the book. She also explains the historical significance of the background in some of the portraits and, at intervals, supplements the portraits and the statements with photos and elaboration on a topic. This contextualizes the portraits and statements for the reader who may not be familiar with the content and enriches the book for those who want to know more about a topic. Some of the topics discussed include removal from the Great Lakes, the Potawatomi trail of death, former and present Potawatomi reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma, boarding schools, and Native American military history. The author started this project with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma and then expanded to include the nine nations who have hosted the annual gathering of Potawatomi nations over the past decade. The reader should note that the book still emphasizes the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though. Additionally, the reader should note that the author does not directly address an inductive method for finding themes for her chapters; rather, readers are left to come to their own conclusions based on the stories shared throughout the book. Hoogstraten has put together a vivid and contemporary set of portraits and stories. Anyone wanting to learn more about Potawatomi people and their regalia would do well to pick up a copy. [End P
{"title":"Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium by Sharon Hoogstraten (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/gpq.2023.a908059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gpq.2023.a908059","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium by Sharon Hoogstraten Robert E. Lewis Jr. Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millennium. By Sharon Hoogstraten. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. 304 pp. Maps, illustrations. $80.00 cloth. Over the past decade, Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Sharon Hoogstraten took portraits of Potawatomi people and their relations in their regalia in Oklahoma, Kansas, and around the Great Lakes. Additionally, she collected statements from her subjects. In Dancing for Our Tribe, Hoogstraten offers a print exhibition of these portraits and statements. Hoogstraten explains her organization of the book in the following way: \"Chapters are organized to respect cultural priorities and influenced by the patterns of Grand Entry\" (v). The first three chapters—veterans, grandmothers, and dancers—address and are ordered to mimic the succession of the dancers one would see as they enter the powwow arena at Grand Entry. The next five chapters—tradition, storytellers, family, elders, and seven generations—explore themes that \"respect cultural priorities\" in the powwow (v). The final chapter—powwow—pans out on the powwow itself. The book recreates the exhibition experience. One will find themselves first taking in a large portrait. Hoogstraten sometimes places a landscape significant to Potawatomi history as the background for the portrait. Accompanying each portrait, one will then find a handwritten statement from each subject. The statements address the subject's regalia and other topics of significance. Hoogstraten brings additional history and culture into the book. She also explains the historical significance of the background in some of the portraits and, at intervals, supplements the portraits and the statements with photos and elaboration on a topic. This contextualizes the portraits and statements for the reader who may not be familiar with the content and enriches the book for those who want to know more about a topic. Some of the topics discussed include removal from the Great Lakes, the Potawatomi trail of death, former and present Potawatomi reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma, boarding schools, and Native American military history. The author started this project with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma and then expanded to include the nine nations who have hosted the annual gathering of Potawatomi nations over the past decade. The reader should note that the book still emphasizes the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though. Additionally, the reader should note that the author does not directly address an inductive method for finding themes for her chapters; rather, readers are left to come to their own conclusions based on the stories shared throughout the book. Hoogstraten has put together a vivid and contemporary set of portraits and stories. Anyone wanting to learn more about Potawatomi people and their regalia would do well to pick up a copy. [End P","PeriodicalId":12757,"journal":{"name":"Great Plains Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/gpq.2023.a908051
Catherine Nealy Judd
Abstract: In 1847 Congress and President James K. Polk assigned a Missouri militia to build military forts along the Platte River Road. Their first project was the construction of New Fort Kearny near present-day Grand Island, Nebraska. Col. Ledwell Pow-ell's Missouri Volunteers undertook and completed the fort by late spring and early summer of 1848. Utilizing Boston artist and traveler William Henry Tappan's 1848 diary, as well as other primary sources including letters home from a Volunteers' infantry soldier, this essay aims to expand our social memories of events long forgotten. Highlighted here is the presence of the Pawnee Nation, owners of the New Fort Kearny building site. In turn hostile toward and admiring of the Pawnee, Tappan recorded detailed aspects of Pawnee material culture, customs, tribal leaders, and religious rites. Tappan's diary also offers glimpses of the deeply embedded racial animosity and bellicosity of the Volunteers' officers, as well as the complex culture of militia life among the Missouri Volunteers' rank and file. In addition, Tappan's interactions with several other Platte River Road–located nations, including the Ioway, Lakhota Sioux, and Cheyenne, offer us a wider-ranging and more comprehensive picture of the Great Plains Platte region of 1848.
{"title":"Building New Fort Kearny, 1848: The Pawnee Nation, William Tappan, and Powell's Missouri Volunteers","authors":"Catherine Nealy Judd","doi":"10.1353/gpq.2023.a908051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gpq.2023.a908051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In 1847 Congress and President James K. Polk assigned a Missouri militia to build military forts along the Platte River Road. Their first project was the construction of New Fort Kearny near present-day Grand Island, Nebraska. Col. Ledwell Pow-ell's Missouri Volunteers undertook and completed the fort by late spring and early summer of 1848. Utilizing Boston artist and traveler William Henry Tappan's 1848 diary, as well as other primary sources including letters home from a Volunteers' infantry soldier, this essay aims to expand our social memories of events long forgotten. Highlighted here is the presence of the Pawnee Nation, owners of the New Fort Kearny building site. In turn hostile toward and admiring of the Pawnee, Tappan recorded detailed aspects of Pawnee material culture, customs, tribal leaders, and religious rites. Tappan's diary also offers glimpses of the deeply embedded racial animosity and bellicosity of the Volunteers' officers, as well as the complex culture of militia life among the Missouri Volunteers' rank and file. In addition, Tappan's interactions with several other Platte River Road–located nations, including the Ioway, Lakhota Sioux, and Cheyenne, offer us a wider-ranging and more comprehensive picture of the Great Plains Platte region of 1848.","PeriodicalId":12757,"journal":{"name":"Great Plains Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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