Pine Ridge Research Articles

Black Elk lives: conversations with the Black Elk family

Nicholas Elk (1863-1950) is arguably the best known and most influential Native American of the twentieth century. His story and teachings, first recorded by John G. Neihardt in Black Elk Speaks, have played a critical role in shaping the way in which Native Americans and others view the past, present, and future of Native America. What has happened to Elk's world and family since the Lakota holy man spoke to Neihardt? Here, for the first time, the descendants of Elk tell us about their lives and their people and how the legacy of Elk affects them today. These conversations offer an intimate look at life on the Pine Ridge Reservation and fresh perspectives on the religious, economic, and political opportunities and challenges facing the Lakota people in the twenty-first century. In addition to learning more about Elk the healer, the family also provides glimpses of Elk as a family man, teacher, and influential ancestor. These insightful conversations make clear that the legacy of Elk is very much alive today. Esther Elk DeSersa and Olivia Elk Pourier are the granddaughters of Nicholas Elk. Aaron DeSersa Jr. and Clifton DeSersa are the great-grandsons of Elk. Hilda Neihardt is the daughter of John G. Neihardt and chairman of the board of the John G. Neihardt Foundation. She is the author of Black Elk and Flaming Rainbow: (Nebraska 1995). Lori Utecht is a former executive director of the John G. Neihardt State Historic Site, and Charles Trimble is current executive director of the site and president of the John G. Neihardt Foundation.

Civic life in Gray Mountain: sizing up the legacy of New England’s blue-collar middle class

When President Clinton took Congressional and business leaders on a tour early this summer to places where chronic poverty has persisted despite the nation’s booming economy, they visited Appalachia’s coalfields, the Mississippi Delta, the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and inner-city neighborhoods in East St. Louis and Los Angeles. They did not visit New England. Not that New England’s inner cities aren’t plagued with poverty and social problems; they are. And many poor families are struggling to get by in rural Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Yet the notoriously bad conditions that took the president to the nation’s “poverty pockets” are exceedingly rare in the six-state region. Why? Why have poverty rates stayed so high in the South compared with New England? And what can the region expect in the future? The answers lie in the kind of civic culture generated by each community’s economy and social structure. Chronically poor places are divided by race and class and saddled with corrupt politics, ineffective schools, and self-interested elites. Distrustful of one another, people in these places look out only for their own families. Escaping poverty is possible only for the lucky few who have a kind relative, caring teacher, or coach who pushes and inspires them to finish school and aim high. But most stay trapped in the same poor conditions their parents and perhaps grandparents knew. In contrast, when communities have a large middle class, the poor are less likely to be cut off from the mainstream. And they are more likely to have the set of contacts, habits and skills—the cultural tool kit—they need to leave poverty behind. More importantly, the community institutions that poor families rely upon are more likely to be effective because the middle class is committed to them. The poor can get ahead without relying solely on personal intervention from a mentor or other benefactor. During the 1990s, I studied poverty and community change in three remote, rural communities: a poor Appalachian coal county I call “Blackwell,” a poor Mississippi Delta plantation community I call “Dahlia” and a more stable and economically diverse northern New England mill community, “Gray Mountain.” The idea was to learn why poverty persisted generation after generation in Appalachia and the Delta, what made the difference when people did achieve upward mobility, and why it was so hard to bring about change. I examined 100 years of Census data detailing changes in population, patterns of work, income distribution and education. I read histories of each region, as well as the local weekly newspapers. But the heart of the study is the 350 in-depth interviews colleagues and I conducted with people living in these communities—not only the poor, but also the rich and those in between. These open-ended conversations revealed how each community’s civic culture—its level of trust, participation and investment—shapes opportunities for both individual mobility and social change.

On the Rez by Ian Frazier

4 3 2 WAL 3 5 .4 WINTER 2 0 01 narrative, Black Hawk’s “autobiography,” and guidebooks and artwork in the U.S. Capitol. In her strongest chapters, Scheckel reveals not only the inter­ play of popular and official rhetoric about Indians, but the interplay of gender and race in the construction of national identity. For example, she offers a mas­ terful reading ofhow guidebooks, produced for the U.S. Capitol visitor between the 18.30s and 1860s, enlisted citizens in a larger drama of U.S. history through its representation of Capitol commemorative artworks of American Indians which “made the political exclusion of Indians seem natural and necessary” (129). In this nuanced analysis, Scheckel links (although does not fully tease out) the “gendered construction of citizenry” enacted in this artwork with the construction of maternal and sexualized roles for Euro-American and Native American women in the other national origin stories covered in the book (139). When the West was East, U.S. legal and cultural texts staged efforts to pin down shifting and unstable boundaries of national identity. Though focused on the early nation, The Insistence of the Indian directs us toward the continued persistence of the “Indian” in U.S. popular culture and policy debates, thus underscoring how American Indians still “frame the meaning of the nation” (151). As such, Scheckel’s sharp reading of U.S. culture’s foundational ambiva­ lence toward American Indians holds lamentably and equally true for today: “Americans were anxious to embrace them as relics of the national history they longed for—and the present—where they could be located neither entirely within nor outside of American society” (95). O n the Rez• By Ian Frazier. N ew York: Farrar, Strau s and G iroux, 2000. 311 pages, $25.00. Reviewed by N ath an iel Lew is St. M ich ael’s College, C olchester, Verm ont Ian Frazier’s new book, On the Rez, is in many ways a response to his 1989 masterpiece, Great Plains. Great Plains celebrated the West as a place to be imagined; like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway “brooding on the old unknown world,” Frazier played the past against the present, lamenting lost opportuni­ ties but celebrating, through surprising literary reaches, the breathtaking joy of American mythology. It remains a cheerfully extravagant book (“Away to the Great Plains . . . now mostly plowed under!” [3]), brilliantly delivered; but it is also, in Frazier’s own reflection, “pretty romantic.” He later “realized that there was a very different way of looking at this part of the world. The idea of the pristine continent is a complete fantasy, and yet we keep playing it over and over again.” On the Rez is his attempt to look at the West “from another direc­ tion,” and it is indeed a much darker, quieter book, filled with doubt and uneasiness (from Atlantic Monthly [Dec. 1999]: 6). On the Rez opens with Frazier’s distinctively direct, calm voice: “This book is about Indians, particularly the Oglala Sioux who live on the Pine Ridge BOOK REVIEWS Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, in the plains and badlands in the middle of the United States” (3). For Frazier, Indian history and culture are cen­ tral in every way to understanding America itself; the fact that he is an outsider to the land and community at Pine Ridge saddens him but also gives him the opportunity to reconsider his own sense of self and country. He greatly admires what he finds in his reading about Lakota culture and in his visits to the reser­ vation: an egalitarian, independent community living with a “self-possessed sense of freedom” that can produce genuine heroes (5). And although he has no interest in playing Indian, he admits to being a “wannabe” (4). (He candidly asks, “[W]hat’s wrong with wanting to be something, anyway?” [4].) Countering such idealized (indeed, romantic) descriptions is the predictably depressing depiction of reservation alcoholism, violence, poverty, loss, and despair. Frazier acknowledges that there is often a disparity between the idea and the fact of Pine Ridge. “I know that the hopeful, big-sky feeling with which we often invest Western landscapes is at odds...

Richard Stockton MacNeish (1918-2001)

Richard S. « Scotty » MacNeish at the Lowe Ranch archaeological site, Belize, C. A., April 1982 (Photograph by Robert N. Zeitlin). On January 16, 2001, archaeology lost one of its most distinguished practitioners and arguably its most colorful character when Richard Stockton MacNeish, affectionately known as « Scotty » to friends and colleagues, succumbed to injuries suffered in an automobile crash in the Mountain Pine Ridge area of Belize. Unwilling, despite a failing heart, to surrender hi...

On the Rez (review)

Book Reviews249 his moving comprehension that this fact will be another building block in his memory's assemblage, the way grief constructs the past for everyone in every time. Whistling a disconsolate tune outside of his mother's house, Goldbarth reaUzes that he's "a mouth harp. . . . Professor [Zeitgeist] is bent to me, is playing an intimate music." At many moments in Dark Waves and Light Matter I ponder the degree to which Goldbarth fictionalizes his nonfiction. The aforementioned conversation between Monroe and Burroughs, for example, is not documented. Certainly Goldbarth imagines this dialogue; where else does he invent? Goldbarth includes a list of sources in the afterword, though he coyly begs forgiveness for its incompleteness, citing an "unorganized, weU-intentioned but haphazard record-keeper's life."A reader can be forgiven for wondering what might remain in an Albert Goldbarth essay if the many weakly documented sources were removed, but such a reduction would be the equivalent of removing three quarters of a painter's color palette: the innumerable arcane books, newspaper accounts, and scholarly references in these essays are the tools with which Goldbarth prods the past and present to reveal the lines between the dots. And his wildly searching, seemingly haphazard connections work best in the ambitious essay form. Essays, PhiUip Lopate has recently written, "are both arguments and coUections, which exhibit conflicting impulses: on the one hand, to plead the case, like a good lawyer; on the other hand, to keep expanding and digressing, like a Whitmanesque poet, so as to take in more of the amusing, infuriating world" (TheArt ofthe Essay 1999, xi). Goldbarth amuses us with his far-flung searches, and repudiates the notion that history is a story told in a straight line. Reviewed byJoe Bonomo On the Rez by Ian Frazier Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 279 pages plus notes and index, cloth, $25.00 Recently a librarian gave me his definition of a good essay. "A good essay," he said, "makes me interested in something I didn't know I was interested in in the first place." Though we tend to limit essays lengthwise to something less than 7,000 words, aU of Ian Frazier's nonfiction books fit the librarian's definition. Who cares about the Great Plains, possibly the most 250Fourth Genre boring strip ofland in the world? Who cares about Mr. Frazier's Family history ? Who cares about the people holed away On the Rez in Pine Ridge, South Dakota? Isn't that why they're there in the first place? Because nobody cared? And yet we do care, and Frazier's books enjoy great success. His own involvement in the things he writes about, his focus on individuals and their stories, his alert description and masterful blending of impersonal history (dates, places, numbers) with real people and real lasting effects aU make for engaging reading and ignite sparks of interest where none existed before. On the Rez is at once personal, investigative, and historic. Frazier's ruminations and wanderings take him from his chüdhood interest in Indians and things Western, to a chance encounter with LeWar Lance, an Oglala Sioux, in NewYork City (Le first appeared in Great Plains), to a continuing friendship , to reservation visits and research leading to this book. The book is a testament to the Indian way oflife; it is a reminder ofthe importance ofthis first American people in the formation of the American consciousness and the American nation. Frazier shares his experience and learning as he makes his way from "wannabe" to "Little Brother," as he contemplates the great role of the Indian by focusing his writings on the Oglala Sioux. Interwoven with Frazier's own experiences visiting the Pine Badge reservation , we get statistical overviews of Indian populations and migrations, abbreviated tribal histories of the Oglala and others, and more recent history of American Indian Movement protests (including the weU-known clash with FBI agents atWounded Knee in 1973). He touches onAnheuserBusch , General Custer, missionary work, an instructive list of practical homespun Indian advice and sayings, a fascinating list of Indian names such as "Buttock on Both Ends," "Toby Shot to Pieces," "Carla Respects Nothing," and a sampUng of words...

Building the Nation Back Up: The Politics of Identity on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

Building the Nation Back Up: The Politics of Identity on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Mikael Kurkiala. Stockholm, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis Press, 1997.254 pp., figures, references, index.

Alternative Economic Strategies in Low‐Income Rural Communities: TANF, Labor Migration, and the Case of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation*

Abstract The premise of current welfare policies is that recipients are avoiding work and that requiring work will end welfare dependency. Unemployment is equated with labor market inexperience and economic inactivity. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a poor rural community with high unemployment, contradicts these assumptions. Many Lakota individuals have off‐reservation wage work experience; there simply are not enough local jobs to absorb their human capital. Lakota households, however, are involved in a complex combination of socially embedded economic activities outside wage work. Imposing the premises of TANF on Pine Ridge results in indirect pressures toward urban migration and cultural assimilation. Furthermore, by imposing rigid notions of work, TANF runs the risk of destroying the economic flexibility that makes survival possible for poor households in Pine Ridge. Welfare and development policies need to reflect the real economies of rural American Indian reservations rather than those of superficially assimilated and economically imagined communities.

Speaking of Ella Deloria: Conversations with Joyzelle Gingway Godfrey, 1998-2000, Lower Brule Community College, South Dakota

Joyzelle Godfrey (Teton/Yankton Dakota/Ottawa) is a professor of Lakota Studies at the Lower Brule reservation community college (an affiliate of Sinte Gleaska University on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota). In the intricate Dakota web of extended kinship, Ms. Godfrey is a social granddaughter of Ella Deloria (1888-1971), the outstanding Yankton Sioux ethnographer and linguist whose only novel Waterlily was posthumously published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1988. Ms. Godfrey, who lives on the Crow Creek reservation, has twice been a grant recipient at the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain SD, where a considerable body of Ella Deloria's known manuscripts (almost all unpublished) is housed. At present she is completing her preparation for publication of Ella Deloria's unpublished ethnographic manuscript Dakota Way of Life, referred to in the conversation below, as well as Speaking of Ella Deloria, which examines her grandmother's complex position within the academe that simultaneously enabled and exploited her. This explores three components of Deloria's ethnographic work: her responses to the writings of James R. Walker, his Lakota informant George Sword, and anthropologist H. Scudder Mekeel in the first third of the twentieth century. 1 Probably no one knows the Ella Deloria papers better than Godfrey does, as she was responsible for cataloguing and copying them (the originals, some in poor condition, are stored in a vault at the Norwest Bank in Chamberlain). Previously the papers had been held by the Ella Deloria Project at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion (where Ella Deloria worked as assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum during the last years of her life). After her death, her brother, the Reverend Vine Deloria Sr., granted custodianship of the papers to the Dakota Indian Foundation, a grant- and scholarship-funding agency. 2 I became interested in Ella Deloria's astonishing body of work from a nonlinguistic, non-ethnographic perspective in 1992, when attending Oglala Lakota College's Lakota Studies Summer Institute. 3 Waterlily was my airplane reading [End Page 456] en route to the Pine Ridge reservation. In August 1993, during a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)/Newberry Library documentary seminar on Native American autobiography at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, a comment by its convener Kate Shanley caught my attention: the Nebraska edition is known to be an abridged version of Deloria's original intentions. What would those intentions have been? What kinds of materials had been cut? Why? Then, when my graduate students and I participated in an oral history project sponsored by the American Indian Heritage Council of Charlotte, North Carolina--interviewing Native Carolinian Indian elders in their seventies and eighties--I happened across a reference to a pageant that Ella Deloria had written and produced for the amalgamated tribe of remnant Indian peoples now known as the Lumbee Indians. Numbering nearly fifty thousand, they are the ninth-largest Indian tribe in the United States, as well as one of the most fascinating: although recognized by the state of North Carolina as Indians since 1885, they have unsuccessfully pursued full federal acknowledgement for over a century. Sponsored by the Farm Security Administration and the then Office of Indian Affairs, Miss Deloria and her sister Susan Mable Deloria lived with these Indians for six months in 1940. The pageant, "The Life Story of a People," was so successful that it excited applause from the federal and state governments; it was repeated in 1941. But World War II turned the Indians' world upside down. Apart from a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, programs, and a few pages of stage directions, the pageant was lost for the next sixty years. After unsuccessfully searching for it from 1995-98 in Robeson County, North Carolina--the Lumbee homeland--I remembered the note on Deloria sources at the...

Indians, Reclamation, and Historic Preservation

The 1992 amendments to the National Historic Preservation Act acknowledge that Native Americans have particular concerns about historic preservation. The amendments recognize that properties of traditional religious and cultural importance to Native Americans deserve special consideration. They also permit tribes to establish historic preservation programs comparable to the State Historic Preservation Officer. Consequently, federal agencies increasingly will be expected to include Native Americans in the consultation process. Further, the 1988 amendments to the Indian Self-Determination Act provide for federal agencies besides the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service to sponsor projects in Indian Country. Federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, increasingly will become involved with tribal governments and Native American groups in construction and development projects in Indian Country. Historic preservation has the potential to become a major issue with these projects. The Oglala Sioux Tribe Rural Water Supply System on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, is an example of such a project. Historic preservation is one of the major concerns. This project exemplifies the working relationship that can develop between a federal agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, and a tribal governmental organization, the Oglala Sioux Rural Water System, to resolve historic preservation issues associated with that project and to ensure that tribal concerns are addressed.

Of Tea Parties, Poverty Tours, and Tammany Pow-wows; or, How Mr. Clinton Distanced Us All from Pine Ridge

Of Tea Parties, Poverty Tours, and Tammany Pow-wows; or, How Mr. Clinton Distanced Us All from Pine Ridge

The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice

For centuries, a persistent and important component of Lakota religious life has been the Inipi, the ritual of the lodge. The lodge has changed little in appearance since its first recorded description in the late seventeenth century. The ritual held within, the sweat, consists of songs, prayers, and other actions conducted in a tightly enclosed, extremely hot and stifling environment. Participants who sweat together experience moral purification and even physical healing. Today, the lodge ritual continues to be a vital part of Lakota religion. It has recently become popular among Lakotas recovering from alcohol and drug addiction and among those afflicted with AIDS. This impressive study is the first in-depth look at the history and significance of the Lakota lodge. Bringing together data culled from historical sources and recent fieldwork at Pine Ridge Reservation, Raymond A. Bucko provides a detailed discussion of changes that have occurred in the structure and function of the sweat ritual over time. He offers convincing explanations for the longevity of the lodge and its continuing popularity. The ritual survives because it is inherently malleable, girded by fixed physical and symbolic forms but continually subject to reinterpretation and creative modification. Consequently, the Lakotas are able to adapt this important healing ritual to meet their changing collective and individual needs. Raymond A. Bucko is an assistant professor of anthropology at Le Moyne College. His articles have appeared in European Review of Native American Studies and Mission. This is his first book.

Summers of no return: transforming care through a nursing field school.

Nursing education is developing a wide variety of ways to educate for cultural competence that expedites culture-congruent care and effective diversity management in practice. Using a praxis orientation, this article reports research done on an innovative nursing field school during the past four summers on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Learning context emphasizing formation of a collaborative, caring community is created for 6-week immersion learning experiences during which student groups work with the High Plains Oglala Lakota in tribal programs. Triangulated data based on participant observation and student journals, stories, discussions, interviews, academic coursework, and evaluation surveys provide a comprehensive record of complex and multifaceted field school and immersion learning processes. Through collaboration with students, Diekelmann's "Concernful Practices" are tested and adapted for fit as a framework for organizing and examining the field school experience, as well as the practice of health care across cultures.

Red Cloud: Oglala Warrior-Statesman

E v e l y n I. F u n d a / d o r y s C r o w G r o v e r as one member called it) of a number of works grouped together; in addition to drawing conclusions about the merits of a single piece, a reviewer can also discuss those “not to be missed” points about what is happening in specialty areas like Chicana poetry or nature writing or the California novel. Because reviewers will have more latitude to consider works in the context of other contemporary writings as well as what has been published before in that field, reviewers’ judg­ ments about what qualities make individual works exceptional will likely have more impact and be more meaningful to readers. Readings will, necessarily, be closer and more informed, and the reviews, then, will consider what “frontiers” lie ahead for western American literature. Even as we consider questions about the direction of WAL’s book review section, one thing remains certain: I look forward to the challenge of making this section responsive to the ever evolv­ ing needs and interests of our readership. ESSAY REVIEW R e d C l o u d : O g l a l a Wa r r io r - S t a t e s m a n Dorys Crow Grover Until its recent publication, the manuscript of the autobiography of Red Cloud (1822-1909) languished for more than one hundred years, virtually unknown, in the Nebraska State Historical Society archives in Lincoln. R. Eli Paul’s Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas is a third-person, “as-told-to” account that details the raiding and war practices of the Oglala Sioux and other Plains tribes during Red Cloud’s early life. Paul, in a remarkable preface and introduction, unravels the complex document to present the early life of the Lakota warrior, stating it “is not an exhaustive life history” but “provides rare firsthand information about Plains warfare and Lakota warrior culture” (27-28). W A L 3 3 (1 ) SPRING 1 9 9 8 Complementing Paul’s look at the early life, Robert W. Larson’s biography, Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux, was published a few months before Paul’s book appeared. Paul had graciously permitted Larson access to the Red Cloud manuscript (a source kept from historians by Addison E. Sheldon, former director of the Nebraska State Historical Society), and Larson augmented Paul’s sources with information from the South Dakota State Historical Society, particularly from the Red Cloud Estate Papers. The Red Cloud autobiography was originally recorded in 1893 as the Life of Red Cloud by Charles W. Allen. Postmaster at Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota and husband to a mixed-blood Lakota woman, Allen had learned that Red Cloud (known to the Oglalas as MahapiyaAuta) often reminisced with Sam Deon, a former French Canadian trader who had been a trusted friend of Red Cloud’s for more than forty years. Deon’s wife was a sister of Smoke, Red Cloud’s uncle, chief of the Oglala Bad Faces, and Deon had witnessed the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and claimed to have followed the Oglalas from their first agency on the North Platte River in 1871 to the White River in 1873 to Red Cloud Agency in 1877 and finally to Pine Ridge in 1878. Allen asked Deon, who was well spoken in the Oglala language, as well as French and English, to act as translator. Because Red Cloud’s narrative ends in 1864, Allen called his work “the Indian part of the life of Red Cloud,” the first of many titles given to the manuscript of 134 typed, double-spaced pages (Paul 27). That man­ uscript, as Paul details, had a tangled and troubled history marked by the personal interests and agendas of writers and historians. Part of Allen’s manuscript, titled “Red Cloud, Chief of the Sioux,” was pub­ lished in University of Nebraska’s literary magazine, The Hesperian (November-December 1895, January 1896), and while Allen planned to publish the manuscript as a book, efforts to interest a pub­ lisher failed, so...

A Strategy for Reducing Tuberculosis Among Oglala Sioux Native Americans

The Oglala Sioux people, who live on the second largest Native American reservation in the United States, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, have a history of high rates of tuberculosis. To determine a strategy for reducing tuberculosis in this population, Pine Ridge Reservation tuberculosis cases since 1968 were analyzed. Diabetic patients were identified through chart reviews and characterized for tuberculosis status. Age-specific tuberculosis rates and age-specific relative risks (RRs) were calculated and compared with those of South Dakota excluding Pine Ridge. Between 1968 and 1994, the RR for tuberculosis was 18.9 for a Pine Ridge Native American compared with rates for the rest of South Dakota. The age-specific RR was 65.7 for the Pine Ridge population 65 and older from 1985-1994. Tuberculin tests were positive in 70% of diabetic patients on the reservation. Diabetic patients comprise 23% of the population 45 and older at Pine Ridge. Fifty-five percent of all the tuberculosis disease in the 45 and older age group can be prevented by eliminating it in the diabetic population. A major stride toward reducing tuberculosis can be made by targeting high-risk groups such as diabetic patients, especially in a time of dwindling resources and personnel for tuberculosis control.

Estimating species richness in tropical forest: the missing species extrapolation technique

ABSTRACTA new technique for estimation of tree species richness in tropical forests was developed and tested in this study. The missing species extrapolation technique is based on the assumption that the rate of accumulation of new species with increasing area is the same within sampled and unsampled areas of similar habitat within a region. This new technique was tested on four 1-ha sites of subtropical moist forest in Rio Bravo, Belize for which complete species counts of trees ≥10cm dbh are available. Estimates given by the technique are 115, 98, 93 and 106% of the actual species counts within the four sites. The accuracy of these estimates was found to be equal to or better than most others obtained by using existing methods of extrapolation. The missing species extrapolation technique was also applied to a 21-ha riparian forest patch in the Mountain Pine Ridge, Belize, where it was used to obtain an estimate of the number of tree species ≥10cm dbh in the entire patch.

The Jesuit Mission to the Lakota Sioux: Pastoral Theology and Ministry, 1886-1945 by Ross Alexander Enochs

book reviews523 The Jesuit Mission to the Lakota Sioux: Pastoral Theology and Ministry, 1886-1945. By Ross Alexander Enochs. (Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed and Ward. 1996. Pp. x, 178. $12.95 paperback.) Jesuit priests, building on the work of earUer missionaries, began missions to the Lakotas (Holy Rosary at Pine Ridge Reservation and St. Francis at Rosebud) in 1886.They had a remarkably successful pastoral ministry among these Indians during the six decades covered by this smaU but valuable book. The book has a clear purpose: to refute the judgments made by other authors that the Jesuits viewed the native Lakota reUgion as heathenism dominated by the devU and that Lakotas could not participate in Indian ceremonies and stül be Catholic. On the contrary, Ross Enochs says, "The Jesuits accepted many aspects of Lakota culture and participated in several Lakota rituals and customs throughout this time among the Lakotas. Furthermore . . . [they] sought to preserve those aspects of Lakota culture and religion that they beüeved were good, and attempted to aboUsh only those practices and beliefs that they thought were in conflict with either the Catholic faith or the Lakotas' wellbeing " (p. viU). To make his point, Enochs discusses at some length the educational program of the Jesuits, the popular Catholic Sioux Congresses that flourished in this period , the extensive use of Lakota catechists (including the famous Black Elk), and the promotion of Lakota language and legends. He provides briefer notices of other missionary adaptations—in funeral rituals, art, processions, dances and games, use of the calumet or sacred pipe, and adoption and naming ceremonies .These early Jesuits were able to build Catholic faith and ceremonies on Indian foundations because they learned the Indians' language and to a large extent shared their life. Enochs does not fail to note, however, the missionaries' strong condemnation of the medicine men and of polygamy and easy divorce and their fight against the aboriginal sun dance and peyote and ghost dance religions.This opposition to significant Indian ways weakens somewhat the book's major theme, but the author is convincing in his assertions that those Indians who converted to Christianity did so willingly and that conversion was not forced upon them. Basing his study on exhaustive research in missionary records and on interviews with Indians and with missionaries, Enochs has produced not so much a critical evaluation of the missionary endeavor as a sympathetic descriptive account of how the Jesuits related to the Lakotas and of the Lakotas' positive response . Enochs ends his story in 1945, a point at which he sees major changes on the reservations resulting from World War II, the strong secularization in the dominantAmerican culture surrounding them, and changes in Catholic mission theory. 524book reviews The book is simply an unrevised doctoral dissertation Ln pubUshed form.That is unfortunate, for careful revision and editing would have greatly strengthened the presentation and eliminated irritating elements of dissertation style. Francis Paul Prucha, SJ. Marquette University The Ecumenical Orthodoxy ofCharles Augustus Briggs, 1841-1913- By Richard L. Christensen. (Lewiston, NewYork: MeUen University Press. 1995. Pp. vU, 236. $89.95.) At a party given in 1907 to honor the publication of Charles Briggs's Church Unity,WUliam Reed Huntington—the moving spirit behind the ecumenical efforts of turn-of-the-century Episcopalians—toasted his friend Briggs for the "softeness ofhis heart and the hardness ofhis head." (No, asAnna Russell would say, I'm not making this up.) A pretty shrewd judge of character, Huntington "got it" just about right in summing up the personaUty of the man more distrusted by evangeUcal conservatives and more lionized by theological Uberals than almost any other in GUded-Age America. Indeed, one might argue that the various "heresy trials" that Briggs underwent between 1891 and 1893 over his biblical theories—trials that represented a defining moment in the history of American religion in a way analogous to the Salem Witch Trials of the seventeenth century and the "MonkeyTrial" of 1925—were due in no smaU measure to Brigg's warm-hearted but bellicose personaUty. Richard Christensen has published a finely crafted and engaging study ofthis complex and crucial figure who helped define the battle lines between the...

Fire in the tropical gallery forests of Belize

ABSTRACT. Historical records of burning, field observations, and a manipulation experiment were used to evaluate the extent and impact of fire in a system of gallery forests in the Mountain Pine Ridge savanna, Belize. The outer boundaries of gallery forests are fire‐prone zones, but fires rarely intrude into these forests. This is attributed to the existence of fire‐tolerant trees in the outer zone, which preserve a forest interior of low flammability. Occasional fire incursions are patchily distributed and partially inhibited by slope convexities. Intrusions consume litter and root mats and destroy seedlings and saplings, but create a wide variety of subsequent light regimes depending upon the degree of canopy destruction. At most sites, partial canopy cover persists and seedlings of a subset of forest tree species establish preferentially. Early survivorship of these seedlings is comparable to those established in undamaged forest. Where canopy opening is severe, a secondary succession is initiated, with large numbers of herbaceous plants deriving from the seed bank. Gallery forests contain core zones into which fire very rarely intrudes, and peripheral zones that experience fire incursions that are patchily distributed in space and time. In the latter zones fire incursions play a role comparable to that of canopy gaps in continuous forests, but also create a unique class of micro‐habitats to which a subset of tree species is specialized. The fire regime over the recent past in this gallery forest system appears to have had an enriching, rather than a depauperizing, effect on the forest communities, and such systems represent plausible refugia for forest species in fire‐prone landscapes.

After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890-1891

Journal Article After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890–1891 Get access After Wounded Knee: Correspondence of Major and Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while Serving with the Army Occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890–1891. Edited by Green Jerry. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996. xvi + 184 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.) David R. Farrell David R. Farrell University of Guelph Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 1, Spring 1997, Pages 77–78, https://doi.org/10.2307/971213 Published: 01 February 1997

After Wounded Knee: correspondence of Major and surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while serving with the Army occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890-1891

After Wounded Knee: correspondence of Major and surgeon John Vance Lauderdale while serving with the Army occupying the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 1890-1891

Survival, growth and wood density of Pinus kesiya and Pinus oocarpa provenances at Kihanga Arboretum, Sao Hill, Tanzania

A study was carried out to evaluate the performance of ten Pinus kesiya and nine Pinus oocarpa provenances at Kihanga Arboretum in Sao Hill, Iringa, Tanzania. Periodic data were collected on survival, breast height diameter (DBH) and height. A final assessment was done at 19.8 years for P. kesiya and 16 years for P. oocarpa on all parameters and also basic density and stem form. Except for stem form, no significant ( P > 0.05) differences were observed for the tested P. kesiya provenances. For P. oocarpa, height, DBH growth and basal area differed significantly ( P < 0.05) between provenances. Overall, the Yucul, Zamorano, Dipilto, Bonete and Mountain Pine Ridge provenances were the best performers while the El Conacaste, Bucaral and Valle Bonito appear to be marginal performers. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that P. oocarpa provenances from Zamorano, Dipilto and Bonete be introduced for large scale planting at Sao Hill in that order of priority. The Yucul provenance may not be P. oocarpa. For P. kesiya, further testing involving provenances from the whole natural range and other outstanding land races should be carried out.