Plains Indian Research Articles

Plains Indian German silver from Oklahoma: the Smithsonian’s Davis collection

German silver jewelry has a historic and ongoing role in the social and ritual life of Indian people on the Southern Plains. A remarkably well-documented collection of German silverwork assembled in central Oklahoma in 1966 reveals much about the economics and social context of the craft at that time. The collection, now at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, includes the work of seven smiths from five tribes, together with information on production and circulation. In addition to biographies of the craftsmen, the documentation positions the objects within social processes involving craftworkers, commercial outlets, the Peyote religion, Native consumers, and an elusive non-Native market.

The Teddy Bear Clinic: Engaging School-Aged Children in Health Education.

This article describes the use of play therapy in a school-based health clinic on an American Indian Reservation. The project used the play therapy model, a nursing intervention focused on using play materials in a therapeutic manner as a form of communication and self-expression for children, enhancing the development of social, emotional, and behavioral skills through the nursing process. The purpose of the Teddy Bear Clinic was to establish relationships among non-Native student nurses and Native American children and their community on a Northern Plains Indian Reservation. A discussion of the potential benefits addresses opportunities for school nurses and student nurses to enhance their understanding of children's perceptions of the health care clinic and the effects of historical trauma on the health and wellbeing of Native American children while offering an opportunity for young children to engage in the health care setting in a fun way, without fear or discomfort is provided.

Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron (review)

Reviewed by: Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West by Stephen Aron Eran Zelnik (bio) Keywords Western history, Alternative history, Daniel Boone, Indigenous people, Lewis and Clark, Oregon Trail, Dodge City Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West. By Stephen Aron. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 320. Cloth, $29.95.) Alternative histories of the west that attempt to complicate, or flat out contradict, declension narratives have been at a premium for several decades [End Page 349] now. Perhaps most famously, after Richard White wrote The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE, 1983), in his next book he sought to frustrate this account of Native American decline, and the result was one of the most influential histories of the west, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). In recent decades, perhaps the most noteworthy histories in this vein were Pekka Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, 2009) and Kathleen DuVal's The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, 2006), which related narratives of indigenous strength and dominance over European and other Native adversaries. In Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West, Stephen Aron brings his deep familiarity with western history to tell a story that differs markedly from traditional narratives of "bloody ethnic cleansings and even genocides" (4). Yet, this study is something of an inversion of DuVal and Hämäläinen's stories of Native power. Instead, Aron "seeks out sites and situations in which colonialism wore a different face and relations between Indians, settlers, and states deviated (for a time) from the monolithic logic of elimination" (4). Even as it attempts to retrieve episodes that challenge the violent framing of most western histories, Peace and Friendship also steers clear of "wishtories": fictionalized "stories about the past" that "cater to contemporary yearnings," such as Disney's Pocahontas or any other "'kumbaya' version of colonialism" (6), for that matter. To do so, Aron takes us on a stroll across the continent that begins with Daniel Boone; Chapter 1 takes place in Revolutionary Kentucky, while Chapter 2 follows Boone down the Ohio River to the region surrounding Apple Creek. Here around the turn of the eighteenth century, Shawnees and Anglo settlers like Boone led something of a peaceful coexistence. This is probably Aron's strongest chapter, in which he provides a good amount of compelling and relatively less familiar evidence regarding the genial relationships fostered between Anglos and Shawnees under Spanish auspices. In Chapter 4, however, we learn that these relationships soured by the War of 1812. Chapter 3 follows Lewis and Clark's famous Corps of Discovery expedition that set out from St. Louis in 1804, while Chapter 5 examines the relationships between Great Plains Indians and settlers on the so-called Oregon Trail from the 1820s through the 1850s. In both cases, Aron sorts [End Page 350] out myth from reality, contending, for example, with the legacy of the famous computer game The Oregon Trail in shaping the memory of the period. Lastly, Chapter 6 explores the history of Dodge City during its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, first as a depot for Buffalo hunters, and later as the end destination of cowboys driving cattle up from Texas. As before, Aron contends that violence, in this supposedly notorious hub of gunslingers, was not as ubiquitous as mythologies of the west would have us believe. Aron's study is an intriguing proposition, while his deep familiarity with the materials and his easy and nimble prose make the book an engrossing read. However, by prioritizing narrative flow and a cast of familiar characters and episodes from American history, the book runs into two considerable shortcomings. First—and this is a pitfall many historians (including myself) often fall into—too much of the narrative conveys the historical context in which such fleeting moments of "peace and friendship" first emerged and then disappeared. As a result, far too little of the book relates episodes and evidence of peace and...

Behavioral determinants of arsenic-safe water use among Great Plains Indian Nation private well users: results from the Community-Led Strong Heart Water Study Arsenic Mitigation Program

BackgroundThe objective of this study was to evaluate the behavioral determinants associated with exclusive use of arsenic-safe water in the community-led Strong Heart Water Study (SHWS) arsenic mitigation program.MethodsThe SHWS is a randomized controlled trial of a community-led arsenic mitigation program designed to reduce arsenic exposure among private well users in American Indian Great Plains communities. All households received point-of-use (POU) arsenic filters installed at baseline and were followed for 2 years. Behavioral determinants selected were those targeted during the development of the SHWS program, and were assessed at baseline and follow-up.ResultsAmong participants, exclusive use of arsenic-safe water for drinking and cooking at follow-up was associated with higher self-efficacy for accessing local resources to learn about arsenic (OR: 5.19, 95% CI: 1.48–18.21) and higher self-efficacy to resolve challenges related to arsenic in water using local resources (OR: 3.11, 95% CI: 1.11–8.71). Higher commitment to use the POU arsenic filter faucet at baseline was also a significant predictor of exclusive arsenic-safe water use for drinking (OR: 32.57, 95% CI: 1.42–746.70) and cooking (OR: 15.90, 95% CI: 1.33–189.52) at follow-up. From baseline to follow-up, the SHWS program significantly increased perceived vulnerability to arsenic exposure, self-efficacy, descriptive norms, and injunctive norms. Changing one’s arsenic filter cartridge after installation was associated with higher self-efficacy to obtain arsenic-safe water for drinking (OR: 6.22, 95% CI: 1.33–29.07) and cooking (OR: 10.65, 95% CI: 2.48–45.68) and higher perceived vulnerability of personal health effects (OR: 7.79, 95% CI: 1.17–51.98) from drinking arsenic-unsafe water.ConclusionsThe community-led SHWS program conducted a theory-driven approach for intervention development and evaluation that allowed for behavioral determinants to be identified that were associated with the use of arsenic safe water and changing one’s arsenic filter cartridge. These results demonstrate that theory-driven, context-specific formative research can influence behavior change interventions to reduce water arsenic exposure. The SHWS can serve as a model for the design of theory-driven intervention approaches that engage communities to reduce arsenic exposure.Trial registrationThe SHWS is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (Identifier: NCT03725592).

Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era by Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote

Reviewed by: Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era by Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote Benjamin R. Kracht Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote, Crafting an Indigenous Nation: Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 142 pp. $29.95 (paper). After 1875, Kiowas in southwestern Oklahoma faced rapid cultural change precipitated by the collapse of the Plains horse and buffalo culture; the influx of Indian Office personnel and missionaries who imposed assimilationist policies; the nefarious Jerome Commission and forced allotment; and attacks on dancing, ceremonies, and Native healers. In Crafting an Indigenous Nation, Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote examines her people's expressive culture—art, music, dance, and performance—to demonstrate how Kiowas navigated and shaped individual, intratribal, and intertribal identities during the Progressive Era and the early twentieth century. In the intertribal arena of fairs, powwows, and expositions, Kiowas formed a distinctive tribal identity observable in war dancing, beadwork, "Indian flat style" paintings, silverwork, and other mediums. Utilizing archival materials, anthropological field notes, and stories about her grandparents, Tone-Pah-Hote describes Kiowa survival and assertion of tribal identity during this challenging era. Images of people and art appropriately frame the introduction and subsequent chapters, setting the tone for discussing Kiowa expressive culture. For instance, chapter one begins with an image that depicts a man and woman on horseback leading a pack horse; both carry weapons because women often accompanied men on war expeditions (16). The presence of Western-style saddles, German silver bridles, trade cloth, and guns elucidates the melding of Western and traditional accoutrements in mid-nineteenth century Plains societies. Kiowa art production was gendered in that men painted scenes of warfare, a marker of male rank and status, whereas women tanned hides and painted parfleche bags. This particular ledger drawing was made between 1875 and 1877 when twenty-six Kiowa men—some were captives—served prison terms in Fort Marion, Florida, at the conclusion of the Southern Plains wars that ended the horse and buffalo [End Page 193] culture. While imprisoned, the men performed war dances and sold art to tourists visiting St. Augustine, in part because they were "objects of display and assimilation" (17) but also to make money. Upon their release in 1878, most of the prisoners returned to a rapidly changing homeland where the formerly nomadic Kiowas were settling in communities. Within two decades, individuals were selecting 160-acre allotments according to provisions of the 1892 Jerome Agreement that opened their reservation for homesteading. Bison hunting, raiding, and trading were replaced by a mixed economy of subsistence farming, foraging, leasing, and wage labor. Despite Indian Office harassment and threats of jail sentences for those participating in tribal dances and festivities, some men were drawn to Wild West shows, fairs, and expositions where they could make money by war dancing. By the 1920s, older war dances transformed into newer forms, including the faster-paced fancy dancer style performed by men donning feathered dance bustles, porcupine hair roaches, beaded clothing and moccasins, and bells attached to their legs that sounded with their dance moves. Perhaps the most popular fancy dancers in the emergent intertribal powwow arena were the male members of the Kiowa Six—Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke, Jack Hokeah, Spencer Asah, and James Auchiah—noted artists who, along with Lois Smoky, studied art at the University of Oklahoma, where they perfected "Indian flat style" painting. Theirs was an "autobiographical style learned from their relatives" (64), although instead of combat scenes, they painted war dancers at powwows and worshipers at peyote, or tipi, meetings. Peyotism, along with Christianity, arrived in Kiowa country towards the end of the nineteenth century and helped fill the void left by the death of the tribal Sun Dance. After its official charter in 1918 as the Native American Church, the peyote religion spread throughout Oklahoma and beyond. Adherents of the new religion attended all-night tipi meetings, ingested peyote buttons, and sang fast-paced songs accompanied by a water drum and rattle; their songs and prayers traveled skyward, assisted by Water Bird, the intermediary between humans and spirits. By the 1920s, peyote attire and jewelry, including Water Bird and Morning Star motifs...

Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn

Abstract: “Embodying Relationality and Enacting Resistance: Celluloid Mobilities in the Silent Film The Daughter Of Dawn ” discusses how Kiowa and Comanche actors embedded their respective material cultures in the 1920 silent film The Daughter of Dawn . Filmed in the Wichita Wildlife Refuge and featuring an all-Indigenous cast, this film is a unique entry in the canon of silent Westerns produced in Oklahoma during its nascent statehood. The author illustrates how the Kiowa and Comanche cast enacted what Michelle Raheja calls “visual sovereignty,” engaging in traditional cultural practices, both on and off camera, which were under attack by settler institutions. The performance and recording of these dynamic instances of buffalo culture, traditional dance, and Plains Indian Sign Language, which the author collectively refers to as “celluloid mobilities,” constituted an embodied refusal of settler-colonial interference in Indigenous cultural continuance.

Rumination and quality of life among Northern Plains Indians.

Therapeutic mechanisms targeting multiple mental health disorders are key for providing treatment services with high-disparity, low-resource populations. Rumination, a cognitive response style, is a well-recognized transdiagnostic factor across disorders in the general population (Arditte et al., 2016; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). This study explored the influence of rumination, and mediational effect of mental health disorder, on Quality of Life among a sample of 585 Northern Plains Indian (NPI) women and men. Using secondary data from a Mood Disorder Assessment Validation study, parallel mediation path analyses indicated rumination did not have a direct influence on quality of life. However, rumination indicated higher anxiety (R² = .38, p < .001), depression (R² = .60, p < .001), and substance use symptoms (R² = .14, p < .001). As rumination increased, significant increases occurred in severity of symptoms reported for women and men for all diagnoses- but lower perceived quality of life occurred only in the presence of depressive symptoms (women, B = -28.19, p < .001; men, B = -20.15, p < .001). Significant differences arose between NPI women and men, with women reporting higher rumination, anxiety, and depression and men reporting higher substance use. Based on these results, rumination is useful as a transdiagnostic factor for NPIs, as rumination helped uncover maladaptive coping mechanisms among NPIs in the sample. In addition, quality of life assessments can help target maladaptive coping in treatment by taking a holistic view of well-being that accounts for risk factors while supporting traditional views of healing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

Well-known among scholars of Wild West shows for his 2005 publication Buffalo Bill’s America, Louis S. Warren here turns our attention to a phenomenon vividly tied to US history through the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, namely, the Ghost Dance. In God’s Red Son, Warren distinguishes Ghost Dancing from the Sun Dance, Medicine Dance, Grass Dance, and other ceremonial observances, and focuses on the charismatic, proselytizing, and spiritual longings of a religion not dissimilar in its workings from the religious revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Warren argues that the Ghost Dance is a religion, rather than merely a spiritual observance, because it traces back to an individual, a Paiute named Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson) from the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada, who was acknowledged as a powerful spiritual leader and a prophet of (G)od. While the Ghost Dance is best known today for its association with the Lakotas of South Dakota, the Ghost Dance religion was also observed on the Shoshone / Bannock Reservation at Fort Hall in Idaho, the Eastern Shoshone / Northern Arapaho Reservation in Wyoming, and on the Southern Cheyenne / Southern Arapaho Reservation near Darlington, Oklahoma. Warren cites these routes of dispersal in order to reconstruct pilgrimages to Wovoka that Indians made to learn his teachings and receive his blessings. These pilgrimages began in the 1870s, accelerated in the 1880s, and continued well past Wounded Knee and into the twentieth century (Jack Wilson died in 1932).Though initially ignored, the Ghost Dance came to be regarded by white officials, at least in Lakota Territory, as an attempt to resist white authority and foment rebellion. Warren argues that the Ghost Dance “helped many believers accept conquest while strengthening their resolve to resist assimilation” (145). Though hospitable to Jesus and Christianity, Wovoka / Jack Wilson was known among Paiutes for miracles like rainmaking, and for the promise of earthly renewal, as well as reunion with the dead through trance dreams. Millenarian visions forecast the disappearance of whites, the resurrection of ancestors, and the return of the buffalo, but Wovoka also taught his followers that, in their here and now, they should go to church, farm, send their children to school, and keep the peace. This mixture of old and new ways was regularized by Wovoka in 1891 into four nights of dancing (the last night until dawn), followed by a ritual bath and community dispersal. This sequence was to be repeated once every six weeks, and likely reflects the need to define and contain the Ghost Dance as a religion (not a political movement) in the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee.The banning of the earlier Sun Dance in 1882 created a space in which the Ghost Dance could flower. Dances were never just for entertainment or devotion, but provided occasions for the redistribution of wealth, healing, electing chiefs, selecting camp marshals and police, and convening male ceremonial organizations. Any ban on dancing undermined the authority of holy men and disrupted social and cultural bonds. Warren traces the motives behind these ethnocidal bans to religious prejudice and competition among Christian missionaries, widespread Progressive Era attempts at social engineering, and the transfer of control over reservations to the Department of the Army in 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison. Above all, Warren cites the widespread land grab by whites, especially in the Dakotas, intended to force Indians onto shrinking reservations, where troublesome Chiefs could be replaced or jailed, gatherings such as dances curtailed, and church and school attendance mandated. That these measures fell most heavily upon the Lakota was due to their numbers. In 1890, there were some 18,000 Lakota, the most numerous of all Plains Indians, only 3,500 Southern Arapaho / Southern Cheyenne, the second-most vigorous Ghost Dance community.In addition to detailing Ghost Dance philosophy, leaders, migration, and practices, Warren provides biographies of Wovoka and his followers, including Porcupine (Cheyenne), Short Bull (Brulé), Kicking Bear (Lakota), and the Arapaho evangelist Sitting Bull. Warren also discusses the intersection of the religion with the massacre at Wounded Knee, the murder of Sitting Bull (Lakota), and with plains history in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. Part of that history concerns how anthropology created the “Indian” subject via James Mooney and the gentlemen’s club that was the US Bureau of Ethnology, a division of the Smithsonian Institution ill-suited to Mooney, a high-school educated, Catholic son of Irish working-class immigrants. In 1894, when Mooney’s book The Ghost Dance Religion was published by the Smithsonian, the Bureau’s view of humanity was hierarchical, placing Christianity at the apex and “primitive religions,” such as Ghost Dancing, at the bottom. Though Mooney individualized, rather than hierarchized, the Indian cultures he studied, he ignored evidence that Indians were rapidly adopting and adapting material practices from the broader culture, while keeping their own culture very much alive.Perhaps no activity illustrates the flexibility of Indian cultures better than the utilization of the Wild West show by Ghost Dancers. Warren notes that a number of those arrested in 1891 were transported from the Dakotas to Fort Sheridan outside Chicago, where William F. Cody recruited most of them for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They toured Europe, then returned to the US to play at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, Cody brought family members to join the company on show campgrounds, where Indians could live as they wanted to, exemplars of the pluralistic society they now inhabited. The Ghost Dance continued to enrich Indian lives, and it has been revived in this century. Thanks to Louis Warren’s exhaustive scholarship, our knowledge of Wovoka / Jack Wilson and the Ghost Dance has been enriched as well.

A Transition of Visual Ritual: Making Medicine, George Flett, and the Historical Emergence of Native American Ledger Art

How do Native Americans have a voice through art practice, especially since they have been silenced for centuries? And how does one convey an understanding that Native American people and their cultures are still here, alive and present in the United States today? This historical inquiry (Bolin, 1995) into ritual and memory pedagogy (Powell, 2017) focuses on a small part of Native American history through the ledger drawing of Making Medicine and George Flett. Reflecting on history and my own memories of George Flett, we can see their voice, both past and present, within their art practice. Through a connected history that expands on the original ritual of Plains Indian buffalo hide painting into a transitional place for Native American ledger drawing, we can see beyond Native Americans’ artistic characteristics associated solely with craft or utility to engage their past and contemporary artists. Their history, culture, challenges, and issues are made visible through their art practice, while bringing awareness that Native Americans are still here!

Military societies: self-governance and criminal justice in Indian country.

We argue that criminal justice institutions must be accessible to citizens, legitimate and have capacity to enforce law. Such was the case with the military societies of the Plains Indians: a system of criminal justice that predated the time of European contact and which remained a significant source of law and order in Indian country until the Indian Wars concluded at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the federal government attempted to replace military societies with federal police starting circa 1850. Despite such attempts, we show that military societies remain an important institution for criminal justice on the contemporary Northern Cheyenne Reservation. When the federal government shirked on policing during the coronavirus pandemic, military societies took over important policing functions. This does not mean that traditional military societies should replace federal enforcement; rather, it shows that until the quality of federal policing improves, traditional institutions of criminal justice remain an important source of public safety in Indian country.

Behavioral determinants of arsenic-safe water use among Great Plains Indian Nation private well users: results from the Strong Heart Water Study

Background and aim: Long-term arsenic exposure in potable water remains a serious public health challenge in the United States. Rural communities with a high reliance on private wells, including American Indian communities, are disproportionately impacted by arsenic contaminated water. However, efforts to decrease arsenic exposure are limited. The objective of this study is to evaluate the behavioral determinants associated with exclusive arsenic-safe water use in the Strong Heart Water Study (SHWS). Methods: The SHWS is a randomized control trial designed to reduce arsenic exposure in American Indian Great Plains communities. All households received point-of-use arsenic filters installed at baseline and were followed for up to two years. At each visit questionnaires were administered evaluating water use and behavioral determinants based on the RANAS (risks, attitudes, norms, abilities, and self-regulation) model of behavior change. Results: Among 75 participants, exclusive use of arsenic-safe water for drinking and cooking at follow-up was associated with higher baseline levels of perceived disapproval from friends and family for using arsenic-unsafe water for drinking (OR: 0.06, 95% CI: 0.01-0.34) and cooking (0.13, 0.02-0.72) (injunctive norms), greater concern for getting sick from arsenic exposure (0.17, 0.04-0.65) (perceived vulnerability), more self-efficacy to use the arsenic filter for drinking (10.5, 1.49-73.2) and cooking (12.5, 1.88-83.1), and higher arsenic knowledge (6.88, 1.07-44.4). Higher commitment to using the arsenic filter was also a significant predictor of exclusive arsenic-safe water use for drinking (11.7, 1.63-83.5) and cooking (8.43, 1.17-60.8) at follow-up. Exclusive arsenic-safe water use was not associated with sex, age, or education. From baseline to follow-up, the SHWS trial significantly increased perceived vulnerability, self-efficacy, and injunctive norms, and decreased concern about the cost of arsenic filters. Conclusion: Future arsenic interventions in our partner communities should target these behavioral determinants of use of arsenic safe water. Keywords: arsenic, health behavior, water treatment, water

Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart (review)

Reviewed by: Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart Thomas Biolsi (bio) Providing for the People: Economic Change among the Salish and Kootenai Indians, 1875–1910 by Robert J. Bigart University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 ROBERT J. BIGART is librarian emeritus at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation. Providing for the People is not a typical scholarly history. This is a detailed narrative of the gradual changes in the reservation economy of the Salish and Kootenai and the result of what the author describes as over fifty years of research. The narrative is focused largely on how Salish and Kootenai adapted—very effectively, it quickly becomes obvious—to changing circumstances, and description is tightly linked to the archival sources. The book is copiously documented and draws on the author's long career locating documents of many kinds. The main lesson of the narrative is abundantly clear: The Salish and Kootenai peoples made a gradual transition from dependence on hunting, fishing, and foraging to primary dependence upon cattle and farming by 1910 (although foraging continued to play a role in subsistence into the twentieth century). Another lesson is that this transition was made without any need for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to "civilize" or otherwise induce the Salish and Kootenai to farm; they made the transition on their own, with some very modest assistance from the agency in the form of seeds and farm implements (paid for with Indian labor). Furthermore, the Salish and Kootenai never became heavily dependent upon BIA rations. The picture Bigart carefully paints makes the reader wonder why on earth the transition to agriculture and "self-support" (as the BIA anxiously and judgmentally called it) was supposedly so vexed on other reservations—or even if the fraught histories of poverty and supposed resistance to agriculture on other reservations was more the outcome of the BIA failures than the "buffalo culture," much less the "indolence" of Native people. The last buffalo hunt took place in 1881, and at that point adaptations were already apparent on the reservation. Both horses and cattle were grazed on the open range (with an annual roundup); numbers varied by individual, of which 105 owned cattle. Most livestock were owned by mixedbloods and white men married into the tribes, but sixty-seven fullbloods owned at least some. The impact of family ownership of even a few cattle for cash sale [End Page 181] and for subsistence was, of course, significant. A good deal of small-scale farming was also taking place by 1881, including subsistence gardens, but also wheat and oats acreages (two to ten acres in the case of wheat). Notably, this was prior to the allotment of the reservation; there was no need to impose "private property" to induce what the BIA called "industry." Chiefs had an important role in allocating farmsteads and in adjudicating disputes over land (apparently there was little need for a Court of Indian Offenses). Even though economic productivity varied by family—a few families owned large herds or farms and also opened reservation businesses—one must consider that surviving traditional customs of pooling and sharing spread basic resources and even cash more widely than might be the case among non-Indians. The tribes also continued to forage both on and off the reservation (including deer, elk, trout, bitterroot, and berries); access to the original homelands beyond reservation boundaries was guaranteed by the terms of the Hellgate Treaty of 1855. Families that continued to rely on this source of subsistence combined it with livestock and farming, leaving for trips when crops or cattle did not need intensive attention. Gradually, the role of foraging in subsistence declined (but never disappeared), while cattle raising, farming, and (fairly limited) wage work became more prominent. The BIA agent reported in 1910 that "practically every family on the reservation is engaged in the cattle business to a certain extent, and the herds vary from two or three cows to as high as a thousand head of cattle" (144). It was the imposition of new laws in the twentieth century that put this Indigenous economic adaptation at risk. Most importantly...

January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879 by Jerome A. Greene

Reviewed by: January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879 by Jerome A. Greene Eric Melvin Reed January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878–1879. By Jerome A. Greene. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. ix + 319 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $32.95 cloth. In January Moon, Jerome A. Greene, a retired research historian for the National Parks Service and author of numerous works of western military history, recounts one of the most tragic and heartrending episodes to befall Native Americans following the Great Plains Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. For readers unfamiliar with the major details, in 1877 the United States government decided to remove nearly one thousand Northern Cheyenne hundreds of miles south to Indian Territory. Conditions there proved to be unbearable. Plagued by disease, unaccustomed to the climate, and deprived of adequate food and medical care, dozens of Northern Cheyenne died. Others, desperate and nostalgic for their lands and relatives in the north, slipped away and headed home. Along the way (somewhere in northwest Nebraska), they separated into two groups under chiefs Little Wolf and Dull Knife. While those who went with Little Wolf escaped farther north, those who remained under Dull Knife surrendered to nearby troops and were incarcerated at Fort Robinson. Eventually, the Northern Cheyenne at Fort Robinson were denied food, fuel, water, and sanitary privileges (including for women and children) as an effort to compel them to return south. In response, the people attempted a breakout. The military pursued, and when it was over, sixty-four Cheyenne and several soldiers lay dead. Greene recounts these events using new and previously underutilized sources. In doing so, he provides sufficient contextualization, exposition, and a judicious weighing of evidence to constitute a comprehensive and fair treatment. The US government violated its own moral and political principles when it deprived the Northern Cheyenne of life, liberty, and property (to say nothing of happiness) during its conquest of the West. Still, the reasons for the Fort Robinson breakout are myriad and complex. (It did not help, for example, that young Cheyenne men assaulted and killed dozens of settlers on their journey north and that the people were able to conceal serviceable firearms during their internment.) At a time when states and school boards are engaged in ideological debates about how to teach American history (debates in which one side accuses the other of indoctrinating students in a dark and twisted version of the country’s past), the US needs historians who can both write well and lay bare the worst aspects of the American experience in the West without yielding to simple or Manichean interpretations. Greene is such a historian: January Moon is written in a descriptive and often engaging narrative style; it follows the facts but [End Page 357] never strays from an appropriately sympathetic Northern Cheyenne vantage point. Eric Melvin Reed University of Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo by Elyssa Ford

Reviewed by: Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo by Elyssa Ford Samuel X. Fleischer Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo .By Elyssa Ford. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. 288 pp. Selected bibliography, notes, index. $32.50 paper. Popular versions of the American West stylized in twentieth-century multimedia have had pop-culture consumers believing the West was mostly White. The facts, specifically within rodeo itself, are much more complex and diverse. Thanks to Elyssa Ford’s Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion, we now see the West as it was in the Great Plains more clearly: populated by people of color with a firm sense of belonging to America regardless of demographic identity, and more populated by women and diverse sexuality than society has been taught. Ford argues rodeo itself as a “site of cultural history” with tremendous meaning and significance for Mexican, Hawai‘ian, Native American, Black, and LGBTQ groups. Through comparative, intersectional analysis of race, gender, and sexuality, her study is a cultural history exploring “rodeo as something beyond a basic competitive environment” (3). Ford also states that the involvement of diverse peoples in a “White, masculine, and heterosexual American event” (15–16) provided the opportunity for “others” to expand thought and understanding of the American West and its cultural meaning. To wit, the Great Plains Indian Rodeo Association, with three-quarters of its 2015 executive membership comprised of women (106), certainly has dismissed many stereotypes. The study itself is concise and direct, with sufficient notes and sources. In five chapters, each covering a different group’s origins and evolution in the American West, Ford consistently emphasizes and examines gender and how each respective community used rodeo to define its own identity to meet its own needs. With connections to the present, Ford successfully explores change over time in multiple historiographical realms. Also included is a short glossary of terms (187–89), which is beneficial for all readers. Combined with Ford’s meticulous research, it is a helpful addition to keep details appropriately organized for the reader. The association of rodeo with the American West and the Great Plains is imprinted in historical consciousness, yet Ford successfully overwrites stereotypical perceptions with her analysis. Each of the groups researched here is deserving of its own monograph, perhaps, instead of each being just one part of an overall examination of how American West stereotypes have been so misleading. Surely the third chapter—“‘Bucking the Odds and Breaking New Ground’: Native Americans Ranching for Others and Rodeoing for Themselves”—could fill 200 pages on its own, much to the satisfaction of Great Plains historians and scholars. Yet Ford’s book still is a great starting point for further research in multiple subfields, and it should be read before any scholar continues deeper into these avenues of American history. Samuel X. Fleischer Department of History Washington State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Cultural Continuum of the Eurasian Boreal Zone and the Eastern Siberian Wedge (Based on Comparative Mythology and Paleogenetics)

Over the recent decade, abstracts of many thousands of folktales recorded in Europe and Asia have been added to our Electronic Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore. Their analysis reveals systematic parallels between the traditions of Western Eurasia and America, those of the Plains Indians in particular. Such motifs are especially apparent in Ancient Greek mythology (Phaethon’s fall, Pasiphae and the bull, cranes attacking dwarfs, etc.). Although they have been known since the 19th century, no explanation for them could be proposed for a long time. The situation changed thanks to recent advances in Siberian paleogenetics. Before the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, Eastern Siberian populations (Yana RHS and Malta) exhibited European affinities. By the mid-Holocene, population replacement occurred. It was not abrupt, but eventually resulted in a breakup of the initial cultural continuum spanning the Eurasian boreal zone and later extending to the New World. Many of the Western Eurasian–American motifs are episodes from stories of adventures. On the other hand, parallels between traditions of the Indo-Pacific rim of Asia and America mostly relate to motifs that are mythological in the narrow sense (etiological and cosmological), including early ones, evidently stemming from Africa. From the Hunno-Sarmatian, if not Scythian age onward, Southern Siberian and Central Asian motifs had been transferred to Western Eurasia on a large scale. Classical sources mirror an earlier stage of European mythology, hence the difference between the Ancient Greek set of motifs and that peculiar to later European traditions.

Engaging Members of a Northern Plains Indian Reservation to Promote Community Responsive Health Care.

This article describes a project to engage community members and to determine how a school nurse-community partnership could improve healthcare equity within an American Indian community. The purpose of this community-building project was to establish a relationship among school nurse practitioners, children, and their community in a Northern Plains Indian reservation using a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model. CBPR requires a partnership between community members and school nurses in prioritizing community needs, developing an appropriate intervention, and engaging the community throughout the intervention project process. Partnering with teachers and the community, we engaged 78 students in a year-long project in which children depicted their perceptions of well-being and wellness through bimonthly art activities. This project laid the groundwork for a strong community partnership with school nurses in addressing the well-being of children and the further exploration of community needs.

Review: Shamanism and Vulnerability on the North and South American Great Plains, by Kathleen Bolling Lowrey

The anthropology of shamanism is vast and has a long-storied history. It is a robust literature that is deeply entangled in colonialism and the inception of anthropology as a discipline. What makes Shamanism and Vulnerability such a refreshing and remarkable contribution is not only Kathleen Bolling Lowrey’s use of disability theory and feminist scholarship, but her critical and candid examination of parallel historiographies within the North and South American heartlands.By using disability theory, Lowrey both interprets field data and reads North and South American literature through the framework of Eva Feder Kittay’s “dependency work,” referencing debility and vulnerability as a “paradigmatic moral relation,” a universal claim that in the context of shamanism illuminates indigenous revitalization movements and ethnogenesis. Lowrey also counters a previous emphasis on masculinity in shamanism studies with that of feminist allyship, “in which shamans commit to long-term solidarity with fellow community members in difficulty, relationships in which their wives and families also play a key role” (7). This “masculinist misunderstanding of shamanism” or recurring trope of shamans in the literature as being enigmatic and solitary, yet also central to community and healing, Lowrey states, is what led to the tragic failure of the shamanic laboratory she investigates.In addition, Lowrey employs Henry Sumner Maine’s distinction between “contract” and “status” societies and argues that claims about disability and indigeneity are status claims, which in contract societies are predicated on independence and autonomy. “Disabled people and indigenous people are temporary special exceptions at best; eventually, they ought to disappear: disabilities will be cured, indigenous peoples will become modern” (16). This juxtaposition between types of societies and the proliferation of indigenous vulnerability, identity, and social dependency is an ongoing theme in the text.In chapters 1 and 2 the reader is introduced to Isoso, a community of fifteen thousand Guarani-speaking people in the Bolivian Chaco, as well as the Chaco prophetic movement-turned-massacre at Kuruyuki in 1892. Lowrey closely examines a popular and problematic account of that movement by Hernando Sanabria Fernandez (1972), which she argues, “created certain kinds of opportunities for Guarani revitalization in the 1980s and 1990s but foreclosed others in ways that have unfortunate consequences for Guarani political mobilization” (6). This misrepresentation of the historical record, or “humbug,” is another key idea and coincides with chapter 3, wherein Lowrey uses disability theory to understand debility and vulnerability in North American literature—specifically, popular literature on the North American Plains Indians, the Old West, the Ghost Dance Movement, and the massacre at Wounded Knee.Chapter 4 “Shamans and Wives” focuses on Lowrey’s ethnographic fieldwork with two shamans—Don Miguel and Don Jorge Romero. The importance of allyship and inequality is analyzed, particularly the dynamics of everyday homelife and kinship relations. Lowrey argues that these subjects have been neglected in much of the shamanic literature, as opposed to topics such as hunting, violence, wildness, antisociality, and predation. Chapter 5, “Shamans and Spies,” critically examines the hagiography of the “father of ethnobotany” Richard Evans Schultes, and questions the oeuvre of his students Wade Davis and Mark Plotkin in an effort to make visible the “entire faux edifice of pseudoshamanism puffed up by Schultes and his devotees” (131). According to Lowrey, this narrative had a dramatic, and negative, “impact on lowland South American indigenous experience in the latter part of the twentieth century” (120). This chapter reiterates the claim that an earlier anthropological and literary emphasis on the shaman as healer was both harmful and dubious.In the next chapter Lowrey compares and contrasts two forms of fictional narrative about power, vulnerability, disability, and dependency within the Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum and the Shuar stories by Anne-Christine Taylor. Lowrey’s application of Henry Maine’s typologies of status and contract societies proves useful in making the argument that, “the flight from contract is both inevitable—and inevitably disparaged—because it is a response to…inevitable presence of human dependency and debility in societies ever more ill organized to deal with those features of human existence” (9). The final chapter of the book provides valuable insight into this “flight from contract” as seen within the Mennonite diaspora in both the Bolivian Chaco and Paraguayan Chaco. It is here that modernity and identity intersect with debility and vulnerability, revealing that modern nation-states have no place for, nor tolerance of, dependent citizens, whether indigenous or not.Shamanism and Vulnerability is a unique and important text that will both challenge and appeal to scholars of anthropology and religious studies as well as sociology, disability studies, and history. Densely written, it would be more appropriate for graduate students than undergraduates. All readers, however, will welcome the application of disability theory and feminist studies to the investigation of shamanism.

Riding to the rescue: an addition to the Plains Biographic rock art lexicon

Depictions of two riders mounted on a single horse appear in Plains Biographic rock art at five sites. Comparison of these images with late nineteenth century Plains Indian drawings on hide and paper indicates that the pictographs and petroglyphs commemorate instances in which mounted warriors rescued comrades who had been unhorsed in battle. Ethnographic material confirms that several Plains Indian societies held this deed in high esteem. These societies employed formal mechanisms for recognizing individuals who had rescued comrades. While the importance of martial themes in Plains Biographic rock art has been widely acknowledged, emphasis has been placed on the acts of counting coup, capturing weapons, and taking horses. The identification of depictions of two warriors on a single horse as rescue scenes adds to our understanding of the diversity of martial exploits recognized by Plains Indian societies.

Phallic imagery in Northern Plains Indian rock art

ABSTRACT Depictions of male primary sexual characteristics are extremely varied and relatively frequent in Plains Indian rock art. These representations have been usually associated with shamanic practice, mythical themes, and fertility. However, existing explanations ought to be evaluated against cultural models and various strands of evidence derived from ethnographic parallels and semiotics so as to build a more nuanced picture of this common symbol. New interpretations advanced here may help us to gain an informed understanding of the complexities of these representations, and the workings of symbols and icons in Northern Plains Indian rock art.

Variable differences of nerve conduction amplitudes versus velocities and distal latencies of healthy subjects assessed in ethnic cohorts.

The variables affecting reference compound muscle (CMAP) and sensory nerve action potential (SNAP) amplitudes as compared to ones affecting conduction velocities and DLs have not been adequately evaluated in previous studies. In this report, this subject is studied in healthy subject cohorts mainly of Northern European extraction, Northern Plains Indians, and Latinos. Nineteen variables and 18 attributes of nerve conductions (NCs) were assessed using highly standard testing conditions and techniques. Classification and Regression Tree analyses were used to assess variable differences among amplitudes, conduction velocities, and DLs. The most important variable affecting CMAP and SNAP amplitudes was age. For conduction velocities (CVs) and DLs, the variables were height, ethnic cohort, and age. The variables affecting attributes of NCs were similar for the three ethnic cohorts evaluated. The differences of variables affecting amplitudes compared to CVs and DLs need to be taken into account in interpretation of NC results and in setting reference limits for use in medical practice, epidemiology surveys, and therapeutic trials. Scores of CMAP and SNAP amplitudes are suitable measures of sensorimotor polyneuropathy severity, whereas conduction velocities and DLs reflect physiologic/pathologic abnormality of nerve fibers.