Plains Indian Research Articles

Americans

Americans

Missing links: Ledger book structure and two war books of the 1860s

Scholarship on Plains Indian ledger art has traditionally focused on the content of drawings rather than the practices and interactions of warrior-artists, especially during the period of the Indian wars, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1870s. However, attention to the physical structure of ledgers used by Plains Indians, in particular, missing pages and transfer patterns, may lead to a new understanding of ledger art dynamics. Unlike reservation-era artists of a later date, the early producers of “war books” operated in a climate of urgency, often in concert with others from their own or allied tribes. Two war books, in particular, the Half Moon and Dog Soldier ledgers, offer evidence that artists working on a single ledger may have removed sections of the bound volume to provide a wider set of available drawing surfaces and a more efficient accommodation to several warrior-artists engaged in drawing personal acts of valor.

The Strong Heart Water Study: Informing and designing a multi-level intervention to reduce arsenic exposure among private well users in Great Plains Indian Nations

Elevated arsenic exposure from drinking water is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and skin, lung, and bladder cancer. Arsenic contamination in groundwater supplies disproportionately affects rural populations using private wells. Arsenic mitigation programs for American Indian communities are limited. There is an urgent need for targeted approaches to reduce arsenic exposure for at-risk communities using private wells. Formative research was conducted to inform and design a community-based arsenic mitigation intervention for Lakota and Dakota Nations in the Great Plains Area of the United States, where, in some communities, one-quarter of private wells are estimated to have elevated arsenic. Formative research included semi-structured interviews, a community workshop, intervention-planning workshops, and a pilot study of the developed intervention. Community members prioritize aesthetic qualities of water (e.g. taste, color), safety, and other situational factors (e.g. cost) when considering their drinking and cooking water. Although water safety is a concern, awareness and concern for arsenic vary substantially within communities. To reduce arsenic exposure, community members recommended communication of water test results, home visits for intervention delivery, and reminders to use arsenic-safe water. Findings informed the development of an intervention to prevent arsenic exposure through drinking water and cooking, including health promotion messages and household items to facilitate use of an arsenic removal device (e.g. tankards to store filtered water). The pilot study indicated promising acceptability and operability of the developed intervention. This research provides a model for the development of environmental health interventions in partnership with American Indian and other private well-using communities.

Travels in North America, 1832–1834: A Concise Edition of the Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied by Prince Maximilian Alexander Philipp

Reviewed by: Travels in North America, 1832–1834: A Concise Edition of the Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied by Prince Maximilian Alexander Philipp Harlan Hague, Professor of History, Retired Travels in North America, 1832–1834: A Concise Edition of the Journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied. By Prince Maximilian Alexander Philipp. Edited by Marsha V. Gallagher. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. vii + 546 pp. Illustrations, editorial notes, bibliography, list of flora and fauna, cast of characters, index. $34.95 cloth. Maximilian's journals are an essential source for those who wish to understand the Great Plains and its inhabitants at early contact. From the outset, the German prince was particularly interested in American Indians. On the very first day of his arrival in Boston, he searched in vain for "the original American race, the Indians." He was disappointed to find nothing about Indians and little of natural history in the town's bookshops. From Boston, Maximilian visited New York, Philadelphia, and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and stayed the winter at New Harmony. Everywhere, he made excursions into the countryside, satisfying his interest in the natural attractions of the locale. From New Harmony, he traveled to St. Louis, where he began his epochal journey to the western Great Plains. The journals continue from Maximilian's return to St. Louis through his journey back East and to his home in Germany. Maximilian was an obsessive journalist, and we are the beneficiaries. His day-by-day journal is the best account we have of a voyage up the Missouri. He traveled in relative comfort on the steamboats Yellow Stone and Assiniboine. He ate well and slept in a cabin. Traveling on a keelboat at the end, he was assigned one of the two beds. He ate less well during his stays at the forts, but did not complain. He described Indians—their appearance, clothing, and homes—in minute detail. All flora and fauna interested him, from bison to bullfrogs, from cottonwoods to daisies. His descriptions and sketches were complemented by the magnificent watercolors and drawings of Karl Bodmer, who produced arguably the best images of early Plains Indians and their surroundings. Contrary to the perception that most Americans have of Plains Indians, Maximilian's contacts with them were peaceful. The Indians were just as curious about the visitors as Maximilian and his retinue were about them. The friendly relations with Indians would persist until the last half of the century, when whites threatened the Indians' lands and their way of life. Maximilian was a man of his time and a compulsive collector. After waxing eloquently about the beauty of a particularly interesting bird, he shot it. He found a piece of petrified wood most intriguing, so he smashed it and pocketed some fragments. In another age, he likely would have been a conservationist. Indeed, he was aware of the folly of waste amid seeming plenty. When buffalo hunters took only choice bits of meat from their kills, he complained that they "kill everything they can reach and thereby destroy their own future." The date was 1833. Editor Marsha V. Gallagher has produced a volume that must be on the bookshelf of anyone who wishes to comprehend the Great Plains in its pristine state. Maximilian would approve. [End Page 434] Copyright © 2018 The Center for Great Plains Studies and The University of Nebraska Press

The Museum as West and West as Museum: The Micro-Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin's Vanishing American Indians

The Museum as West and West as MuseumThe Micro-Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin's Vanishing American Indians Nilak Datta (bio) Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, George Catlin trained as a lawyer and found himself drawn to painting. Having been inspired by the artistic scene in Philadelphia and by the public curiosity surrounding Native Americans, he decided that his future lay in making public efforts to highlight the plight of Native Americans in the Jacksonian era. Catlin saw Native American cultures as pure and static and their disappearance under the constant and continuing interventions of the federal government as a fait accompli and chose to register any signs of gradual change in culture not as a part of a process contingent on colonization but as a cataclysmic disappearance. Taking his cue from the popular Cooperian images of the vanishing American Indian, Catlin's visual rhetoric in both his artwork and his travel accounts in "Indian" territory was similar to the formulaic prescriptions of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales.1 This romanticized version of Native American cultures and ways of life was expressed in the Gallery Unique, Catlin's version of a touring museum that he took with him to cities in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Belgium. By 1830 Catlin had managed to procure the necessary papers to travel on the steamer Yellow Stone. The journey, conducted in 1832, is recorded not only in his travel accounts but also represented in his artwork in the form of scenic sketches. Many of these were later worked into oils and washes in a New York studio for display during Catlin's later tours to East Coast cities in the United States and in select cities in Europe or converted into engravings for the [End Page 311] purpose of illustrating his travel publications. In accounting for his life and work Catlin "performed himself self-reflexively as the only authentic witness of American Plains Indian culture" (Pratt 273). This article argues that Catlin's representation of Native American ways of life, particularly through his Gallery Unique, is touristic in nature because the display strategies that Catlin used made the Great Plains into an open-air museum for Anglo American and European audiences. Using insights from Dean MacCannell's theory of tourism in his classic account, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (published 1976; reprinted 1999), this article argues that Catlin was able to showcase Plains Indian culture by creating an effect of strangeness; audiences were made to see Catlin's exhibition as an authentic starting point for understanding the alien nature of the Great Plains Native heritage. This article also borrows insights from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (1998) to assess how Catlin used the "quotidian" (everyday objects in use) to make his collection of Native American artifacts seem worthy of contemplation. I use her notion of cultural distancing via the quotidian to show how Catlin's use of the quotidian opens up the tourist's view of Native American cultures as an imagined world of process that doubles back on itself and reifies the world-picture of Native American peoples as a rarefied dense "object" of curiosity. I use these arguments to show that Catlin's accomplishments are better understood through his specific positioning of the Gallery Unique as the authentic West and, by the use of select display techniques, the overall positioning of the "West" as an open-air museum unrestricted by four walls. Catlin's tacit acceptance of expansionist ideology has been emphasized in authoritative accounts of his life. For instance, Haberly, Ewers, and McCracken emphasize how Catlin's romanticized vision of Native peoples can be seen in the way he painted idyllic scenes, his own attitude as the savior of the primitive, and his continuing zeal for over forty years in this mission. Truettner and Dippie (George Catlin) focus on how Catlin, in order to make his work more profitable, repeatedly advertised his collection and tried to sell it to the federal government, hindered as he was by the lack of federal funding. Berkhofer and Dippie (The Vanishing) [End Page 312] show that despite the idealism implicit...

Cheval Bonnet: A Crow Calling Card in the Blackfeet Homeland

Abstract Cheval Bonnet, a small petroglyph site located along Cut Bank Creek in northern Montana, contains coup-counting and horse-raiding narratives from the early 1800s. By careful comparison to known Crow-style rock art and robe art imagery, most of the petroglyphs at the site can be identified as Crow drawings, begging the question of why they are located here, so far from Crow country and in the heart of Historic Blackfeet tribal territory. Detailed ethnohistoric research shows that one aspect of Historic Plains Indian warfare was the leaving of such drawings as “calling cards” by war parties who entered enemy territory and wished to taunt their adversaries by illustrating deeds that they had executed against them. Understanding this site as such a calling card enables us to identify other similar ones elsewhere on the northern Plains.

"It Felt Like Violence": Indigenous Knowledge Traditions and the Postcolonial Ethics of Academic Inquiry and Community Engagement.

In a 2014 presentation at an academic conference featuring an American Indian community audience, I critically engaged the assumptions and commitments of Indigenous Research Methodologies. These methodologies have been described as approaches and procedures for conducting research that stem from long-subjugated Indigenous epistemologies (or "ways of knowing"). In my presentation, I described a Crow Indian religious tradition known as a skull medicine as an example of an indigenous way of knowing, referring to a historical photograph of a skull medicine bundle depicted on an accompanying slide. This occasioned consternation among many in attendance, some of whom later asserted that it was unethical for me to have presented this information because of Indigenous cultural proscriptions against publicizing sacred knowledge and photographing sacred objects. This ethical challenge depends on enduring religious sensibilities in Northern Plains Indian communities, as embedded within a postcolonial political critique concerning the accession of sacred objects by Euro-American collectors during the early 20th century. I complicate these ethical claims by considering competing goods that are valued by community psychologists, ultimately acknowledging that the associated ethical challenge resists resolution in terms that would be acceptable to diverse constituencies.

Facing new flows: subjectivity and the colonial encounter in Plains Indian art

This preliminary evaluation of depictions of the human face among North American Plains Indians elicits questions regarding non-Western approaches to portraiture at the interface between visual regimes and experiential approaches to reality. It shows how the appearance of mimetic naturalism in this regional art reflects more profound changes in perceptions of reality and personhood engendered by the colonial encounter. In so doing, the essay aims at reframing the questions we ask about Native American arts by incorporating indigenous approaches to experience and vision that may help us reformulate how we talk about arts outside the Western canon.

The Walk Across North Dakota by Jeremy Bold et al.

Reviewed by: The Walk Across North Dakota by Jeremy Bold et al. AnnMarie Kajencki The Walk Across North Dakota. By Jeremy Bold, Tyler Bold, Gwendolyn Hoberg, Richard Hoberg, and Bruce Ringstrom. Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 2016. 216 pp. Illustrations, notes. $19.95 paper. For readers eager to experience a long-distance trek sans blisters, sore ankles, and chilly June mornings, The Walk Across North Dakota will satisfy their yen for an "existential adventure." The walk was completed in two parts—the first covering a distance of 191.6 miles in fourteen days in June 2011 from the North Dakota–Montana border to Bismarck, and the second covering 215.1 miles in thirteen days from Bismarck to the North Dakota–Minnesota border in June 2013. Two pairs of expatriate North Dakota siblings, Jeremy and Tyler Bold and Gwendolyn and Richard Hoberg (and Gwendolyn's spouse, Bruce Ringstrom), return home "to rediscover many things that make North Dakota weird and fantastic." The book may best be appreciated by readers familiar with the state, as landmarks, points of reference, and cultural idiosyncrasies abound. For readers unfamiliar with North Dakota but open to its treasures, the book is significant. And for anyone wishing to invest in an extensive walk, the authors provide a plethora of sound advice for long-distance hiking, camping, and exploration of one's physical and mental stamina. The one thirty-six-year old and four twenty-something walkers embark on "one of the most rigorous journeys any [of them had] attempted" to answer what it means to be from North Dakota and how the state has and has not changed since they left. As their eyes reopen to the "marvelous emptiness" of the state, they capture in terse prose the essence of their daily experiences that include North Dakota's infamous hourly changing weather, unsurpassed sunrises and sunsets, the boast of opulent bird species, rolling hills and majestic buttes, the lonely barks of coyotes at night, the irrepressible song of the mead-owlark, and "kindred spirits." Also gracing the book are the hikers' haiku that eloquently capture additional reflective moments. The design of the book, with its numerous blank and uncrowded pages and the seemingly intentional white space, mirrors the spaciousness of the "Blank Rectangle" and the numerous times the hikers encountered quiet, desolate places. Because the book focuses on place, the authors could have provided more visuals, such as maps, in addition to the two maps of the state identifying the cities or towns the walkers traversed from the western to the eastern border, and a few more photographs. Also, the authors' decision not to edit journal entries sometimes leaves readers with unnecessary repetition. The philosophical introspection and wonderstruck summaries of their days that comprised part 1 seem diminished in part 2, perhaps because of the two-year break between the walks and perhaps because the western part of the state is vastly less populated than the eastern half. Also glaringly absent is any mention of the state's Native American indigenous population. Only at the end of the book does a perfunctory reference to the Plains Indians appear. Nevertheless, the authors successfully document their unique and introspective experiences, reinforce the majesty of North Dakota's land and the enigmatic and resilient character of its people, and provide a plethora of advice for anyone wishing to engage in a life-changing long-distance hike. [End Page 149] AnnMarie Kajencki Department of English Bismarck State College Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory ed. by Bradley R. Clampitt

Reviewed by: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory ed. by Bradley R. Clampitt Rowan Faye Steineker The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory. Edited and with an introduction by Bradley R. Clampitt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. vii + 184 pp. Map, list of contributors, index. $25.00 paper. The eight essays included in The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory provide a window into complex military, political, and social issues that do not fit easily within the traditional narrative of the American Civil War. Inhabitants of the sovereign tribal nations in Indian Territory, including tribal citizens, slaves, and Euro-American settlers, serve as the focal point of the volume. Thus, the collection marks a significant departure from the typical focus on the Union and the Confederacy in Civil War scholarship. It joins other recent contributed volumes, including Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, and Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West, edited by Virginia Scharff, in exploring the impact of the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West. The slim volume also complements When the Wolf Came, Mary Jane Warde's comprehensive narrative of the Civil War in Indian Territory. Collectively, the essays in the volume demonstrate that while the battles in Indian Territory did not significantly affect the military outcome, the distinct sovereign status of the Five Tribes complicated the larger political and social landscape of the Civil War era. For instance, the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations negotiated an alliance with the Confederacy because the terms of the treaty offered them better opportunities to protect their political autonomy than previous relations with the federal government had afforded. Essays by Clarissa Confer and Linda Reese also highlight just how disruptive the conflict and reconstruction efforts proved for the diverse population of Indian Territory, particularly women and newly emancipated slaves. Contributing to growing scholarship on Civil War memory and commemoration, Amanda Cobb-Greetham and White Edward's contributions illuminate the unique and complicated legacies of the American Civil War in Oklahoma. F. Todd Smith's essay, "'The Most Destitute' People in Indian Territory: The Wichita Agency Tribes and the Civil War" skillfully chronicles the ways in which smaller Native groups in Indian Territory suffered devastating losses in the midst of the larger conflict. Further essays covering the Plains Indian tribes would have been a welcome addition to the book. More rigorous ethnohistorical research and interpretations would have strengthened some of the individual essays. For instance, Christopher B. Bean's "Who Defines a Nation?: Reconstruction in Indian Territory" relies almost exclusively on secondary sources and does not adequately problematize previous scholars' assumptions. In particular, the emphasis on political factionalism and a "traditional" versus "progressive" binary obscures the political, cultural, and racial diversity that characterize the Five Tribes. As a whole, however, the volume effectively explores the complex history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory with a particular emphasis on the diverse experiences of various Native communities. It will appeal broadly to students and scholars of Native American history and Civil War history. [End Page 147] Rowan Faye Steineker Department of History and Geography University of Central Oklahoma Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Giving Voice to Historical Trauma Through Storytelling: The Impact of Boarding School Experience on American Indians

ABSTRACTThis study documented events contributing to historical trauma among American Indian mission boarding school survivors using the Dream Catcher-Medicine Wheel (DCMW) model as a culturally appropriate tool that enhanced storytelling. Nine women from 2 Plains Indians tribes were recruited through snowball sampling. A descriptive exploratory qualitative method was used in the study. A thematic analysis process using the DCMW was combined with taped and written storytelling sessions. Inductive analysis was applied to the 2 research questions. Data analysis identified 3 major themes. First, unable to voice mission boarding school experiences for most of their adult lives, each affirmed the rediscovery of Native spirituality as empowering. Second, all expressed appreciation for traditional methods woven into storytelling sessions, particularly the DCMW. Finally, all indicated they experienced release and healing through telling their stories. Participants struggle to resolve health challenges to this day.

Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology

Contents Introduction: The Passamaquoddy Experiment 1. Media Evolution: Indians, Alphabets, and the Technological Measures of Man 2. Representing Plains Indian Sign Language 3. Originals and Aboriginals: Race and Writing in the Age of the Phonograph 4. Race, Empire, and the Skin of the Ethnographic Image 5. Local Colors: The Work of the Ethnographic Autochrome Postscript: Fictions of Permanence Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

GABBR1 and SLC6A1, Two Genes Involved in Modulation of GABA Synaptic Transmission, Influence Risk for Alcoholism: Results from Three Ethnically Diverse Populations.

Animal and human studies indicate that GABBR1, encoding the GABAB1 receptor subunit, and SLC6A1, encoding the neuronal gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) transporter GAT1, play a role in addiction by modulating synaptic GABA. Therefore, variants in these genes might predict risk/resilience for alcoholism. This study included 3 populations that differed by ethnicity and alcoholism phenotype: African American (AA) men: 401 treatment-seeking inpatients with single/comorbid diagnoses of alcohol and drug dependence, 193 controls; Finnish Caucasian men: 159 incarcerated alcoholics, half with comorbid antisocial personality disorder, 181 controls; and a community sample of Plains Indian (PI) men and women: 239 alcoholics, 178 controls. Seven GABBR1 tag single nucleotide polymorphisms were genotyped in the AA and Finnish samples; rs29220 was genotyped in the PI for replication. Also, a uniquely African, functional SLC6A1 insertion promoter polymorphism (IND) was genotyped in the AAs. We found a significant and congruent association between GABBR1 rs29220 and alcoholism in all 3 populations. The major genotype (heterozygotes in AAs, Finns) and the major allele in PIs were significantly more common in alcoholics. Moreover, SLC6A1 IND was more abundant in controls, that is, the major genotype predicted alcoholism. An analysis of combined GABBR1 rs29220 and SLC6A1 IND genotypes showed that rs29220 heterozygotes, irrespective of their IND status, had an increased risk for alcoholism, whereas carriers of the IND allele and either rs29220 homozygote were more resilient. Our results show that with both GABBR1 and SLC6A1, the minor genotypes/alleles were protective against risk for alcoholism. Finally, GABBR1 rs29220 might predict treatment response/adverse effects for baclofen, a GABAB receptor agonist.

Through Indian Sign Language: The Fort Sill Ledgers of Hugh Lennox Scott and Iseeo, 1889–1897 ed. by William C. Meadows

Through Indian Sign Language: The Fort Sill Ledgers of Hugh Lennox Scott and Iseeo, 1889-1897, ed. William C. Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015, 520 pp., hardbound, $55, ISBN: 978-080614-727-7)HUGH LENOX SCOTT (1853-1934) was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army. He is well known among students of Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) as the organizer of the very first conference both in and on this sign language in Browning, Montana, in 1930; as the author of a couple of articles on PISL; and for his attempt to make a filmed dictionary of the language in the 1930s. From 1891 to 1897 he was the commander of Troop L, 7th Cavalry, which consisted exclusively of Native American soldiers. Iseeo (1849-1927) was a lifelong member of this troop and a good friend of Scott's. Iseeo did not speak English when Scott arrived at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and Scott did not speak Kiowa, but Scott had learned a northern variety of PISL from Native Americans farther north before he arrived in Oklahoma. Scott and Iseeo communicated throughout their lives exclusively in PISL (and dictated letters when they were separated). Scott had a keen interest in Plains Indians, and he interviewed Iseeo, a knowledgeable keeper of Kiowa traditions, many times, and other members of this army unit, as well as other visitors. The stories were all told to Scott in sign language, and Scott wrote them down in English. This eventually led to three notebooks, totaling almost five hundred handwritten pages.The main body of the book consists of a diplomatic edition of the sign language stories translated into English by Scott (pp. 157-453). The texts have been carefully edited by William C. Meadows, anthropologist and an expert in Kiowa culture and history. Meadows also wrote an excellent introduction (pp. 3-155) about Scott, Iseeo, and all of the other Native consultants in Troop L, as well as those who contributed texts.The trickster stories, origin myths, fables, migration stories, and texts about lake monsters, belief systems, medicine, sexual miracles, military achievements, and battles, as well as manuals such as the one on how to catch a bald eagle with your bare hands, are fascinating. One often notices similarities between these Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddoan myths and those from other Native American groups. I believe the chapters on the stories could have profited from more extensive cross-referencing, as some of the stories recur in different versions. In addition, more comparative comments would have been welcome, along the lines of Scott himself, who made marginal notes on parallels in Blackfoot narrative traditions, for example. But that is my only criticism with regard to this fascinating book.What this book can teach us about sign languages in general and about Plains Indian Sign Language in particular is of more interest to readers of SLS.The lexicon of PISL is fairly well documented, with at least a dozen published dictionaries (see Davis [2010], who counted more than thirteen thousand identified tokens of some thirty-five hundred distinct signs). Surprisingly, however, PISL grammar is poorly documented. Only a handful of texts have been published or are otherwise accessible through film recordings, sequences of photographs, or transcripts of signs, and there is no grammatical sketch of more than a few pages in length. As the language is severely endangered, we can be thankful that Jeffrey Davis has been documenting the language for more than a decade, even if his published work thus far is more sociolinguistic and historical than grammatical.The current book is therefore a welcome addition to the scarce materials on PISL, and this time directly from a Native viewpoint. Information about the language can be found in five types of sources in the book. Meadows provides a very good historical overview of PISL research, with new facts and observations, in his introduction, adding to the existing scholarship on PISL. …

Inspired by Plains Indian Drawings: The Mystery of Lieutenant Adolphus von Luettwitz’s Drawings of the Plains Indian War

Inspired by Plains Indian Drawings: The Mystery of Lieutenant Adolphus von Luettwitz’s Drawings of the Plains Indian War

Fort Bascom: Soldiers, Comancheros, and Indians in the Canadian River Valley by James Bailey Blackshear

Reviewed by: Fort Bascom: Soldiers, Comancheros, and Indians in the Canadian River Valley by James Bailey Blackshear Robert Wooster Fort Bascom: Soldiers, Comancheros, and Indians in the Canadian River Valley. By James Bailey Blackshear. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 272. Notes, bibliography, index.) In August 1863, a mixed force of United States regular soldiers and New Mexico volunteers established Fort Bascom, New Mexico, on the south side of the Canadian River about sixty miles west of the Texas border. Named for Capt. George N. Bascom, killed eighteen months earlier at the Battle of Valverde, the post was designed to blunt a possible Confederate invasion of New Mexico and to check the flourishing Comanchero trade between residents of that territory and Southern Plains Indians. Chronic shortages of good drinking water, building materials, fresh meat and vegetables, and forage continually plagued the small military garrisons there (usually only two companies). General William T. Sherman described the region as “an awful country from which to draw men before death” (8). Fort Bascom’s independent status was ended in the summer of 1870, but it would thereafter serve as a sub-post of Fort Union until its permanent closure in 1875. In this first full study of the post, James Bailey Blackshear makes two significant points. First, he demonstrates that while obviously a part of the history of New Mexico, Fort Bascom also played an important role in the history of Texas. As the closest military position to the western Llano Estacado, it served as a base for big army columns led by Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson (1864), Maj. Andrew W. Evans (1868–69), and Maj. William R. Price (1874) into the heart of Comanchería, campaigns that, in conjunction with soldiers from Kansas, Texas, and Indian Territory, eventually crushed the military power of the Comanches and Kiowas. Even more [End Page 265] significant is Blackshear’s skillful analysis of the impact of the Comanchero trade—the generations-old exchange through the well-concealed canyons of the western Canadian River between New Mexicans and Plains Indians of food, sugar, clothing, whiskey, and guns for livestock—on the army and Indian affairs. As Blackshear explains, few Anglos grasped the systematic, deep-seeded nature of this trade, which long eluded both the soldiers assigned to stop it and the newcomers who attempted to seize it for their own. Highlighted by tenacious archival research, Blackshear’s study shows that those interested in nineteenth-century Texas history must incorporate Fort Bascom, which for all practical purposes served as the Lone Star State’s “northernmost frontier fort” (159) until the establishment of Fort Elliott in 1875, into their world view. He also shows that military historians of the period must pay greater attention to the Comanchero trade; to paraphrase an old adage, while amateurs discuss tactics, professionals study logistics. Moving beyond the immediacy of Fort Bascom, Blackshear is less sure-footed, as exemplified by his claim that Sherman and General Philip Sheridan applied concepts of total war learned in the Civil War against Indians, notions that scholars like Mark Grimsley and Mark Neely have done much to discredit. Such minor caveats notwithstanding, this is a valuable book that says much more about Texas and the Southwest than the typical history of a frontier fort. Robert Wooster Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Assessment of anxiety among Northern Plains Indians.

This study is an examination of the reliability and validity of the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck, Epstein, Brown, & Steer, 1988) in a sample of NPIs (N = 529). Validity was assessed by comparing BAI scores among 3 different diagnostic categories in a clinical sample (anxiety disorder, mood disorder, and comorbid anxiety/mood disorder diagnostic groups) and a community sample of participants with no self-reported mental health diagnoses. The BAI was also compared with depression, quality of life, and anxiety measures to assess validity. Support toward the validity of the BAI was demonstrated through high correlations with similar measures of anxiety, as well as higher scores among the clinical samples compared to the control sample. The BAI also demonstrated strong internal consistency (α = .95). An exploratory factor analysis indicated the presence of 3 factors: (a) fear, (b) cardiorespiratory, and (c) body instability symptoms. The BAI was unable to accurately differentiate between mood disorder and anxiety disorder groups. Results of this study indicate that the BAI may be a useful instrument in the assessment of anxiety with NPIs; however, the BAI is potentially unsuited to differentiating between mood disorders and anxiety disorders with this population. (PsycINFO Database Record

Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America by Jennifer Guiliano

Reviewed by: Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America by Jennifer Guiliano Joe Schiller Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America. By Jennifer Guiliano. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. ix + 165 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95 cloth. At a glance, Jennifer Guiliano’s subtitle seems ambitious for such a concise book. Her impressive contextualization of the rise of Indian imagery in college athletic mascots and halftime shows, though, fulfills it well. Relying on archival sources from five universities formerly or currently using American Indian mascots, Guiliano argues that the creation of American Indian mascots and halftime spectacles was bound to the larger project of higher education. From the late nineteenth century to the early Cold War, the mascots’ establishment reinforced the modern university’s mission to develop white male middle-class athletic bodies in the service of community and country. The mascots sanitized narratives of colonial expansion in the face of anxieties about industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and wartime fitness for service. The work is organized chronologically in six chapters, each having a thematic emphasis. The first chapter chronicles the rapid rise in profitability of college football, showing how university identity became tied to the sport and its spectacle. The remaining chapters pan the scope of complicity in the Indian mascot’s invention and spread. The University of Illinois was historical ground zero, but the university’s influences were in the Great Plains. Progressive Era reformers like those with the Boy Scouts of America, often with connections to Dakota and Lakota people, trained early (white) Indian mascots in dance and costuming. The headdressed Plains Indian became the preferred image for mascots as far away as Stanford. Administrators, students, athletes, newspaper sportswriters, and band directors, among many others, embraced and disseminated ideas about community identities created through Indian mascotry. With variation between universities, the narratives were consistent: Indians could be present in the modern university when called forth by university mythology, or cued to perform by the band’s “sounds of ethnicity” (51), but must nobly cede university space to whites and remain in the past. Guiliano’s samples are well chosen for institutional diversity. However, she mischaracterizes the University of North Dakota as a “frontier agricultural school” (8) when, in fact, part of that university’s mission in creating an Indian identity was to distance itself from North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University), in addition [End Page 333] to assuaging fears about its proximity to the frontier and finding a suitable opponent to the agricultural college’s bison. This is a very minor oversight, but placing und’s founding in its liberal arts tradition might actually have helped her already cogent argument for und’s effort to appear more civilized to eastern audiences. Begun as Guiliano’s dissertation, Indian Spectacle is tightly argued and well researched, theoretically rigorous and clearly written. It makes no effort to engage contemporary debates about Indian mascots or their effects on contemporary American Indians, yet illustrates why, amid never-ending battles over their use, we should understand the historical circumstances that bore them. Joe Schiller Department of History University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2016 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Not Over: The Nineteenth-Century Indian Wars

Not Over:The Nineteenth-Century Indian Wars Michael A. Elliott (bio) Jerome A. Greene. American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. 648 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Boyd Cothran. Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 264 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Lisa Blee. Framing Chief Leschi: Narratives and the Politics of Historical Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xviii + 320 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.95. In A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013), Ari Kelman recounted the details of a remarkable 2003 encounter between officers of the Colorado National Guard and descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho survivors of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. The guardsmen were visiting Sand Creek in the course of a “Staff Ride,” a study of a historical episode that could inform their work as military leaders. Dressed in uniform, the Colorado officers were, in a sense, contemporary representatives of the Colorado militia who had killed more than 150 Cheyennes and Arapahos there who believed that they were under the protection of a nearby federal fort. As described by Kelman, it was a day for both commemoration and difficult truths. Chief Laird Comestvah of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes staked out his position plainly. “The Cheyennes will not accept an apology for what happened at Sand Creek,” he told the Colorado guardsmen, “for the simple reason that Sand Creek is not over.”1 Kelman’s book told the story of the long and winding path that led to the opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historical Site in 2007, and it explored in great detail the challenge of remembering a historical event that, for many, raises unresolved questions. As he continued speaking, Comestvah referenced reparations that were promised—but never paid—to the survivors of Sand Creek in the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas. Moreover, we should [End Page 277] hear something even more challenging in Comestvah’s claim that “Sand Creek is not over”; the statement makes an implicit claim that the violence that transpired in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the tribal communities living in the Western United States so radically that its full effects are nearly impossible to compass. This violence, to be sure, took many forms—legal, economic, cultural—but it was enforced and made most visible through military action that could turn indigenous homelands into theaters of war. Kelman’s book is so significant because it connected the military actions of Plains warfare to a broader campaign of anti-indigenous dispossession, revealing how this history reverberates through contemporary struggles over commemorative practices. I was thinking of Kelman’s Misplaced Massacre as I read Jerome A. Greene’s American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890. Greene is one of the preeminent historians of the Plains Indian Wars, and his knowledge of both the military and tribal leaders during this period is prodigious. As in his earlier books on U.S. campaigns against the Southern Cheyennes and the Nez Perce (or Nimiipuu), he has left no archive unsearched in his quest to unravel one of the most shocking scenes of bloodshed in American history. Most readers will already know the outlines of the story of Wounded Knee: In 1890, a growing number of Lakotas began to practice the Ghost Dance, which they believed would purify the dancers and lead to the restoration of the world. Civilian authorities on the Lakota reservations feared that this dancing was the prelude to a violent insurgency; they outlawed the Ghost Dance and sought military aid. In late December, the Army accepted the surrender of a group of Ghost Dance adherents under the leadership of a Miniconjou Lakota named Big Foot. The soldiers surrounded a camp near Wounded Knee Creek, and began to disarm the Lakotas as a step toward bringing them to the Pine Ridge Agency. During this process, close-range shooting broke out—its origins still unclear—between a small number of Indians and soldiers. Then the violence devolved into wholesale slaughter. Even Greene suggests...

Tubitsinakururu: Listen Closely

Tubitsinakururu:Listen Closely Dustin Tahmahkera (bio) A response to Elle-Maija Apiniskim Tailfeathers, “A Conversation with Helen Haig- Brown, Lisa Jackson, and Elle-Maija Apiniskim Tailfeathers with Some Thoughts to Frame the Conversation.” Biography 39.3 (Summer 2016): 277—306 We learn the world and test it through interaction and dialogue with each other, beginning as we actively listen through the membrane of the womb wall to the drama of our families’ lives. —Joy Harjo (Mvskoke) (Harjo and Bird 19, emphasis added) . In the Nʉmʉ tekwapʉha, the Comanche language, it means listen carefully. means listen, but to practice is to listen closely and engage with the speakers and sounds, be they familiar or foreign, friendly or fierce, fictive or factual, or sometimes, in the eccentricities of humanity, all of the above. It is to perform possibilities of conversing not at, around, or away from each other but, as Lisa Jackson says during the conversation with Elle-Maija Tailfeathers and Helen Haig-Brown, “through each other.” What, then, does it mean not just to hear each other but to really listen to and through each other? That Haig-Brown, Jackson, and Tailfeathers, three highly skilled and self-reflexive filmmakers, converse their words aloud, before they are transcribed for this Indigenous-centric issue of Biography, allows space for thoughtful spontaneity into talking Indigeneity. They talk through each other on what it means to be Indigenous and familial filmmakers. As cinematic kin, Jackson, Haig-Brown, and Tailfeathers cite, engage, and empower each other, a citational process similarly enacted by my academic kin in Indigenous studies who continue to construct and amplify volumes of [End Page 309] Indigenous intertextuality through each other’s work, experiences, and teachings. In building Indigenous filmographies, Tailfeathers, Jackson, and Haig- Brown express their shared aesthetic and critical relationships between filmmaking and/as story, courage, responsibility, healing, humor, trauma, fear, ethics, reception, and ceremony, all key terms spoken during their conversation. Several of their individual films, for example, share stories of family trauma at anti-Indigenous institutions, including Canada’s residential schools and Norway’s Sami Boarding System. For Suckerfish, Jackson’s voiceover actress and the environmental activist Cleo Reece knows her onscreen role as Jackson’s mother resonates deeply offscreen when she tells the filmmaker, “This is all our story” (282). Tailfeathers similarly observes of Haig-Brown’s familial documentary My Legacy, “Her story was my story” (278). During their phone conversation for Biography, Tailfeathers says, “What I was watching was my story. It was my experience and it just opened me up,” a testament to the power of filmmaking and film to engage in the “ongoing healing process” for Indigenous families enduring centuries of colonization (285, 291). As Haig-Brown states, “It’s like a ceremony. It’s like a prayer” (292). In their conversation, Jackson explains her objective in making the film Suckerfish about her mother and their relationship: “I went in wanting people to understand people like my mother, and not just see them as a stereotype, or to see something more there, and illustrate it through our relationship, through each other” (295). In the deeply personal and familial contexts of these filmmakers’ works, listening through each other means, to borrow from Blaze Kwaymullina (Palyku and Nyamal), “listening through the heart,” as joyous and painful and as challenging and cathartic as that may be and become. Jackson’s affective intention of expressive enlightenment for her audience, which can effect change in thought and action, is part of what recently drove a group of Lakota high school students to respond to a mainstream TV special on Indigenous poverty by calmly talking back and representing that they are, as their video short is titled, More than that. It’s what drove the late Blackfeet actress Misty Upham to represent Native women as she said, too, “more than that,” that being the roles of “leathers and feathers or drunk on a reservation.” She proactively sought out roles of complexity and multidimensionality that she made her own, such as in Frozen River (2008) and Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013). It’s what drives scholars like Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi) and Jill Doerfler (White Earth Anishinaabe...