Plains Indian Research Articles

Cherry River

The multimedia exhibition Cherry River, Where the Rivers Mix was presented to audiences in August 2018 at the Missouri Headwaters State Park in Three Forks, Montana. Long before the European invasion across the Atlantic, the headwaters, or the confluence of three forks of the Missouri River, was a crossroads for Northern Plains Indians. The place-based project, Cherry River, created by artist Mary Ellen Strom and Native American researcher Shane Doyle, was produced by Mountain Time Arts, a collaborative arts and culture organization in southwestern Montana. In an effort to analyze the site, Mountain Time Arts convened a diverse group of participants. Their research question became, What does it take to change the name of a river? After six months of research, the project centered on the act of changing the name of the East Gallatin River back to the Indigenous Crow name Cherry River. The name Cherry River honors and describes the numerous chokecherry trees growing on the river’s banks that provide sustenance for wildlife and venerates Indigenous history, the ecology of running water, and riparian systems in the Northwest. The rise of interest in the rights of Indigenous people in North America aligns with many of Okwui Enwezor’s groundbreaking initiatives around the world. This assemblage of images, poetry, and first-person narratives is an example of the kind of practice in dialogue with the legacy of Enwezor’s decolonial actions and innovative use of curatorial strategies in several groundbreaking exhibitions to confront the “complex predicaments of contemporary art in a time of profound historical change and global transformation.” While Enwezor was neither an explicit source of inspiration nor invoked for the Cherry River project, the futures of Enwezor are palpable in this anticolonial project restoring the past to reimagine the present.

Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity

In Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas, Benjamin R. Kracht has crafted an important contribution to Native American religious practice, one drawing on more than thirty years of extensive ethnography on the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma and illuminated with detailed archival research. As a result, this book skillfully describes the religious responses of Kiowa people during the first half of the twentieth century to the harsh realities of reservation life and increasingly intensified Christian missionization. Kracht’s dedication to ethnohistorical detail shows in his intimate portrayal of how people, both Kiowa and non-Native, navigate the religious diversity of this reservation community and their own beliefs. Volumes have been written about the Ghost Dance and the Native American Church, but there is little recent scholarship about Native American Christianity, with important exceptions including Mark Clatterbuck’s Crow Jesus (2017) and Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George Tinker’s A Native American Theology (2020).Kracht takes on the difficult task of relating a holistic depiction of Kiowa religious change from the tumultuous early reservation era through the post–World War II period, drawing together Indigenous Kiowa religious practice, the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, and Christianity. In the final chapters, he brings his narrative up through current practice, documenting an incredible sweep of history. He has brought extensive archival materials to bear on his ethnographic research to build a complicated historical narrative, relating perspectives of both Kiowa people and of the government officials and missionaries working in these communities. He has crafted a rich ethnohistory that can only come from decades of work in one community. Such in-depth research allows him to illuminate the multiple perspectives of Kiowa people as they approached these new religious forms. Accounts of Native religion, and particularly the Ghost Dance, can present a monolithic perspective, but Kracht provides a nuanced account, demonstrating that Kiowa people held a multitude of opinions about religion depending on band, family history, personal experience, economic situation, and other social factors. By beginning the narrative in the early reservation period, Kracht sensitively depicts the challenging choices Kiowas made during a time when their religious practices were under threat from both government officials and missionization. As he continues the narrative to the present, he also relates how perceptions of religious practice have changed over time.In this book, Kracht provides lengthy quotes from his voluminous interviews, giving voice to Kiowa people, letting their perspectives and observations speak for themselves. He also relates with sincerity his own experiences, providing even more nuance to the reader. His analysis of shifting Kiowa religious practice leans a little heavily on revitalization-movement theory to explore the Ghost Dance and peyotism, an approach that can be essentializing. Regardless, he successfully reveals that Kiowa religious action throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not simply been a response to deprivation. This book makes an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that Christianity has not simply existed in opposition to peyotism or other Indigenous forms of Kiowa religion, but that Kiowa people themselves have actively shaped all of these religious practices in conversation with one another. Kracht builds a strong case for his argument that Kiowa people molded each new religious movement they encountered to their current circumstances, even indigenizing Christianity. Scholars of Plains Indian history, the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, Native Christianity, and early reservation life on the Plains will find this book useful. I believe that scholars researching missionary activity in the United States, revitalization movements, syncretic religious change, and Indigenous responses to missionization and colonization would also find insight in this book.

Gravettian hand stencils as sign language formatives.

Several Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites from the Gravettian period display hand stencils with missing fingers. On the basis of the stencils that Leroi-Gourhan identified in the cave of Gargas (France) in the late 1960s, we explore the hypothesis that those stencils represent hand signs with deliberate folding of fingers, intentionally projected as a negative figure onto the wall. Through a study of the biomechanics of handshapes, we analyse the articulatory effort required for producing the handshapes under the stencils in the Gargas cave, and show that only handshapes that are articulable in the air can be found among the existing stencils. In other words, handshape configurations that would have required using the cave wall as a support for the fingers are not attested. We argue that the stencils correspond to the type of handshape that one ordinarily finds in sign language phonology. More concretely, we claim that they correspond to signs of an 'alternate' or 'non-primary' sign language, like those still employed by a number of bimodal (speaking and signing) human groups in hunter-gatherer populations, like the Australian first nations or the Plains Indians. In those groups, signing is used for hunting and for a rich array of ritual purposes, including mourning and traditional story-telling. We discuss further evidence, based on typological generalizations about the phonology of non-primary sign languages and comparative ethnographic work, that points to such a parallelism. This evidence includes the fact that for some of those groups, stencil and petroglyph art has independently been linked to their sign language expressions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.

Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway by Louis Kraft

Reviewed by: Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway by Louis Kraft Pierre M. Atlas Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway. By Louis Kraft. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. ix + 413 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95, cloth. The November 1864 murder and mutilation of over 200 peaceful Southern Cheyenne (Tsistsistas) and Arapaho (Hinono'eino') at Sand Creek by Colorado volunteer cavalrymen was one of the great atrocities in American history. The attack was intended to be a slaughter. Its architect, Colonel John Chivington, told another officer that he "had come to kill Indians, and believed it to be honorable to kill Indians under any and all circumstances" (206). Independent scholar Louis Kraft uses contemporary sources to reconstruct this horrific event down to the minutest of details (including his own maps), but Sand Creek really serves as the lynchpin for a broader project. In an impressively detailed and nuanced work, Kraft presents the context and backstory leading to Sand Creek as well as its aftermath, including the duplicitous Medicine Lodge Treaty, retaliatory warfare, and Custer's Washita River massacre (where Cheyenne peace chief and Sand Creek survivor Black Kettle was killed). Utilizing [End Page 156] a wealth of contemporary, archival, and scholarly sources, Kraft presents a rich portrait of white-indigenous relations spanning several decades in what would become the states of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In an epilogue, he notes the massacre's devastating cultural legacy for Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Kraft presents compelling portraits of major and minor characters and describes the social dynamics within both settler and indigenous Great Plains communities of the 1860s, including political tensions in Colorado Territory between Union and Confederate sympathizers. One of the book's major takeaways is that local relationships between whites and Indians were not purely conflictual: there were people on both sides who tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to foster cooperation and coexistence. The book includes fascinating tidbits such as an 1861 meeting between Arapaho and Colorado leaders that culminated with them attending a play at a Denver theater. Kraft spotlights people who lived "in between," such as William Bent, who married Owl Woman (Cheyenne), and his biracial sons, Charley and George, who lived with the Cheyenne and witnessed Sand Creek. Kraft meticulously recreates the negotiations between government officials and Indian leaders; parsing the contemporary records, he identifies where negotiators' words were—tragically—mistranslated. There is a quirkiness to Kraft's writing style, with an overuse of colloquialisms, and occasions where the author abandons his role as detached historian and jarringly engages the reader directly. Kraft covers the various investigatory commissions following Sand Creek but does not discuss the reports' conclusions, making their detailed chronicling seem anticlimactic. One thing becomes clear after reading Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway: not only was the conflict between Plains Indians and the United States asymmetrical in terms of capacities, but it was also asymmetrical in intent. The Cheyenne and Arapaho wanted to maintain their way of life on some part of their traditional lands—and many were even willing to adapt to "white ways" on their land—whereas the US government and American settlers had no intention whatsoever of allowing that to happen; they wanted the land, and nothing would stop them from taking it. Pierre M. Atlas Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Copyright © 2022 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber

Reviewed by: The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber Thomas D. Hamm The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. By Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii + 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. The past two decades have seen a shift in the study of Native American history. Influenced by work done in other disciplines, and by the activism of Native American scholars, historians have increasingly turned to non-documentary sources, especially oral traditions. This is controversial, as an exchange in the April 2020 American Historical Review shows. But when done well, it produces excellent history. Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country is a prime example. Graber’s focus is the Kiowa people, who in 1800 lived and hunted over what are now the states of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Kiowas faced relentless pressure from white settlers, state and territorial governments, and the government in Washington to dispossess them of most of their lands and confine them to reservations. Graber sees spiritual practice as key to Kiowa resistance. Central was the Sun Dance, which the Kiowa had learned from the Crow and other Plains Indians. It acknowledged the centrality of the sun in Kiowa life and was a way of giving thanks for abundant buffalo, which were not only the center of the Kiowa diet but also of the Sun Dance’s rituals. In 1869, the Kiowas first encountered Quakers. The new administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a “peace policy” of attempting to “civilize” and assimilate Native Americans by turning administration of Indian agencies over to religious denominations. American churches answered this call enthusiastically. As Graber notes, since the early nineteenth century, many American Protestants had been what she calls “friends of the Indians,” critics of involuntary removal and dispossession and fraudulent treaties. They were fervent believers that Native Americans, if educated and Christianized, women introduced to habits of domesticity and men changed from hunters into farmers, could become assimilated into American society. Quakers had been involved in such projects since the 1790s, and both Hicksite and Gurneyite Friends accepted agencies. Gurneyites took responsibility for the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne through the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs (AECFIA). Friends Thomas C. Battey, James Haworth, and Lawrie Tatum, agents to the Kiowas, are central to Graber’s account of the 1870s. [End Page 89] Many Friends will find the portrayal of these Quaker Indian agents disturbing. While critical of white encroachment on Native lands, these Friends largely accepted government policies. They urged the Kiowas to remain on reservation lands, to give up the hunt and become farmers, and to send their children to school, including boarding schools that have gained such an evil reputation over the past generation. They viewed traditional Kiowa spirituality as ignorant paganism. Ultimately Friends supported the severalty policy that broke up tribal landholdings. While sympathetic to the Kiowas, Graber is candid. They were a warlike people for whom violent raids against other tribes and whites were a way of life. Kiowa prophets, claiming the ability to bring back the buffalo after 1870 or to turn aside enemy bullets with special spells or shields clearly failed. Graber notes divisions among American Friends. Since the Hicksite agency in Nebraska lies outside her focus on the Kiowa, she dismisses the theological disputes among Quakers as not crucial to her story. But many of the Gurneyite Friends involved in AECFIA were in the midst of a dramatic transformation of their own in the 1870s, laying the foundations of the pastoral system. That theology would lead them, unlike the Hicksites, toward a missionary impulse of their own that included Native Americans and has continued to the present day. This is a minor criticism. The Gods of Indian Country is engaging, widely researched, elegantly written, and convincing. Thomas D. Hamm Earlham College Copyright © 2021 Friends Historical Association

Emergence and Evolutions: Introducing Sign Language Sociolinguistics

Emergence and Evolutions:Introducing Sign Language Sociolinguistics Annelies Kusters (bio) and Ceil Lucas (bio) sign languages, rural sign language, village sign language, sociolinguistics, variation, multimodal The very nature of sign languages in society is such that all of the areas of sociolinguistics are relevant to their study (Schembri and Lucas 2015; Roy and Metzger 2014). Sign languages range from national ones such as American Sign Language (ASL; Supalla and Clark 2014); or rural sign languages such Adamorobe Sign Language used in Ghana and in many other communities, where members of a community, both hearing and deaf, use a sign language (Nyst 2007; Zeshan and de Vos 2012); to alternate sign languages (Kendon 1989) such as Plains Indian Sign Language used by the hearing speakers of mutually unintelligible Native American languages and sometimes used also by deaf members of these communities (Davis 2015). Sign languages that have emerged in differing contexts have been used on different scales too: rural sign languages are used locally, in wider language ecologies that feature the ample use of gesture (Branson et al. 1999); national sign languages, which mostly emerged in deaf schools and deaf families are widely used throughout countries and beyond national borders (e.g., in contexts of migration); and some sign languages are used around the world in international contexts, most notably American Sign Language (ASL) and International [End Page 320] Sign (Parks 2014; Parks and Kusters forthcoming). The geographical spread of sign languages has developed largely independently from that of spoken languages, and researchers have identified sign language families (Padden 2011). Sign sociolinguists have documented the varied social contexts of these sign languages, which emerged respectively in mostly deaf contexts (e.g., Palfreyman 2019), in mixed deaf/hearing contexts (e.g., Marsaja 2008), and in mostly hearing contexts (e.g., Kendon 1989), and have proposed accounts on how these contexts of use shape the structures of sign languages (e.g., Schembri et al. 2018; Ellis et al. 2019). Naturally, the sensory asymmetries between deaf and hearing people, and related sensory access to languages impacts on sign languages, their use, and conceptualizations of them (De Meulder et al. 2019). This is one crucial difference between sign language sociolinguistics and spoken language sociolinguistics, which we expand on below. In a Dialogue section of the Journal of Sociolinguistics (vol. 26, no. 1), author pairs introduce a number of themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, explore why these are debates; how the debates are situated within sociolinguistics as a whole; and how spoken language sociolinguistics does or does not have similar debates. In order to give authors room to think beyond established subject areas (such as "language contact" or "variationism"), we chose five titles that foreground and represent debates rather than subject areas: Geographies and Circulations; Lumping and Splitting; Hierarchies and Constellations; Classifications and Typologies; Natural and Elicited. These main themes and debates in sign language sociolinguistics, as well as main parallels and differences with spoken language sociolinguistics, are introduced below. Themes in Sign Language Sociolinguistics Sign languages do not exist in sociolinguistic vacuums—sign languages are used in contexts where spoken/written languages, and increasingly also other sign languages are in use. An increasing number of signers are fluent in multiple spoken/written and/or signed languages. In short, multilingualism as concerns deaf and hearing sign language users is an extremely rich topic for investigation (Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen 2004; [End Page 321] Zeshan and Webster 2020). Multilingualism of course is closely linked to language contact, with all of the phenomena attested in spoken language contact and bilingualism also seen in sign language situations, along with some unique ones related to the multimodal nature of sign languages and the sensory asymmetries between deaf and hearing signers. Examples of signed and spoken/written language contact include fingerspelling (i.e., the manual representation of a writing system which has been assimilated into the phonology of many sign languages), the (partial) mouthing of spoken words, codeblending (also called sign-speaking or code-mixing), and chaining (e.g., signing a concept and then fingerspelling it); (e.g., Bagga-Gupta 2000; Holmström and Schönström 2018; Lucas and Valli 1992; Tapio 2019). Adam and Braithwaite (2022...

Symbiotic Allegory as Innovative Indigenous Research Methodology.

This article introduces symbiotic allegory, an innovative research method designed by the researcher, an American Indian Chippewa. Symbiotic allegory incorporates traditional methods (storytelling, the Dream Catcher-Medicine Wheel, traditional grounding ceremonies) with Western interview methodology to evoke trust and candor among Plains Indians who had never voiced the traumatic stories of their childhood boarding school experiences. Implications reflect the importance of creating methodologies that incorporate the ways of knowing of the group being studied, which is best accomplished by a researcher who comes from within the ranks of the population being studied.

Pretty Shield's Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory

Pretty Shield's ThumbprintBody Politics in Paratextual Territory Amy Gore (bio) Over several cold March days in Montana, three friends gathered around a wood stove in an unused building on the Crow reservation. They met for more than pleasant reminiscing: from the start all three considered their conversation as an important means of cultural preservation for the Crow Nation. Frank B. Linderman, who had spent the last forty-six years of his life living in Montana and building relationships with Native peoples, took careful notes while he watched the hands of a Crow elder, Pretty Shield, as she shared her life's story through sign language.1 Linderman conversed fluently with Pretty Shield in Plains Indian sign language, yet to ward off any misinterpretation, Pretty Shield also spoke simultaneously in the Crow language while another Crow woman, Goes Together, translated into English for Linderman's added benefit. Although Linderman had spent a lifetime in Montana and had just published the memoir of another important Crow leader, Plenty Coups, he records this as the first extended conversation he had ever had with Native women. In the resulting text, Red Mother (1932), later renamed as Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, he writes of his desire to document "a woman's story" (16), a perspective that he regarded as underrepresented and undervalued in Native American autobiography.2 To correct the trend, Linderman directly and repeatedly requests a Native woman's perspective in his interview questions. As a result the book draws continual attention to the race and gender of Pretty Shield, not only throughout the text but also throughout the book's many paratextual elements, such as its cover images, illustrations, dedication, foreword, and title page. [End Page 167] As an ethnographic collaboration, Pretty-shield presents a two-body problem: as the non-Native recorder of a Native informant, to what extent did Linderman control, limit, or misrepresent Pretty Shield's life narrative? On the one hand, critics such as Stephanie Sellers question Linderman's qualifications, as a privileged white man immersed in Western culture, to chronicle the life of a Crow woman (79). Sellers devotes a chapter of her book to addressing her numerous critiques of the text, including instances of Linderman's ethnocentrism, his qualifications to write Pretty Shield's story as a cultural outsider, the absence of the Crow creation story, and Linderman's missed opportunities to "ask the right questions" about Crow culture (78–82). On the other hand, Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Sands compliment Linderman for embedding explanatory notes within the text rather than marginalizing them in an appendix, for maintaining Pretty Shield's achronological narrative of her life, and for recording her story with "sensitivity and insight" (45–46). As such debates demonstrate, the body politics of racial and gender identity and the role they play in Native autobiography lead one into a contentious intellectual hot spot in Native studies. Yet a recent shift in the field proposes a reexamination of Native American autobiography that restores attention to the Native subject as well as the non-Native ethnographer. As Michelle Raheja and Stephanie Fitzgerald argue, previous focus on the ethnographer's mediation "often obscured the Indian voice of the text and shifted the focus of the scholarship away from indigenous lived experience to that of the non-Indian editor" (1). Similarly, David Carlson protests readings of Native American autobiography for how "authentic" they may or may not be. He calls such approaches, following Robert Warrior, a "critical dead-end" and instead suggests readings of "how individual autobiographical acts can reveal a process of self-definition whose engine was engagement with legal models of Indianness in a highly charged communicative context" (14). Such a reframing, he suggests, considers Native autobiographies as "something more complex than capitulation to colonial power; they produced a vibrant tradition of Native American literary and political discourse that should be better appreciated today" (14). In all, their [End Page 168] scholarship advocates for a revisiting of as-told-to narratives and, rather than debate "whose text" we are reading, how "authentic" it may be, or in what ways the recorder falls short, that we more productively reconsider the complex instances of...

Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plainsed. by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B.

Reviewed by: Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plainsed. by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. William C. Meadows Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains. Edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2018. 422 pp. Illustrations, maps, references cited, index. $99.00, cloth. This book brings together several prominent Plains archaeologists to examine what is known regarding warfare of non- state Native American societies in the Great Plains. Their contributions are divided into four sections—an introduction to what is known about Great Plains warfare, emic views through Plains rock art and tribal pictographic calendars, fortifications as evidence of violence, and warfare in society and Plains history—followed by an afterword. This volume presents an excellent combination of qualitative and quantitative data from both excavation and documentary sources. Overall, combat victims appear in the archaeological record more often in the southern and northwestern portions of the Plains during the Woodland Period, while large scale violence is clearest in the northeastern portions of the Plains during the Plains Village Period. This work discusses the many causes of Plains warfare and the different ways in which Plains peoples went to war geographically and temporally, as well as examples of instances in which war did not occur. In presenting a deep history of warfare on the Plains, this volume demonstrates that factors of in-migration of new populations, extra-regional economies and interactions, fluctuations in material conditions, and social factors of belief and social status were all likely factors in Plains warfare and often related to ethnogenesis. While the presence of osteological evidence in post- and perimortem mutilation is often noted in archaeology, what it can tell us is often lacking. This work follows this direction with the presentation of new hypotheses for postmortem mutilation. Kendall's discussion of subtle differences in scalping victims at the Crow Creek Site, based on age and gender, raises important questions regarding factors of status and belief, even when difficult to address. Bleed and Scott employ approaches from military theorists in battlefield archaeology to examine two cases of United States–Cheyenne conflict. The inclusion of some ethnographic sources, old and recent, on the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Plains Apache, and Plains Indian military societies would better clarify the nature of these sodalities (343–45, 353–54), which extended back at least into the late 1700s, regarding variation in social organization, seasonality, functions, shifts from uni-society to mixed war parties among some groups, and the unique trajectory of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers as a tribal division. The varied role and uses of scalps, as well as sites such as Cutthroat Gap (1833), the Battle of the Washita (1868), and Massacre Canyon (1873), could also be more fully addressed. However, the larger patterns and new avenues of inquiry offer contributions for future work. This work is frank about the extent of our knowledge: "As we turn to these topics, we enter a domain where it is harder to say what we know and easier to say what we are not sure of" (25). Overall, this is a rich, broadly encompassing, and well-written volume that will be of great benefit for a wide range of Plains scholars; I believe it will become a seminal work in the field. William C. Meadows Department of Sociology-Anthropology Missouri State University Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language by Nimachia Howe

Reviewed by: Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language by Nimachia Howe Peter Bakker Retelling Trickster in Naapi’s Language. nimachia howe. Louisville, Colo.: Utah State University Press, an imprint of University Press of Colorado, 2019. Pp. xv + 161. Price: $22.95 (paper). The young Blackfoot scholar Nimachia Howe, curator and archivist in Montana, has published a remarkable study about the stories of the Blackfoot trickster Naapi. The language referred to in her title is, of course, Blackfoot, or Siksika as it is called by its speakers. (The nickname Blackfoot or Blackfeet supposedly comes from the fact that their moccasins were often black because they would walk in places where fires had burned the prairie grass.) “Language” here can probably also be interpreted metaphorically. According to the biographical blurb on the back cover, the author is “an Indigenous philosopher and educator who specializes in environmental philosophy and landscape literature.” With the word “language” in the title, a linguist would hope to get a linguistic analysis as well. The book is an intellectual tour de force. The author has studied all the available printed sources of trickster stories of the Blackfoot, and also manuscripts, as well as the analyses of them by indigenous and nonindigenous observers—scholars, missionaries, tribal leaders, and short-term visitors. The book is written in a decorative style, intellectual yet intelligible, accessible yet flowery. Her writing style is amazing, and her choice of vocabulary wide-ranging. I read her book with interest, pleasure, and awe for her broad knowledge and intelligent observations. As a linguist, however, I was somewhat disappointed. The four chapters of the book are rather abstract. The author states that the text was intended to be an introduction to an anthology of Blackfoot trickster stories. If one does not know the genre of trickster stories, I would recommend that readers start with the six-page appendix, which contains five brief trickster stories: Naapi flees his enemies, and changes himself into a rock that can still be seen; Naapi meets a woman, he ties a bell to her dress, and she helps him shoot bison, but later she discovers that he has no eyes; Naapi, when rejected by women, turns into a lone pine tree. Many of the stories are connected to certain locations, such as a place near Red Deer River where Naapi slid down a hill with his toboggan. One of the storytellers said, “Napioa [Naapi] is the Secondary Creator of the Indians. There are two kinds of stories told concerning him. One class reveals him in the character of a good man, and the other class as a bad man. He is not, however, a man, but a supernatural being, able to perform deeds which no human could perform” (p. 135). The first chapter deals with the language background as well as the semiotic background; the author connects the Blackfoot language with Plains Indian Sign Language and the meanings of animal tracks as signs. The second chapter deals with the name of the trickster, including the loss of a final syllable through time (as above: Napioa to Naapi). Chapter 3 deals with traditional and untraditional interpretations of Naapi stories, and chapter 4 provides a new view of the stories. Reading the book, one gets the impression that the author is privileged as an indigenous person, in that she better understands the deeper background of the trickster stories than an outsider would. She criticizes several approaches, and proposes her own complex analysis of the wider meaning of the stories. She has one foot in indigenous [End Page 192] philosophy, but she also has a good grasp of modern Western, perhaps also postmodern, science. On the one hand, she links the Naapi stories to similar narrations in other North American Indian traditions, most often of the Algonquian groups. A reader who does not know anything about the Blackfoot language, or Algonquian languages, or the diversity of languages of the world, will find that the remarks about Blackfoot in this book provide a very exotic image of the language. For a typologist, however, the exotic traits constitute just another solution among the range of structural and grammatical choices: special, yes, but far from unique. Blackfoot is...

Nación Genízara: Ethnogenesis, Place, and Identity in New Mexico ed. by Moises Gonzales and Enrique R. Lamadrid

Reviewed by: Nación Genízara: Ethnogenesis, Place, and Identity in New Mexico ed. by Moises Gonzales and Enrique R. Lamadrid Rob Martinez Nación Genízara: Ethnogenesis, Place, and Identity in New Mexico. Edited by Moises Gonzales and Enrique R. Lamadrid. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. 390. Illustrations, notes, index.) Nación Genízara is a compendium of essays on the Genízaro phenomenon and sheds much-needed light on one of the most fascinating and complex cultural themes in New Mexico history. A myriad of authors, including scholars, enthusiasts, and avocational historians, address the many questions about the detribalized Indians called Genízaros that have arisen over time. Constructed in the early 1700s, the term was applied to uniquely New Mexican people at the bottom of the frontier caste system that Spaniards devised to attempt to control the diverse peoples of the Spanish empire. No longer members of the tribes of their origins, and yet not completely Hispano, Genízaros occupied a cultural no man’s land wherein they were viewed with suspicion, yet relied upon for protection and guidance within terra incognito, the literal but unknown territories surrounding New Mexico. By the late eighteenth century, they made up a significant part of the local population, both in their own communities on the periphery of the New Mexican province, within Hispano communities, and even in the Pueblos. By the mid to late 1800s, with the advent of Mexican independence and then the U.S. occupation and annexation of New Mexico, the Genízaros had all but disappeared. Or had they? Moises Gonzales and Enrique Lamadrid are our guides through this historical labyrinth. Like any historical subject of substance, there are many perspectives and truths to be considered and confronted. And many are represented in this volume. Ramón Gutiérrez challenges the reader to be open to his “work of historical imagination” (80). He postulates the growth of the Genízaro population in the 1700s as having fueled the Penitente movement, which, he suggests, is a sign of Genízaro identity flourishing. Gutiérrez leads us to postulate about who the Genízaros were in relation to New Mexico’s cultural and historical development. Renowned Indo Hispano photographer Miguel Gandert takes the reader on a journey through Genízaro cultural memory with images of people and places that are both familiar and exotic. Susan Gandert provides a personal family history that reminds us how complex our genetic and biocultural histories are. She remembers her German and Hispano antecedents, then takes [End Page 90] the reader into the part of her family that is Genízaro, integral to making her the person she is today. Charlie Carillo challenges the notion of Genízaros as merely detribalized Plains Indians, and puts forth the idea of significant Puebloan contributions to the overall Genízaro experience. This adds more spice to the already diverse, even convoluted caldo, or stew, of New Mexican ethnicity in the 1700s. But hasn’t that always been the challenge? Who are we? What are we? Spanish, Mexican, Puebloan, Chicano, Indo Hispano, Latino. And now Genízaro. There are multiple definitions in the book of what being truly Genízaro means, and in some instances, the more we know the less we know. Reading each essay, one surmises that all of New Mexico was Genízaro by the end of the 1700s, that the whole province was a buffer between the expansionist British, French, and United States to the east and the Spanish mining districts to the south. Genízaros were outcasts in their communities and in that way New Mexico was a frontier that kept enemies at bay. It is doubtful Nación Genízara is the last word on such a fascinating subject, but for students of history and ethnic studies, it is an excellent place to start. Rob Martinez New Mexico State Historian Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Sex Differences in Diabetes Prevalence, Comorbidities, and Health Care Utilization among American Indians Living in the Northern Plains.

ABSTRACTBackgroundThe American Indian (AI) population experiences significant diet-related health disparities including diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Owing to the relatively small sample size of AIs, the population is rarely included in large national surveys such as the NHANES. This exclusion hinders efforts to characterize potentially important differences between AI men and women, track the costs of these disparities, and effectively treat and prevent these conditions.ObjectiveWe examined the sex differences in diabetes prevalence, comorbidity experience, health care utilization, and treatment costs among AIs within a Northern Plains Indian Health Service (IHS) service unit.MethodsWe assessed data from a sample of 11,144 persons using an IHS service unit in the Northern Plains region of the United States. Detailed analyses were conducted for adults (n = 7299) on prevalence of diabetes by age and sex. We described sex differences in comorbidities, health care utilization, and treatment costs among the adults with diabetes.ResultsIn our sample, adult men and women had a similar prevalence of diabetes (10.0% and 11.0%, respectively). The prevalence of CVD among men and women with diabetes was 45.7% and 34.0%, respectively. Among adults with diabetes, men had a statistically higher prevalence of hypertension and substance use disorders than women. The men were statistically less likely to have a non–substance use mental health disorder. Although men had higher utilization and costs for hospital inpatient services than women, the differences were not statistically significant.ConclusionsIn this AI population, there were differences in comorbidity profiles between adult men and women with diabetes, which have differential mortality and cost consequences. Appropriate diabetes management addressing gender-specific comorbidities, such as substance use disorders for men and non–substance use mental health disorders for women, may help reduce additional comorbidities or complications to diabetes.

Time's Arrow: Toward a Social History of Crow Biographic Art Using Seriation and Multivariate Statistics

ABSTRACTBiographic artworks produced by Historic‐period Plains Indian warriors can be viewed as genuine historical documents, detailing important events in their lives. This is especially true because these documents contain a genuinely narrative component, telling their stories as much as depicting them. However, for individual lives to create a broader social history, they must be connected with the lives of others, especially over a temporal span. Here, we begin the task of building a chronological framework for Crow (Apsáalooke) biographic artworks based on multivariate statistical analysis and seriation analysis of their content. Our research not only allows five undated artworks to be better placed in chronological context but also reveals the changing pattern of stylistic features in these artworks during the turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. [biographic art, Plains Indians, cultural traditions, Native American art]

The skulls and the dancing pig

In late 2017, protesting the ongoing forced slaughter of indigenous reindeer herds in Norway, a young Sami artist traveled to Oslo to set up a “curtain” of some 400 reindeer skulls in front of the national parliament. The demonstration drew considerable attention, both nationally and internationally, and mobilized a complex range of historical resonances—from the first Sami protests against the Alta hydroelectric project, half a century earlier, to the vast piles of bison skulls that accumulated during the US campaign against the Plains Indians in the 19th century. Situating the curtain in a context of chronic state violence, indigenous invisibility, and crisis biopolitics, the article examines the multiple apocalyptic logics summoned in the work.

Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection by Emma I. Hansen

Reviewed by: Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection by Emma I. Hansen Emily C. Burns Plains Indian Buffalo Cultures: Art from the Paul Dyck Collection. By Emma I. Hansen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. ix + 178 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95, paper. Joining an array of beautifully illustrated books that chart expansive private collections of American Indian art objects is Emma I. Hansen’s analysis of the Paul Dyck collection of about 2,000 objects, acquired in 2007 by the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. In the footsteps of his father, Dyck avidly pursued acquiring objects for his “Buffalo Culture Collection” over his lifetime, and also used his collection as inspiration for his own art-making. Hanson’s accessibly written and well researched volume presents a broad selection from this collection which largely comprises prereservation-era objects made by citizens of the Crow, Pawnee, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, [End Page 386] Shoshone, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, Dakota, Kiowa Comanche, Blackfoot, Otoe, Nez Perce, and other indigenous nations in the Great Plains. Hanson’s analysis simultaneously considers points of cultural overlap and shared artistic interests across these communities while flexibly allowing for occasional divergences and cultural specificity as appropriate, such as for beading techniques. She interweaves discussion of the lineage of Plains Indian art traditions with the adaptability of art production during the beginning of the reservation era. After a foreword by Oglala Lakota artist Arthur Amiotte, thematic chapters cover (1) the context of “Buffalo Culture” societies; (2) the material culture of warrior and hunting societies; (3) an analysis of a muslin painting of warrior life by Apsáalooke (Crow) painter Mee-nah-t-see-us (White Swan); (4) the role of women in Plains Indian art production; (5) the function of visual culture to bestow leadership and respect, both for men and women; (6) the relationship of art to horse culture in the Plains; and (7) the legacies of the Dyck collection, as well as a discussion of its occasional reservation-era artifacts, like ration cards and passports. The volume might do more to show the reciprocity between the details of the aesthetics of the objects and their histories, contexts, and uses, as well as framing the Dyck collection objects in a larger trajectory of Plains Indian art production. For example, how does Meenah-t-see-us’s depiction of himself as a warrior scout working with the Seventh Calvary in 1876 overlap with and distinguish itself from Lakota painter Mató Nájin’s (Standing Bear’s) depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.718.2)? Yet the volume is at its best in Hanson’s investments in indigenous voices in the textual as well as the visual by drawing a large percentage of its primary and secondary source material from indigenous accounts. Her project also draws welcome attention to the role of women in Plains Indian society, in a deep reading of their labor of producing art objects, in participating in ceremonies, and in developing societies for art production. For scholars of Native American art, spiritualities, and history as well as for the lay reader, this book blurs the boundaries between traditional and adapted art practices, in the process revealing the cultural layers of Plains Indian nations as well as their resilience. Emily C. Burns Department of Art and Art History Auburn University Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Evolution of a Poem: An Interview with Tiffany Midge

The Evolution of a PoemAn Interview with Tiffany Midge Tiffany Midge (bio) and Scott Andrews (bio) The following interview is taken from a series of e-mails I exchanged with award-winning poet Tiff any Midge (Standing Rock Sioux) in early 2018. I was intrigued by diff erent versions of her poem "The Woman Who Married a Bear," and I wanted to learn more about her process of revising it. I thought other readers and poets would be interested as well, especially since she has two books coming out in 2019: a collection of cultural criticism and humor titled Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's (University of Nebraska Press) and a chapbook of poetry titled Horns (Scabland Books). I first encountered "The Woman Who Married a Bear" in her 2005 book from Gazoobi Tales; a revised version appeared in her 2016 award-winning poetry collection from the University of New Mexico Press. I have included both versions here, with permission from and gratitude to the publishers. From Guiding the Stars to Their Campfires, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds (Gazoobi Tales, 2005) The Woman Who Married a Bear Alliances between animals and humans are common in many tribes' myths. They appear to be most popular in the North Pacific Coast tribes, where a whale takes a human wife, and among the Plains Indians whose legends often feature a buffalo or bear. —Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends [End Page 208] She had a lover whose eyes were black hooks,luring her heart into the marsh of his body—then dragging her out like a stained prize,a captive of his scars, his mother's blood. She wintered on berries and thin plums,drank a broth of maples and spruce,strung nets to snare the mice and snakes,while her lover groaned and slept. She had a lover whose fingers spun sticky webs,who wove her nerves around his throat like pearls—a necklace of fat spiders and grubs,moth wings fluttering against his skin. Mornings she melted anise and creamin an iron skillet over low flames.She gutted pale fish and split the fleshdangling from the bones like husks of fruit.Her lover rubbed against the current of her hips,howled in gratitude and ate. She had a lover whose voice pulled at the fragilecords coiled along her spine like a harp.Whose dreaming hands arranged the blackveil of her hair until it shimmered with music,each strand a tiny river of soundcombed between his claws. She scraped the rings of green melons,crushed pine needles and thick leaves,simmered the reeds and stems in summer grass—then braided a rug of feathers and strawfor her lover to rest upon while he smoked. She had a lover who spooned her body at night,who drank from the full cups of her breasts,who hungered for her shoulders, her mouth, her belly—who fed on the pounding in her chest. From The Woman Who Married a Bear (Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2016) [End Page 209] the woman who married a bear Alliances between animals and humans are common in many tribes' myths. They appear to be most popular in the North Pacific Coast tribes, where a whale takes a human wife, and among the Plains Indians whose legends often feature a buffalo or bear. —Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, American Indian Myths and Legends She had a lover whose eyes were black hooks that pierced her heart into the darkling of his body—then winched it out, a spent, stained prize, a captive of his scars, his mother's blood. She wintered on berries and thin plums, relied on the mercy of trees, their crafts—knitted traps to snare wood rats and grouse, while her husband groaned and slept. She had a lover whose fingers spun viscid webs, who wove his nerves around her throat—a necklace of swarm and teem, sorrow's breath, moth wings fluttering against her skin. Evenings, his voice edged the cords coiled along her spine like a harp. His dreaming handsarranged the dark veil of her...

Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman

Reviewed by: Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technologyby Brian Hochman Tisha Hooks (bio) Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology. By Brian Hochman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. 284. Paperback $27.50. The tension at the heart of Brian Hochman's Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technologyis the imperialist notion that declining indigenous cultures could only be conserved by Western intervention. Hochman argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small network of mostly white and mostly male ethnographers, employing the still inchoate technologies of the phonograph, photography, and later motion pictures, were essential to the establishment of these inventions as more than patent novelties. Rather, their deployment in the project of salvage ethnography helped these applications emerge as important tools of seemingly unbiased and accurate documentation that today are at the heart of the media's power to reproduce and perpetuate centuries-old notions of race. Savage Preservationopens with the efforts of John Wesley Powell, eventual head of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to invent ways to document the modes of communication of the indigenous peoples of the western United States. In 1877, Powell published Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages. In so doing, he hoped to ensure that they could be written into the historical record and reproduced for successive generations (though not necessarily by the indigenous peoples perceived to be on the verge of vanishing) as important remnants of Civilization writ large. Yet Powell, and later individuals like anthropologist Garrick Mallery, who worked on Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL), struggled to convey these complex language systems through the written word or illustrations alone. In these opening chapters, Hochman chronicles the limits and frustrations of early ethnographic methods, which made the burgeoning recording technologies like the phonograph and the camera appealing as more precise methodological alternatives. It is the latter chapters of Savage Preservation, however, that may resonate most profoundly for scholars of technology. In chapter 3, Hochman examines the role of the phonograph as an [End Page 328]instrument of "mechanical neutrality" in the face of the aural predilections of the ethnographer and the perceived and real reproduction limits of early wax recordings. It's impressive in its use of the work of novelist George Washington Cable, anthropologist Franz Boas, and the observations of British engineers William Henry Preece and Augustus Stroh. But it is chapter 4, with its stunning look at the 1926 film Moana: A Romance of the Golden Ageand the impetus behind the innovative use of panchromatic film stock by its creators Robert and Frances Flaherty (also responsible for Nanook of the North), and chapter 5, with its exploration of National Geographic's early use of the autochrome color photography process, where the technological, ethnographic, and imperialist notions of race synthesize so successfully. Hochman demonstrates how the conscious efforts of individuals like the Flahertys and Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the editor of National Geographic, to "accurately" reproduce highly-theorized constructions of racial hierarchy visually would inform the greater public imagination in the United States and around the world. Savage Preservationis a valuable addition to the history of technology for these chapters alone. That said, for scholars of the history of technology, the opening chapters of this volume may frustrate. They do lay out a very convincing case as to why these early ethnographers might look to new forms of documentation. Yet in the first two chapters of the book, Hochman doesn't clearly define what he means by technology. Is Sequoyah's Cherokee alphabet both a linguistic innovation and a technological one, for example? This question matters. How technology is defined, who has access to it, and the idea of invention as a "eureka moment" are also components of the larger construction of savage and civilized that Hochman is unpacking here. In addition, definitions of technology aside, the stakes of the argument remain relatively low—the construction of race in media, the question of salvaging vanishing cultures versus the notion of evolving cultures. Hochman does a wonderful job of tracing the ties that link a small but important matrix of scholars, civil servants, and media brokers...

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich

Reviewed by: Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich Lance R. Blyth (bio) Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867. By Andrew E. Masich. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 464. Paper, $26.95.) "From 1861 to 1867 the diverse peoples—Indian, Hispano, and Anglo—of the Southwest Borderlands struggled for survival and dominance in civil wars, quite apart from the Civil War of the Southern rebellion that raged in the eastern United States" (3). So begins Andrew E. Masich's Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, which examines the fighting in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico that took place from the start of the U.S. Civil War in 1861 to discharge of the last New Mexico volunteer in 1867. The Southwest Borderlands was a vast theater of war, the combatants, as I have noted elsewhere, far more peoples than armies. Masich's first chapter covers these peoples. He identifies some twenty-seven different native societies, speaking languages from six different groups. To the familiar roll of Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, Masich adds the Yumans (Quechans and Mojaves) and their antagonist Pima and Papago (Akimel and Tohono O'odham) neighbors. Other peoples included the Hispanos, ethnic Mexican U.S. citizens of New Mexico and Arizona; Anglos, non-Hispano U.S. citizens; and Mexicans of the border states of Sonora and Chihuahua. He notes that all the peoples of the Southwest Borderlands shared a "martial masculinity" in which men found violence a usable way to gain and maintain access to resources and, I would add, to reproductive opportunities (31). Thus "ethnic rivalries, competition for resources, and deeply rooted warrior traditions" underlay the fighting in the Southwest Borderlands (37). Masich then moves to the start of the Civil War, noting that it "created a great power vacuum" in the region with the withdrawal of federal troops and the diversion of local, state, and federal attention (38). Among those seeking to fill the absence were Chiricahua Apaches, who had clashed with the U.S. before 1861, particularly in what would become the territory of Arizona. As Texan forces prepared to seize the Southwest, California Volunteer regiments mobilized to stop them, leading to an Anglo invasion of the Southwest, with the Californians coming across the deserts from the west and the Texans from the east. The Texan invasion ultimately failed, foiled [End Page 319] by distance, logistics, and the intervention of the Colorado Volunteers in New Mexico, and the Texans retreated, leaving both the Southwest and the story. Masich then takes up the tale in 1863 with Christopher "Kit" Carson's campaigns against the Mescalero Apaches and Navajos and continuing campaigns in Arizona against the Western and Chiricahua Apaches. He notes that the fighting hardened into a series of retaliations by all sides, with Indian revenge falling hardest on the Hispano inhabitants. "By 1865," Masich writes, "the clashes over power and dominance among ethnic groups and nations had increased, and the level of violence had also risen" (197). Starting in 1864, as the U.S. Civil War was coming to an end, Plains Indians—Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas—attacked supply trains and settlers along the routes to Denver and into New Mexico. Campaigns to stop these raids resulted in the First Battle of Adobe Walls, where Carson was nearly defeated, and the massacre at Sand Creek. In Arizona, Pimas, Papagos, and Hispanos formed a multiethnic battalion to seek out Apaches, Yavapais, and Hualapais. Masich concludes that "the American Civil War had triggered multiple wars in the Southwest Borderlands during the 1860s," which "transformed the region's communities" (262). By 1867, Anglos were unquestioningly militarily, economically, and politically dominant in the Southwest, whereas in 1861 they had been one people among many. The greatest contribution of Masich's work is that we now have a single-volume history of the Southwest Borderlands during the Civil War from which other scholars may depart or disagree. In full disclosure, I made tentative attempts several years back at a similar project but failed to make any headway, so I applaud the accomplishment. Masich also adds extensive coverage of Arizona to the typically New Mexican focus of most works. He...

Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt

Reviewed by: Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt Matthew J. C. Cella Linda Ray Pratt, Great Plains Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2018. 168 pp. Paper, $14.95; e-book, $14.95. Linda Pratt's Great Plains Literature is the fourth offering from the University of Nebraska Press's "Discover the Great Plains" series, published in collaboration with the Center for Great Plains Studies. The series introduces a general audience to various facets of the cultural and natural complexity of the Great Plains through a collection of texts organized around key topics; for example, other titles in the series include Great Plains Indians (David J. Wishart), Great Plains Bison (Dan O'Brien), and Great Plains Geology (R. F. Diffendal Jr.). In this spirit, Pratt's book offers the reader an accessible and thoughtfully structured literary history of the region. Focused on close readings of a representative set of texts—just over a dozen writers are examined—Great Plains Literature does not offer an all-inclusive overview of the Plains literary tradition but instead highlights how twentieth-century Plains literature engages with the rich history and the distinctive natural parameters of the region. As Pratt explains in the introduction, the book explores "the legacy of that past as it plays out in a contemporary society that both wants to forget and remember" (13). In this manner Pratt charts the legacy of the bioregion by consulting literary texts that chronicle the succession of cultural and natural changes that have accrued in the region from the troubling frontier era to the urbanization and rural exodus that characterizes the present-day Plains. The book is organized around a chronological series of cultural shifts that shape the region's history. The introductory chapter lays out the boundaries of the bioregion and presents some descriptions of first encounters with the unique landscape as documented in the journals of explorers like Henry Kelsey, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. In the second chapter Pratt explores the Plains frontier from the Native American perspective as she examines works by Zitkala-Ša, Nicholas Black Elk (with John Neihardt), and N. Scott Momaday in order to document the impact of Euro American settlement on the Indigenous communities. Chapters 3 and 4 focus respectively on the works of O. E. Rölvaag and Willa Cather and their [End Page 502] novels about the pioneers who worked to convert the arid grasslands into ordered fields of grain. In the Rölvaag chapter Pratt highlights the process of acculturation and adaptation on the Plains, noting how his trilogy about the Plains pioneers—and especially the first book, Giants in the Earth—illustrates not only changes to the landscape wrought by agricultural development but also "how the immigrant becomes American" through this work (45); in the chapter on Cather she notes an increasingly elegiac tone in Cather's Nebraska fiction as her protagonists, especially Jim Burden in My Ántonia and Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady, must confront the end of the pioneer era and the passing of the Old West. The fifth chapter looks at the social and ecological upheaval of the Dust Bowl era as reflected in Lois Hudson's Bones of Plenty and Mari Sandoz's Capital City. In these works, Pratt traces a growing social consciousness as these two writers engage the declining status of the twentieth-century Plains farmer, noting that, as she says about Hudson's novel, "the farmer is getting an unfair deal and needs to fight back against the rich men, the banks, corporate interests, the railroads, the government, and anything else that is trying to run American agriculture" (89). This "unfair deal" is one of the factors contributing to the massive depopulation of the deep rural Plains and the movement to metropolitan centers on the region's edges. Chapter 6 focuses on this urbanization and industrialization in the region as reflected in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio, Meridel LeSeur's The Girl, and Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah; collectively, these novels expose the class- and race-based tensions that many citizens of the Plains—especially the disenfranchised—face in the city. In the final chapter Pratt looks at Ted Kooser's poetry, Kent Haruf...

Psychometric evaluation of depression measures with Northern Plains Indians.

Numerous psychometric measurements are used to assess for mental health problems in Native American and Alaskan Native (AI/AN) populations; however, few studies have been carried out to assess their validity and reliability within these populations. This study was designed to assess the validity and reliability of numerous measures among the Northern Plains Indians. This article is a partial report, focused on the psychometric measures directed at detecting depression, namely the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) II, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale, the Tri-Ethnic Depression Scale (TEDS), the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). Results revealed moderate to strong correlation across all measures, alpha coefficients that exceeded published alphas for the general population, and overall indicated their validity and reliability of these measures, and a 2-factor solution for the BDI-II. While there were limitations to the study, analysis of the results supports the use of each measure with the Northern Plains Indians (NPI) subpopulation, that the NPI subpopulation scored similar to the general population. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).