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Reviewed by:
  • Red Dirt Women: At Home on the Oklahoma Plains by Susan Kates
  • Elisabeth George
Red Dirt Women: At Home on the Oklahoma Plains. By Susan Kates. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 134pages. Paperback, $14.95.

Susan Kates has written a remarkable narrative charting her gradual acceptance of the Oklahoma plains as a place she now wholeheartedly calls home. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Kates examines how multiple ordinary women who live in the Great Plains region of Oklahoma have carved out their own spaces as early childhood educators, barrel racers, roller-derby skaters, and jewelry experts, to name but a few. Kates captivates her audience by shaping compelling oral history narratives around her own personal experiences and Oklahoman history to produce a nuanced story of life on the Oklahoma plains. In the process, Kates leaves the reader with a much more nuanced understanding of a state that may hold a certain reputation to outsiders as desolate, unforgiving, and a site of tragic indigenous history.

Rather than just weave interviews into a chronicle divorced from the experiences of both the narrators and author, Kates takes the reader with her to the places where she interviews women, some of whom have become her friends over the years. Kates fuses methodological practices found within anthropology and history, acting as both oral historian and ethnographer in order to intertwine the seemingly disparate voices of her narrators into one cohesive account. She is successful because she is not afraid to use some very personal details of her life, such as the “truly messy” process of the open adoption of her son, in order to highlight her connections to Oklahoma (11). As Kates illustrates, hers is but one woman’s journey in search of a place to call home. The reader very quickly discovers that through a semiautobiographical lens, Kates adeptly offers her audience a window into the larger and diverse set of people and practices one may encounter in Oklahoma. Upon reading the narrative, residents of Oklahoma will undoubtedly harbor feelings of pride, while nonresidents might gain a new understanding of the complex array of women who consider the expansive landscape to be their home.

Throughout the book Kates tackles Oklahoma’s historical legacy of migration as one part of the story, but certainly not all of it. She more than just mentions the connection between Oklahoma and “the forced relocation of more than 46,000 American Indians” (5). She devotes a chapter to exploring the existence of casinos in Oklahoma from the perspectives of those who frequent them, those who are employees, and indigenous tribal board members who manage them. Through her interviews, she discovers that “members of other tribal gaming commission boards” consider the Chickasaw Nation to be the “model”—they have created a “variety of social programs . . . for the Chickasaw community—many of them for women” (75, 76). And Kates found herself changed after interviewing employees and patrons of casinos: “I have compassion for the women I see in gaming houses—so much so that I cannot [End Page 454] judge the casinos as I once did when I first saw them looming on the horizon” (77).

Kates connects Oklahoma’s past to present-day narratives well, but she does so most poignantly in the chapter in which she tells the story of how Nhung Le Nguyen became the successful owner of a jewelry store that serves as Kates’s “personal Tiffany’s . . . called My Ngoc (‘Beautiful Jade’)” (104). Kates vividly presents Nguyen’s story of escaping Vietnam, living in a refugee camp in Malaysia with her children, and settling in Houston before moving to Oklahoma to start her own business. She juxtaposes Nguyen’s moving biography against her own move toward an antiwar stance in the 1970s as a fourth-grader upon viewing the coverage of the My Lai Massacre in Life magazine. Kates’s perspective as an outsider provides grounding through the entirety of the book, which is just as much about the women with whom she talks as it is about her own growing attachment to and admiration of the women who live on the Oklahoma plains.

As a former derby skater, I also found it interesting...

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