Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma 1962–1972 by Sarah E. Janda (review)

Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma 1962–1972 is a narrative of Janda's research on the student activism found in states like Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, but it also included Oklahoma and Texas. Often the movements within these states were left out of the dominant literature on student activism during this timeframe and focused more on the movements on both the east and west coasts. This book seeks to provide a narrative and perspective on the prairie power movement in Oklahoma. Janda organizes the text into six chapters. She begins by providing context to the student discontent in Oklahoma. Then, in Chapter 2, she discusses free speech and the making of activists. In Chapter 3, Janda turns to the discussion of the emergence of antiwar demonstrations and the advent of the Sooner CIA. She transitions in Chapter 4 to the Jones family's grandchildren and localization of national dissent. She addresses local politics in Chapter 5, and lastly, in Chapter 6, Janda discusses Hippie Oklahoma and the retreat of authenticity.

Janda begins Prairie Power by providing an understanding of how socialism was a part of Oklahoma's history. The alternative newspaper, Home Cookin', and its two-year presence in Oklahoma is also a central feature. Home Cookin' was the most widely distributed among the many alternative newspapers in the state. She also discusses when one of the first underground college student newspapers began in 1962 and the uprising of college student protests and demonstrations on civil rights, free speech, ending in loco parentis policies and the Vietnam War. Janda also writes about the surveillance of six thousand organizations and individuals between 1968 and 1970 by the FBI, the state, campus security, and a secret organization created by the governor at the time. Finally, she returns to alternative newspapers and their importance in the state. Like social media today, these newspapers provided outlets for people to learn more about what was going on outside of the status quo and conservativism that guided mainstream Oklahoma politics and business.

I read this book and reviewed it with a critical lens in connection to the 2018 Association of Higher Education's annual meeting theme, "Envisioning the 'Woke' Academy." As I read, I also thought about my own roots in Oklahoma, whose name has a Choctaw meaning "Okla humma" meaning red people, and how my tribal affiliation is one of the thirty-nine federally recognized tribes here. I am a citizen of the Kiowa or Caigu people. I am critiquing this book as it is a representation of ten years of activism that mainly focuses on the hippie movement and the Student Democratic Society (SDS) in Oklahoma. I must be critical that since this is written from a historian perspective it would seem foundational to have provided a cursory overview of the history of Oklahoma. This would have been pertinent to understand that though the state itself was not founded until 1909 that prior to its founding it was Indian territory where most tribes who are currently housed here were forcefully removed from their homelands. Moreover, after these relocations, there were groups of settler boomers and sooners who came to be a part of the 1889 land run that opened most of the remaining Indian territory to White settlers. The boomers were settlers who campaigned for the lands to be taken from the tribal peoples who were already there. The sooners were those settlers who [End Page E-12] were land thieves, occupying the land before it was federally opened up to White settlements.

Why is this history important to include? To write about the political and troubling conservative history of Oklahoma, one would recognize that in Stillwater, Oklahoma where Oklahoma State University (OSU) sits there is a claim to recognize the White settlement of this city as the beginning of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. In addition, there...