Project MUSE®: Great Plains Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Great Plains Quarterly.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 34 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: Great Plains QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Great Plains Quarterly2333-50920275-7664Latest articles in Great Plains Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Kanza Chief White Plume: Path to Power
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978375
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Although of Osage origin, White Plume was the most consequential chief of the Kanza (or Kaw) people during the early nineteenth century.1 He is often considered to be the individual most responsible for ceding much of the Kanza homeland to the United States in 1825. How could an individual recognized in one tribe give away the homelands of another? In this article, we attempt to answer this question by examining White Plume and the context of his life in the Lower Missouri and Kansas River region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a dynamic period of interactions among Native peoples and representatives of foreign powers, namely the French, Spanish, and Americans. As a young man
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallKanza Chief White Plume: Path to Power2025-12-18text/htmlen-USKanza Chief White Plume: Path to Power2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®1795312026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Gabriel Dumont’s Political Activism: Building Alliances through Cultural Capital
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978376
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Born in 1837, Gabriel Dumont lived during the golden age of being Métis,1 rulers of the buffalo hunt on their homeland that spread across the Northwest. Dumont lived the buffalo hunt life, marrying Madeleine Wilkie (daughter of buffalo hunt chief Jean Baptiste Wilkie), and was elected as hunt chief, a position of leadership and respect within his community. During his lifetime he played an important part in Métis nation building and political mobilization: as a representative of his people in the signing of the 1862 Dakota Sioux Treaty, as a witness at the signing of Numbered Treaty 6 (1876), and frequent interaction with Canadian government agents.2 As buffalo numbers waned, Dumont’s hunt brigade elected to create
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallGabriel Dumont’s Political Activism: Building Alliances through Cultural Capital2025-12-18text/htmlen-USGabriel Dumont’s Political Activism: Building Alliances through Cultural Capital2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®1475772026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18“When Will This End and We Can Go on Living?”: Remembering the Great War through a Kansas Woman’s Letters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978377
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On September 11, 1918, Helen Reynolds wrote another of her thrice-weekly letters to her husband, Albert, who served as a soldier with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in the trenches in France. Compared to her other letters, Helen wrote less about her day-to-day activities and more about how the war affected the community. She wrote about the severe lack of men available to help harvest the fall crops and how she loathed attending student sing-alongs at the local high school where she worked as a replacement teacher because too many of the songs were about the war, which made her melancholy.1 Helen mixed these home-front vignettes with personal topics found more typically in other letters: family happenings
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmall“When Will This End and We Can Go on Living?”: Remembering the Great War through a Kansas Woman’s Letters2025-12-18text/htmlen-US“When Will This End and We Can Go on Living?”: Remembering the Great War through a Kansas Woman’s Letters2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®899172026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18A Qualitative Study of Nebraska Teachers’ Experiences during COVID-19: Implications for Teacher Burnout
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978378
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Teacher shortages and teacher burnout have increasingly become a part of the national conversation in education. The ability of states to deliver high quality instruction to K-12 students is contingent upon the availability of trained teachers with appropriate education, credentials, and certifications. Unfortunately, teacher shortages are a growing problem nationally and in Nebraska,1 leaving many students at risk for compromised educational outcomes.Teacher attrition and shortages in the teaching workforce represent a significant financial burden to districts, with costs associated with advertising, recruitment, and training of new teachers quickly adding up.2 Teacher attrition cost estimates vary considerably by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallA Qualitative Study of Nebraska Teachers’ Experiences during COVID-19: Implications for Teacher Burnout2025-12-18text/htmlen-USA Qualitative Study of Nebraska Teachers’ Experiences during COVID-19: Implications for Teacher Burnout2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®729182026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alex Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978379
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This new anthology put together by Alex Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde is not a routine compilation—quite the opposite. The editors do begin by saying regions are important in American life—they matter and ought to be discussed; they should be mapped, although they overlap and coexist; they represent dissent within the federal framework of nation. The editors assemble authors, however, who are “questioning the canonical regions in US history” (xvii). Much of the scholarship on region is too hidebound to stay abreast of dynamic change and subjective treatment of region. Something needs to be done: “Regional identification,” say the editors, “is ripe for historical analysis because it is so pertinent to collective and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallReconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alex Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USReconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism ed. by Alex Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®55112026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978380
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American Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland reframes the death and burials of settlers who moved across the Overland Trail as vital to the decades of America’s expansion in the West. Sarah Keyes, historian and curator at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, successfully argues that the white settlers who received their burials on the trail represented a cultural purchasing of the West and contributed to Indigenous dispossession. Through the inclusion of an analysis of Indigenous death and burial rituals on land surrounding the trail, Keyes maintains that the trail’s pathways were not solely white. Keyes touches on topics including Indigenous relocation, cholera, and burial practices.Keyes examines the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallAmerican Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USAmerican Burial Ground: A New History of the Overland Trail by Sarah Keyes (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®50012026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo by Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978381
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Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield’s Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo presents a comprehensive exploration of the history and cultural significance of gay rodeo, charting its development from the 1970s to the present with particular attention to the Great Plains and Western regions of the United States. The authors establish gay rodeo as both a site of resistance to dominant heterosexual and hypermasculine rodeo traditions and as a space for community formation within the LGBTQ+ population. However, the early chapters of the text suffer from a degree of repetitiveness, which may hinder reader engagement and limit the effectiveness of the initial framing.Through the incorporation of personal narratives
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallSlapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo by Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USSlapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo by Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®43482026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18To Educate American Indians: Selected Writings from the National Educational Association’s Department of Indian Education, 1900–1904 ed. by Larry C. Skogen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978382
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As we look back to the boarding and residential schools that tried to “civilize” Native children but so often mostly traumatized them, we wonder, of the teachers and administrators and matrons and other workers, “What in the world did they think they were doing?” Larry Skogen has found and meticulously annotated thirty-four papers given by “Indian Educators” (i.e., white people who worked to educate Native children) at National Educational Association conferences from 1900 to 1904. Although the focus is on the whole United States West, the papers include schools on and students from the Great Plains.The papers illustrate the division between the “assimilationists” (like Richard Henry Pratt) and the “progressives”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallTo Educate American Indians: Selected Writings from the National Educational Association’s Department of Indian Education, 1900–1904 ed. by Larry C. Skogen (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USTo Educate American Indians: Selected Writings from the National Educational Association’s Department of Indian Education, 1900–1904 ed. by Larry C. Skogen (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®54612026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978383
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Posited as a companion to their documentary, The American Buffalo, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan wrote Blood Memory as a biography of the bison to supplant a dated narrative of Manifest Destiny: that American territorial expansion arrived at no cost. To accomplish this, Burns and Duncan attempted to center “the long, beautiful relationship between Native peoples and the buffalo, punctuated dramatically by the arrival of Europeans and the carnage they inflicted on both.” Their “complex narrative” reveals how a “pernicious mythology” overlooked the lives and freedom of both Indigenous peoples and the buffalo (xii).Organized chronologically, Blood Memory spans a vast swath of time, from 20,000 years ago to the present.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallBlood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USBlood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®50472026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Indigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas ed. by Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978384
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In the anthology Indigenous Borderlands, Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez gathered a multinational and multidisciplinary cohort to unveil lesser-known cases of Indigenous power in the Western hemisphere from 1492 to the early twentieth century. It is thus an excellent addition to the historiography of Indigenous resilience in the face of colonialism.Rivaya-Martínez defines Indigenous borderlands as a geographic and ideological space where no one entity can exert full control, á la Richard White’s The Middle Ground, but one where “independent or semiautonomous native peoples exert(ed) considerable power . . . and remain[ed] paramount agents of historical transformation after the European intrusion” (3). Rivaya-Martínez opens
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallIndigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas ed. by Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USIndigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas ed. by Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®54732026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Disturbing the Sleeping Buffalo: 23 Unexpected Stories that Awaken Montana’s Past by Sally Thompson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978385
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Anthropologist and cultural historian Sally Thompson has collected twenty-three wide-ranging stories about Montana in Disturbing the Sleeping Buffalo: 23 Unexpected Stories that Awaken Montana’s Past. The book is divided into five parts: Overland Journeys, Northwest Montana, Buffalo Commons, Clark Fork Basin, and Rocky Mountain Front. The tales are accompanied by historic photos, sketches, and manuscripts as well as what she terms “Story Maps” that accompany the essays. Although the work includes well-documented endnotes and a comprehensive index that underscore Thompson’s lifetime of scholarly research and field experience, she is most importantly an enthusiastic storyteller. Her preface, “An Ear to the Ground:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallDisturbing the Sleeping Buffalo: 23 Unexpected Stories that Awaken Montana’s Past by Sally Thompson (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USDisturbing the Sleeping Buffalo: 23 Unexpected Stories that Awaken Montana’s Past by Sally Thompson (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®51382026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18The Gold Rush (Black Hills History Tours) by David A. Wolff (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978386
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The Black Hills of South Dakota are famous for their historic gold rushes and vibrant modern tourism industry. In The Gold Rush (Black Hills History Tours), David A. Wolff combines these topics and takes readers on an expansive tour that spans both the northern and southern Black Hills. As the first in a potential series of tour guides for the region, Wolff succeeds in crafting a focused exploration of the mining industry in the Black Hills.For ease of use, the expansive tour is broken down into fifteen parts, each accompanied by a map and a detailed itinerary. These itineraries invite readers to explore cultural and historic sites that are integral to understanding the region’s mining history.Each part of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallThe Gold Rush (Black Hills History Tours) by David A. Wolff (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USThe Gold Rush (Black Hills History Tours) by David A. Wolff (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®48712026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978387
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I can hear the rhythmic gallop of a horse, the frontier hero, the borderland brigand: the Texas Ranger approaches. Where are they coming from? What direction are they headed? Tracking the Texas Ranger Historians maps the trails of Texas Ranger scholarship throughout history from romanticized accounts of heroic exploits in the West to nuanced interpretations of the colonialist imperatives of the Texas Rangers. By exploring the historiography of the Texas Rangers, Bruce Glasrud and Harold Weiss Jr. contribute valuable scholarship that contextualizes histories of law enforcement in the Great Plains.Historiographical analysis examines how historians have interpreted and written about a particular historical subject
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallTracking the Texas Ranger Historians ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USTracking the Texas Ranger Historians ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss Jr (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®51332026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978388
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Tensions between the small problem of the title and the broad promise of the subtitle mark every page of Kliph Nesteroff ’s loving account of contemporary Native comic performers’ aspirations, frustrations, and triumphs. The title comes from the tag line used by Charlie Hill (Oneida, 1951–2013), the most important stand-up comedian white Americans have never heard of, and a powerful role model for today’s Indigenous comedians: the first Native stand-up to regale audiences at the Comedy Store, appear with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, write for a network sitcom, and headline a series of TV comedy specials, most notably Showtime’s American Indian Comedy Slam (2009). Hill’s signature quip—“My people are from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallWe Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USWe Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®70032026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18Old Trails and New Roads in South Dakota History. ed. by Jon K. Lauck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978389
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Jon K. Lauck’s Old Trails and New Roads in South Dakota History gathers thirteen essays that reexamine South Dakota’s past, offering fresh perspectives on Indigenous agency, political movements, environmental challenges, and cultural identity. Lauck and his contributors challenge conventional narratives—arguing that South Dakota’s history is not a linear march of progress—but rather an evolving negotiation of power, place, and people. This collection engages readers in a broader dialogue about how regional history intersects with national and global developments, though certain thematic gaps suggest avenues for further inquiry.The volume’s central argument lies in its emphasis on South Dakota’s dynamism. Pekka
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/627/image/coversmallOld Trails and New Roads in South Dakota History. ed. by Jon K. Lauck (review)2025-12-18text/htmlen-USOld Trails and New Roads in South Dakota History. ed. by Jon K. Lauck (review)2025-12-182025TWOProject MUSE®55132026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002025-12-18