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The collision of Indian and European cultures created new relationships all across the Great Plains. Native peoples responded to the European presence by redefining their worldviews to include outside ideas and materials. Many tribes not only survived the early impact but also managed to thrive as the result of it. Initially, both the Omaha and Pawnee peoples reimagined their own potentials and expanded their horizons and spheres of influence. As time progressed, however, they encountered fluctuating power structures and wholesale assaults on the "Indian way." Ultimately, between first contact and 1808, both cultures experienced profound economic, political, social, and demographic upheavals that irrevocably transformed their traditional customs and ways of living.

In 1742 two sons of the explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Verendrye met an indigenous nation they called the Gens de l'Arc somewhere along the middle Missouri River near present-day Pierre, South Dakota. Louis-Joseph and Francois were searching for the mythical Sea of the West, and the former asked the chief of the Gens de l'Arc if he "knew the white people of the seacoast." The chief replied that "[t]he French who are on the seacoast are numerous" and have "many chiefs for the soldiers, and also many chiefs for prayer." The chief was most likely describing an event that had occurred over twenty years earlier: the destruction of the Villasur Expedition on the banks of the Platte and Loup rivers in present-day Nebraska. It was the last expedition of its kind until fears of Zebulon Pike inspired another Spanish march to the northeast. In 1720 Pedro de Villasur led forty-five Spaniards and sixty Pueblo auxiliaries out of Santa Fe to win Indian allies and to gauge the French presence in the Great Plains. Pawnee Indians, perhaps with the help of a few French traders, destroyed the expedition near the confluence of the Platte and Loup rivers, leaving only fourteen survivors to report back to Santa Fe.

Eighty-six Cheyenne families followed Little Wolf to his self-imposed exile near Rosebud Creek. To most observers, this blind loyalty to a fallen leader required little explanation. After all, Little Wolf had recently led his people in a costly yet courageous escape from Indian Territory, fighting through the dead of winter back to the Northern Cheyenne's ancestral Montana homeland, and in the process attained a cultlike status. When this small community soon prospered to the point that just four years later President Chester Arthur declared a Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the specific area surrounding Little Wolf's exile, the amazing story of the resilient and defiant Northern Cheyenne seemed complete. Little Wolf had guided his people through the harrowing escape back to Montana, and his final act of violence dictated the specific location of their federally sanctioned home.

Soon after its inception the camera became the primary vehicle for producing images of Native Americans. Without question, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century images of Native Americans have been integral in forming the stereotypical ideal of "Indian." For many imaginations, these images have frozen North America's indigenous people, not only in a timeless past but, in essence, "outside" time. This essay examines photographic images that illustrate this phenomenon and some that dismantle it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932 signaled a mandate for sweeping reform at the federal level to lift the nation out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) joined other agencies in launching policies to rebuild economic stability. Much of the scholarship on the Indian New Deal to date necessarily focuses on the centerpiece of Collier's reform efforts: the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA). But prior to tribal consideration of the IRA, the Roosevelt administration undertook a series of steps in an attempt to mitigate the most dramatic losses experienced by individuals in rural America. These early short-term relief measures played an important role in Native American perception of Collier's larger efforts. Study of these measures also provides important lessons for scholars to use in evaluating the positive and negative effects of the Indian New Deal in its entirety.

In the late 1920s, Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw began documenting daily life in southwestern Oklahoma with the camera. As Poolaw began making dramatically posed, narrative-rich portraits of family members, historian Lewis Mumford asserted that the modern individual now viewed him or herself "as a public character, "being watched"" by others. He further suggested that humankind developed a "camera-eye" way of looking at the world and at oneself as if continuously on display. Among Native Americans this sense of constantly posing for a camera--usually an outsider's camera--was certainly not a new development in 1930. Comanche writer Paul Chaat Smith compares the influence of cameras and Colt revolvers on Native peoples: "If one machine nearly wiped us out... another gave us immortality." Certainly, the invention of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851) impacted Native Americans' sense of self. The same could be said of motion pictures. In Smith's words, "We starred in scores of movies. The movies gave us international fame. Without them, Comanches would be an obscure chapter in Texas history books. With them, we live forever."

Many Indians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century commodified aspects of their cultures in order to make a living and sometimes present their identities, history, and artworks in ways that were satisfying to them. Ten vintage postcards from the Oklahoma Historical Society by Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-1984) indicate that he recognized popular tastes for Plains Indian male imagery while both participating in that production and working independently of it. Poolaw printed some of his photographs on postcard stock to sell at local fairs in the early to mid twentieth century. In order for the postcards to appeal to the greatest number of consumers, he had to compose his images and select subject matter that fit into common visual assumptions and expectations of Indian identity, such as the "chief."

The life of Edwin James (1797-1861) is bookended by the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803-6) and the Civil War (1861-65). James's work engaged key national concerns of western exploration, natural history, Native American relocation, and slavery. His principled stands for preservation of lands and animals in the Trans-Mississippi West and his opposition to Indian relocation should be celebrated today, yet his legacy does not fit neatly into established literary or historical categories.

The Battle of Platte Bridge, July 26, 1865, is a noteworthy event in the annals of the American Indian Wars. An alliance of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapahoe, numbering in excess of 2,000 warriors, traveled three days to a specific military objective, an undertaking unusual both in terms of its magnitude and its level of organization. The battle, which occurred near present-day Casper, Wyoming, is also of interest because we have a detailed description of the event written from the Native American viewpoint. This description comes in the form of a number of letters written to George Hyde by Southern Cheyenne George Bent.

Eunice Woodhull Stabler. Eunice Stabler, or Thataweson , meaning "Pale Woman of the Bird Clan," was born in 1885 on the Omaha Reservation in northeastern Nebraska. During a period of continued transitions and federal assimilation efforts directed at the Omaha people--and Indigenous people throughout the United States--Stabler remained inherently rooted in her Omaha heritage and lifeways. A product of the U.S. Indian boarding school experience, Stabler was propelled into a world and way of living that was drastically different from that which surrounded her on the Omaha Reservation the first twelve years of her life. Thousands of Indian children during the late 1800s and into the 1900s endured the United States' assimilation policies in attending federal boarding schools. Such institutions forced these children into traumatic experiences that included rules against speaking their tribal languages, cutting of hair, removal of Indian clothing and cultural practices, and even sexual and physical abuse. Many departed from these institutions only to struggle with identifying their roles within American society "and" their tribal societies. Some pupils returned to their homes, abandoned the instruction they were forced to learn, and reoriented themselves with their ancestral ways. However, other youths found it difficult to return home at all, for in many instances they had lost a connection with their tribal traditions, languages, and identities.

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an "entrada" from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where, among other activities, they strangled their principal Indian guide, a man they called El Turco. The author focuses on the events leading up to and including the execution of this Indian guide. Although Coronado, his chroniclers, and modern historians have tended to take the killing of this guide for granted, the violence was far from straightforward. Indeed, the expeditionaries' actions were embedded in sixteenth-century Spanish culture, a milieu that can still reward study by historians of the Great Plains. Working within this context, the author explores the ways in which Aesop, the classical master of the fable, may have informed the Spaniards' actions on the Kansas plains.

This article lays out U.S. Indian policy in the Great Plains during the twenty-five years after the Civil War by examining chronologically specific "players" that shaped and reshaped that policy: the U.S. Army, the President and Interior Department, Congress, religious organizations, whites in the Indian reform movement, settlers surging west, railroads, and the native nations of the Great Plains, particularly the Lakota. Into the narrative of this changing policy the experiences of the Eastmans are interjected, marked in italics, to illustrate how this changing colonial policy affected those being colonized.

The Pecos River of the nineteenth century, unlike its faint twenty-first century shadow, was a formidable watercourse. The river stretches some 755 miles, from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe to its eventual merger with the Rio Grande. Control over the public domain of southeastern New Mexico came from controlling access to the Pecos, its tributaries and springs. In the arid environment of New Mexico's Pecos Valley, corporate accumulation of land through manipulation of federal land laws followed the removal of Native Americans, the displacement of Mexican American communities, and the departure of major players in the cattle industry of the American West. The purpose of this article is to reveal some of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century speculative impulses for harnessing water.

As a literary work initiated and directed by a committee of women, the "Pageant of Paha Sapa" captures the zeitgeist of the post-frontier era through the eyes of the influential women of one small town. Like all origin myths, this script presented the current populace as the rightful heirs of the place and its resources, having won them through persistence, struggle, and divinely ordained destiny. The pageant's message was that "civilizing" influences had transformed the former Indian paradise and frontier hell-on-wheels into a respectable modern community. This theme of social evolution was typical of the larger pageant movement; however, unlike the eastern towns, Custer, South Dakota, could not draw on its past for moral authority. The town began as a mining camp, with the rootlessness and disorder of any western gold rush town, compounded by conflicts with Indians trying to drive the white trespassers from their reservation lands.

Most historians have focused their attention on two elements about the restoration of the American bison: western ranchers who started the earliest private herds and eastern conservationists who raised funds and lobbied for the creation of the first national preserves. However, no one was a more effective popularizer than William F. Cody, despite his belief that bison neither could nor would recover. Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" exposed millions of North Americans and Europeans to live buffalo; it provided a market for fledgling buffalo ranchers; and, to a lesser degree, the "Wild West" raised awareness of the precariously low population of American bison. Buffalo Bill Cody is not the first name that comes to mind when one considers preservation of the American bison, primarily because he is best known for killing them.

Plains Indian cultures have left numerous forms of Native drawings in the form of painted and drawn clothing, robes, tipis and tipi liners, shields and shield covers, calendars, ledger books, religious and historical drawings, and maps. Native drawings of geographic features are distinguished from other forms of drawings by their focus on the concept of territory rather than on occasional individual features such as a hill or river. Native maps predate European contact and are recorded for every major region of North America. Although most extant Native maps are from the Plains and Arctic regions and date to the nineteenth century, others range from 1540 to 1869. Nearly every major North American explorer through the late nineteenth century used geographic information and/or maps obtained from Native inhabitants of their respective areas.

Among every known people, places are named, and in every known place, stories are told. Yet the meanings of the place and the variety of stories attached to it can derive from a variety of traditions and can lead in many different directions. Just as various pilgrims are drawn to some sacred places, so do all people, in all places, come to know the meanings of at least some places through names, with the stories about them capturing their deeper significance, from the sacred to the mundane. Yet names for places change, stories about them get revised, discarded, or created anew. At times, this variation can be a source of stress and strain, as a single place can be identified in different ways, each with its own story to tell, with each story advancing different ways of living there. This article examines how the two communication practices of place-naming and storytelling work together to create senses of place, including ways of living within a particular geographic landscape--Glacier National Park.

By 1879 the vast buffalo herds were all but gone from the Great Plains. Many of the remaining animals had moved south from the Milk River of northern Montana and Alberta into the Judith Basin of central Montana. In these rich grasslands, for a few more years, life went on as it had for centuries. Following the buffalo came many Indian bands, as well as Metis who had been hunting on the Milk River for decades. A buffalo-based economy had brought prosperity to the Native people of the Plains. The animals provided essential food and materials in addition to products for trade. For Metis people, buffalo had replaced beaver as the backbone of their fur trade economy. Their production of robes for the eastern markets and pemmican for the Hudson's Bay and American fur companies provided the economic base of a growing number of communities spreading westward from the Red River of Manitoba, Minnesota, and North Dakota, including the Spring Creek settlement (Lewistown), where Metis descendants still live today.

During treaty negotiations with federal Indian agents in 1851, Taoyateduta (Little Crow), a Dakota representative, warned that the council members would "talk of nothing else" until conflicts related to the previous Treaty of 1837 had been resolved. His statement is surprising, given that government officials at the time, as well as subsequent historians, have interpreted the Treaty of 1837 as an uncontroversial, even positive, event for both the Dakota and the federal government. Instead, Taoyateduta's words illustrate the continued Dakota disillusionment and anger with the document, close to fifteen years after the Treaty of 1837 went into effect. Nearly thirty years ago, anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson called for ethnohistorians to study Native interpretations of historical events.

This article chronicles LaDonna Harris's experiences with the media, the public, and government leaders as she rose from humble origins in the Great Plains to national prominence as a leading advocate of Native American rights in the latter half of the twentieth century. Harris helped to integrate Lawton, Oklahoma, in the early 1960s, founded Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity (OIO) in 1965, and established Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) in 1970.

Nebraska's Indian population exploded in the summer of 1898, but it was not due to natural increase. More than 500 Indians representing twenty-three tribes came to Omaha as part of the United States Indian Bureau's exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. During their three-month stay at the world's fair, Indians engaged in dancing, feasting, visiting, and earned money performing sham battles. In doing so they demonstrated not only the vibrancy and resilience of Native American cultures, but also the ineffectiveness of the government's assimilation policy. The Indian Bureau had $40,000 to spend to show the public how education was "civilizing" Native Americans. Instead, the Bureau sponsored an enormous intertribal powwow and Wild West show that directly contradicted its own policies. This essay demonstrates that Indians not only negotiated the terms on which they came to Omaha but also played a major role in determining what activities they would participate in once they arrived.

Memorializing history in the landscape reflects deep-seated cultural needs. This process not only pays homage to the actions, events, or persons deemed significant at a particular point in time, but it also offers a chance for the creators of the historic marker to write their version of history and to use an interpretive format that highlights their understanding and values. The significance of selecting historical interpretations for commemoration plays a key role in shaping social memory.

Sacred and cultural geography is a universal feature of indigenous religious practices across Native North America. However, in a growing number of cases, conflicts have developed between Native North American religious practitioners and land-managing federal agencies. The contentious situations often come down to Indian peoples struggling to reassert their religious rights within an environment of "due process, federal and state statutes, and administrative policies." Here we take a case study, the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, and examine the problem of weighing a value system based on inextricably associating a spiritual world and physical geography against a system that inherently separates the two.

During the 1840s and 1850s, more than 300,000 traders and overland emigrants followed the Platte and Arkansas rivers westward across the Central Plains, the winter habitat of the bison. By the mid-1870s indigenous peoples at both ends of the grasslands, in places such as the Texas Panhandle and the upper Missouri River valley, fiercely defended the dwindling herds in an attempt to avoid starvation. The Indians' predicament was not theirs alone, however, as Native efforts at self-preservation posed a significant threat to Euro-American plans for the frontier. To that end, government officials on the peripheries of the Great Plains developed a remarkably similar strategy: the use of mounted constabularies to pacify indigenous peoples. Few scholars have situated the efforts of these constabularies within the context of the rapidly changing conditions for Indians on the Great Plains after 1865.

The U.S. has regulated liquor sales and consumption among Native Americans from the beginning of the republic until 1953. Forms of regulation have included fines and imprisonment for selling alcohol in Indian country, for introducing alcohol into Indian country, and for drinking alcohol if you were an Indian.

Benedictine men and women brought with them centuries of experience as learners and teachers, and they shared their educative way of life as well as their schools with Native peoples and European immigrants. In turn, the land and peoples of the Great Plains have contributed to the evolution of Benedictine monastic life in North America.

The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, terminated in 1965 and restored to federally recognized status in 1990, is exploring the limits of self-governance, economic development opportunities, and cultural revitalization initiatives. The Ponca recognize they have experienced profound cultural loss over the past three centuries, yet the definition of what it means to be Ponca has never been lost.

Popular images of the Great Plains frequently portray horse-mounted Indians engaged in dramatic bison hunts. The importance of these hunts is emphasized by the oft-mentioned dependence of the Plains Indians on bison. This animal served as a source of not only food but also materials for shelter, clothing, containers, and many other necessities of life. Archeological studies have shown that bison hunting was key to the survival of Paleoindian peoples of the Plains as early as 11,000 years ago.

In 1867, in an effort to avoid the high costs of war and protect overland transportation routes, Congress passed a bill authorizing a commission to establish peace with the Plains Indians. Despite signing treaties with a number of plains and western tribes, Congress failed to fulfill the treaty stipulations, and instead of initiating an era of peace, the commission commenced a decade of war and bloodshed throughout the Plains.

The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) represented a culmination of frustration felt by Native Americans. The news media mocked the occupation and minimized the seriousness of the event. However, the historical significance of the Native American occupation of Wounded Knee, as well as the ensuing trail, which was viewed as a major civil rights case for Native Americans, justifies their rhetorical analysis and augments understanding of the American Indian protest movement.

Efforts to ban the "Little House on the Prairie" series because of racist depictions of American Indians seem a knee-jerk reaction to a complex text. Teachers can use the books to develop an appreciation of American Indians and their history and to promote understanding of the disparate and conflicting attitudes of the nation when the books were written. (TD)

As Lewis and Clark moved west across the North American continent, their contact with Native informants revealed spatial and topographic concepts at variance with their own "scientific" methods of cartography. The explorers' failure to understand and integrate Native patterns of geographical knowledge resulted in long detours where shorter easier Native trails were available. Contains references in extensive notes. (SV)

In the 1700s, the Spaniards of New Mexico ransomed captive Plains Indians enslaved by other tribes, named them "genizaros," and absorbed them into Pueblo-Spanish society. After working off their ransoms, the genizaros became farmers or craftsmen and served as defenders against and traders with Indians. Contains 55 references. (SV)

There are at least 2,000 silver nitrate negatives in the Horace Poolaw collection, and as many stories to go along with them. If you begin to talk about one image, it leads from that story to the next, and the next, and pretty soon two or three hours have gone by. Rather than discussing in detail the images in the Horace Poolaw collection, the author discusses Horace Poolaw the man--a complex yet loving individual who was much more than just a photographer--whose influence helped shape the author's life.

I argue that women were integral to the success of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition held in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1898. Women were the planners, organizers, workers, and bodies exploited and displayed throughout the fair. This article adds to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition scholarship by writing women into the narrative when the focus has historically been on the male organizers and the impressive Indian Congress held at the fair. Much of the analysis focuses on the Rinehart photo collection to reconstruct women’s roles at the fair. World’s fairs were cultural havens for exploring a region, society, and even a nation’s identity. The Trans-Mississippi Exposition’s mission was to celebrate the “conquest and civilization” of the West at an integral time in Great Plains history. Women were vital to the settlement of the area, and to this particular encapsulation of that settlement through the fair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prolific writing of Nebraska author Mari Sandoz evolved through her rigorous routine of producing multiple drafts and scrutinizing the work of editors and publishers. She faced multiple challenges throughout her career, made more difficult by her health and cancer diagnoses. While Sandoz fought this illness during the last two years of her life, she also worked tirelessly to complete her last projects. This included The Battle of the Little Bighorn, published posthumously in 1966. Sandoz's niece traveled to New York City to assist her with draft revisions of the manuscript and later reflected on her aunt Mari's endurance through painful treatments. This essay offers insight into the battles Sandoz endured during her final months of writing the history of the Great Plains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the events of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition held in Omaha, Nebraska on November 1, 1898. Topics include the transformation of the meatpacking and agricultural centers of the city into a European utopia, the design of the city's fairgrounds inspired by the design and layout of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago, Illinnois, and the issuance of an official guidebook of the exposition to promote the event.

The article discusses the history of the establishment and dissolution of the Delaware Reservation in Kansas from 1829 to 1869. Topics discussed include the relocation of Delaware Indians to the reservation according to the Treaty of 1829, the formation of Christian Indians on the reservation, and the removal of Delaware Indians from Kansas. Also mentioned are the status of the Delaware Tribe as a landless tribe in Oklahoma and the tribe's fight to restore a land-based presence.

The article discusses Vietnam war and mentions African American troops in the war. Topics discussed includes Native Americans and Mexican Americans troops in the war, African American soldiers in World War I and II and historical biographies. Other topics such as cultural expectations and patriotism are also discussed.

The article focuses on the conflict between Native Americans and white Coloradans known as the Sand Creek Massacre, which took place in 1864. The author explores the religious aspects of the Massacre, particularly Methodism and the idea of manifest destiny, examines how the U.S. Civil War influenced the violence, and discusses the role of Colorado territorial governor John Evans.