Great Plains Indians

David J. Wishart, Great Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.147 pages. ISBN 978-0-8032-6962-0. $14.95 USD paperback.Scholarly and commercial publishers alike are experimenting with what call books-inexpensive, small-format books, often incorporated into series, for the general reader. Leading off the Discover the Great Plains series for University of Nebraska Press is Great Indians, by geographer Davijl J. Wishart. Wishart is well-known as a scholar of Great studies. Many of his previous publications have dealt with American Indian life.The author undertakes to survey, and to an extent interpret, the history and of Native peoples on the American plains. This raises the question of audience, to which the answer is evident. Wishart writes to the settler society, on a need-to-know basis. He does not go for flash. He supplies the pertinent background and subject content that settler citizens of the Great should acquire to live alongside their tribal neighbors.There are notable absences from the work's chapters. Wishart gives little attention to anthropology, ethnology, or cultural history. He does nothing with art, and the only mention of literature is a passing reference to Black Elk. Words such as powwow, rodeo, and drum group do not appear. Governance, either traditional or constitutional, also gets a pass. Gender receives passing attention.What, then, does Wishart write about? He begins with the archeological record in a chapter that spans from earliest human occupation to the coming of smallpox in 1779-83. Here he strives to correct an orientalist timelessness with a dose of agency. Native during this span was characterized more by continuity than by change, but there was change, which accelerated greatly with the arrival of Europeans. were not just helpless victims of this process, Wishart writes, they were also opportunists, taking advantage of new possibilities (16).The narrative pauses around 1803 to consider the textures of life before were torn and frayed (59) by EuroAmerican pressures. There is a good discussion of territories -that is, how the peoples of the plains used and asserted control of land. Wishart appreciates the Natives' agricultural expertise, notes their aptitude for trade, and critiques the romantic ideal of Indians as ecological models. He perhaps over-emphasizes their conception of time as cyclical rather than linear.Surprisingly, his discussion of dispossession contains almost no military history. Sitting Bull appears but once in the index, Custer not at all. …

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