August Book of the Month
Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Cloud
By Renya Ramirez
Details: American Indian Studies/ Social Activism/ Anishinaabeg / Ho-Chunk
Publisher: University of Nebraska-Press, 2018
Standing Up to Colonial Power focuses on the lives, activism, and intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884–1950), Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), Ojibwe, both of whom grew up amid settler colonialism that attempted to break their connection to Native land, treaty rights, and tribal identities. Elizabeth fought against termination as part of her role in the National Congress of American Indians and General Federation of Women’s Clubs, while Henry was one of the most important Native policy makers of the early twentieth century. He documented the horrible abuse within the federal boarding schools and co-wrote the Meriam Report of 1928, which laid the foundation for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
Standing Up to Colonial Power shows how the Clouds combined Native warrior and modern identities as a creative strategy to challenge settler colonialism, to become full members of the U.S. nation-state, and to fight for tribal sovereignty. Henry Cloud grew up on the Winnebago reservation in Nebraska, and Renya Ramirez uses her dual position as a scholar and as the granddaughter of Elizabeth and Henry Cloud to weave together this ethnography and family-tribal history.
“Ramirez pulls from archives and personal letters to give us a full picture of her grandparents' activist work, including the contradictions, at a time when Indian activism was virtually unheard of.”
—Mark Anthony Rolo, Progressive Magazine
Past Great Plains Books of the Month:
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, Dan Flores
A Chorus of Cranes: The Cranes of North America and the World, Paul Johnsgard
Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, Karen Hansen
Wild Again: The Struggle to Save the Black-Footed Ferret, David Jachowski
A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Inequality to Become America's First Indian Doctor, Joe Starita
Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before the Oil Boom, Richard Edwards
Towards a Prairie Atonement, Trevor Herriot
Walking the Llano, Shelley Armitage
Barnstorming the Prairie, Jason Weems
Homesteading the Plains, Richard Edwards, Rebecca Wingo, Jacob Friefeld
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867-2017, Edited by Daniel Simon
This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, Ted Genoways
Grasses of the Great Plains, By James Stubbendieck, Stephan L. Hatch, Cheryl D. Dunn
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, Ann Weisgarber
The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–1899: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle by Wendy Katz
Jewels of the Plains: Wildflowers of the Great Plains Grasslands and Hills by Claude Barr and James Locklear
Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America's Grasslands Since 1945 by David Vail
Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakota, 1886-1916 by Harvey Markowitz
The Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland by Walter Echo-Hawk
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.
Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West by Larry Len Peterson
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden Rensink
Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps
Visions of the Tallgrass: Prairie Photographs by Harvey Payne
Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin by Todd Kerstetter
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber
Pacing Dakota by Thomas Dean Isern
Theodore Roosevelt & Bison Restoration on the Great Plains by Keith Aune and Glenn Plumb
American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World by David Baron
Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp
Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend
The Chisholm Trail: Joseph McCoy's Great Gamble by James Sherow
First Americans: US Patriotism in Indian Country After World War I by Thomas Grillot
A Thirsty Land by Seamus McGraw
Keetsahnak/Our Missing And Murdered Indigenous Sisters by Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt, eds.
Forty Acres and a Fool: How to Live in the Country and Still Keep Your Sanity by Roger Welsch
Perfectly Golden: Adaptable Recipes for Sweet and Simple Treats by Angela Garbacz
Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen by Bob Greene
Wilber "Bullet" Rogan and the Kansas City Monarchs by Phil S. Dixon