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Zusatztext ...She [Hansen] presents representative perspectives from both genders, and a range of ages and socioeconomic status. Her research is well documented, with helpful appendices and liberal notes and her sources. Hansen's conversational prose is well-suited to a wide range of audiences. Informationen zum Autor Karen V. Hansen is Professor of Sociology & Women's and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Not-So-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care and A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England Klappentext When Scandinavian immigrants and Dakota Indians lived side by side on a turn-of-the-century reservation, each struggled independently to preserve their language and culture. Despite this shared struggle, European settlers expanded their land ownership throughout the period while Native Americans were marginalized on the reservations intended for them. Karen Hansen captures this moment through distinctive, uniquely American voices. "I wish more scholars were as open as Karen Hansen in sharing the personal ties that draw them to their subject matter, and I'm so glad she followed the trail of her childhood curiosity. Her sensitive, multifaceted, gracefully written portrait of the interactions between Dakota Indians and Scandinavian immigrants-both peoples feeling far from their native lands-is fascinating. I'm not surprised she received a postcard from one of her interview subjects saying, 'Thanks for making our lives more interesting.' Readers of this book will feel the same."-Adam Hochschild, author of Bury theChains and To End All Wars "Most 'multicultural' histories fail to capture how different groups have mutually shaped the conditions for each other's existence. In marked contrast, this remarkable account offers a layered and nuanced understanding of how the lives of indigenous Dakotas and Norwegian immigrants were deeply intertwined. Both groups resisted prevailing pressures to assimilate, but the distinct ways they were racialized led to dramatically different outcomes."-Michael Omi, University of California, Berkeley "Karen V. Hansen's study links Scandinavian immigrant history and American Indian studies in ways never before attempted. Defined by federal acts, these cultures established parallel lives on the reservation across new and delicate ideas of landownership. Hansen evinces a profound sense of how stories contribute to a shared past, and Encounter on the Great Plains deserves a firm position in the canon of American Studies."-Oyvind T. Gulliksen, Telemark University College, Norway "A compelling account of the Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation, Encounter on the Great Plains narrates the interaction of massive Indian dispossession under the Dawes Act with the Homestead policy that drew land hungry Scandinavian immigrants West. Entangled with this place by her own family's past, Karen Hansen reconstructs an immensely complicated moment through th Zusammenfassung In 1904, Scandinavian settlers began moving onto the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. These land-hungry first and second generation immigrants struggled with poverty nearly as severe as that of their Dakota neighbors, often becoming sharecropping tenants of Dakota landowners. Yet the homesteaders' impoverishment did not impede native dispossession: by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than did Dakotas. In the words of one settler, who staked a claim with her widowed mother in 1905: "We stole the land from the Indians."Encounter on the Great Plains captures this encounter to bring together two key processes in American history: the unceasing migration of people to North America, and the protracted dispossession of indigenous peoples who inhabited the continent. Although this historical encounter at Spirit Lake took place in a small corner of eastern North Dakota, it encapsulates the story of conquest...
