Programs | South Dakota Book Bag
South Dakota Book Bag
With funding from the South Dakota Humanities Council, three South Dakota State University professors and John Miller, Professor of History emeritus, SDSU, wrote twenty-one study guides for books by South Dakota authors or with a South Dakota theme to be used with the book bags. Each study guide is three or four pages long and includes a summary of the book, questions for discussion, and a brief biography of the author.
Nicholas Black Elk, as told through John G. Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932, reprint Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.
This is a classic account of the last decades of the Lakota Sioux in western South Dakota before the end of the Indian wars in 1890. The book is based upon extensive interviews conducted by scholar John G. Neihardt. Black Elk (1863-1950), a Oglala Lakota holy man and a Catholic convert who witnessed the Battle of the Little Big Horn, was wounded at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and was a member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show when it traveled in England, tells his own story and that of his compatriots in this hugely important (and controversial) narrative.
Tom Brokaw, A Long Way From Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland. New York: Random House, 2002.
Brokaw, long-time NBC Nightly News anchor, narrates the story of his boyhood in Bristol, Igloo, Pickstown, Yankton, and Vermillion up to the time of his graduation from college in 1962. In the process of learning about an “All-American boy” who was athletic, popular, smart but not always studious, ambitious, and active, the reader also discovers a great deal about the context of small-town South Dakota during a hugely important transitional period—post-World War II America.
Peter Carrels. Uphill against Water: The Great Dakota Water War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Aberdeen journalist Peter Carrels has written a fascinating account about the rise and fall of the Oahe Irrigation Project during the 1970s. An irrigation plan to transport water by a series of canals from the Missouri River to the James River Valley as compensation for the loss of 500,000 acres of prime bottomland when the main-stem dams were built after World War II, the project had the support of virtually every prominent political group and office-holder, regardless of party. But a determined collection of farmers, scientists, and journalists finally derailed the hugely controversial project by showing that it made little economic or ecological sense.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. The Power of Horses and Other Stories. New York: Arcade Publishing. Little, Brown & Company, 1990.
Cook-Lynn, an enrolled member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, became one of the leading Indian Studies scholars in the world with her teaching and writing. Her storytelling is at its best in this collection of short stories, which together provide a panoramic picture of her Dakota people and their struggles to adapt to changing times and often tragic circumstances. An especially accessible and engaging text, this book constitutes an important part of the history of the plains.
Ella Deloria. Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Deloria (1888-1971), who was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation and whose Dakota name was Anpetu Waste, studied cultural anthropology at Columbia in New York City under the famed scholar Franz Boas. These stories, reflecting her training as an anthropologist, provide a lucid analysis of kinship relationships among the Dakota Sioux, but, just as importantly, they present fundamental ethical lessons that are applicable to all people at all times. Waterlily remains an enduring masterpiece of the real Dakota life.
Gilbert C. Fite. Peter Norbeck: Prairie Statesman. 1948, reprint Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2005.
Fite (b. 1918), one of America’s finest agricultural historians, grew up in Wessington Springs, received his master’s degree in history at the University of South Dakota, and maintained ties with his native state until his death in 2010. His biography of Peter Norbeck, one of South Dakota’s two or three most important governors, stands among the best biographies ever written about a South Dakota politician. Norbeck’s career as state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, and U.S. Senator from 1909 to 1936 spanned the progressive period, World War I, and the New Deal.
Hamlin Garland. Main-Travelled Roads. 1891, reprint New York: New American Library, 1962.
Garland (1860-1940) stands as one of the most acclaimed and respected writers about rural America in U.S. history. Born on a farm near La Crosse, Wisconsin, he grew up on homesteads in Iowa and near Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, before leaving for Boston in his early twenties to pursue a literary career. The original stories constituting Main-Travelled Roads were inspired by a visit home when he was in his late twenties. Chronicling the day-to-day lives and emotions of prairie settlers in the region, these stories rocketed him to literary fame in 1891 and remain his foremost fictional legacy.
Linda M. Hasselstrom. Going Over East: Reflections of a Woman Rancher. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, Inc., 1987.
Poet and essayist Linda Hasselstrom (b. 1943) has become nationally known for her evocative descriptions of the ranching life and small town milieu in western South Dakota. This volume, organized around a trip which took her in and out of twelve gates on the land east of her ranch home near Hermosa, provides everyday—and often profound—reflections on what it means to be a rancher, a woman, an environmentalist, a citizen, and a neighbor. Topics include agriculture, corporate behavior, the vagaries of weather, values like frugality, community, memory, history, privacy, story-telling, names, water, politics, time, efficiency, technology, and junk.
Patrick Hicks, ed. A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry. Sioux Falls: The Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, 2010.
In this collection put together by Patrick Hicks, a poet and writer-in-residence at Augustana College, a dozen of South Dakota’s best poets—Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Leo Dangel, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Jeanne Emmons, David Allen Evans, Linda Hasselstrom, Allison Hedge Coke, Patrick Hicks, Debra Nystrom, Jim Reese, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Dennis Sampson, Christine Stewart-Nunez, and Lydia Whirlwind Soldier—put some of their best work on display. This is the most important such collection of South Dakota poetry published in years.
Edith Eudora Kohl. Land of the Burnt Thigh. 1938, reprint St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986.
This sprightly autobiographical account of a woman homesteader in West River, South Dakota, near Presho between 1907 and 1909 provides one of the best and most readable accounts of such activity ever written. Edith Ammons, only 23 years old, arrived with her older sister Ida Mary during the third major wave of frontier settlement in Dakota (the first two occurring between 1865 and 1873 and between 1878 and 1886). This is a story of homesteading, newspapering, confronting drought and weather hazards, establishing community and family life, setting up stores and business institutions, small towns, economic boom and bust, and the general excitement, challenges, and sometimes heartbreak of the frontier experience.
Frederick Manfred, The Golden Bowl. 1944, reprint Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
Written under the pen name of Feike Feikema, The Golden Bowl—Manfred’s first novel—established his reputation as a regional author and remains perhaps the best of his almost two-dozen novels. Based upon his own hitch-hiking journey across South Dakota in 1934, after graduating from college, the book narrates the story of Maury Grant who is a “tumbling tumbleweed,” always looking for a job on the distant horizon until he settles down to establish roots on the land in the area just east of the Badlands. Similar in tone to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Manfred’s dust bowl saga stands as one of the most iconic books ever written about South Dakota life and culture.
Jack W. Marken and Charles L. Woodard, ed. Shaping Survival: Essays by Four American Indian Tribal Women. Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
In four illuminating essays, women writers discuss the bi-cultural educations of tribal people in South Dakota, each written from a different geographical, tribal, and experiential perspective. Education at every level, from elementary to university, and in various venues, from reservation schools to public schools and boarding schools, is made understandable and emotionally resonant. The stories are inspirational accounts of survival and ultimately, therefore, pathways to light.
Kent Meyers, The Work of Wolves. New York and London: Harcourt, Inc., 2004.
Meyers, an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer, grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota and is a long-time professor of English at Black Hills State University. With The Work of Wolves and the more recently published Twisted Tree, he has emerged as one of the region’s most acclaimed writers. Set in West River South Dakota, this novel features memorable and evocative settings, excellent characterizations, interesting and engaging conflicts, dramatic action, and a believable and satisfying conclusion.
Oscar Micheaux. The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. 1913, reprint Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
This semi-autobiographical novel of a black homesteader in Gregory County during the early 1900s provides a compelling story of individual bravery and creativity, the last frontier of settlement, the rise and fall of small towns, business competition, weather disasters, unrequited love, and social interaction. Micheaux, who grew up in southern Illinois and worked out of Chicago as a sleeping-car porter, made the unusual decision to become a black homesteader in South Dakota. His fiction-writing career morphed into film-making, and he emerged as the first great black film-maker in United States history.
John E. Miller. Looking for History on Highway 14. 1993, reprint Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2001.
In this engaging volume, a long-time professor of history at South Dakota State University provides a “historical-journalistic travelogue” along Highway 14 in South Dakota from the Minnesota border to Wall, where the highway merges with I-90, with a final chapter on Mount Rushmore, which originated with an idea presented at a meeting of the highway association in 1924. Not a history of the towns per se, this book highlights a variety of methods and sources for doing local history: buildings and material culture, transportation routes, fiction, biography, historical accounts, art, photography, rituals and celebrations, “tourist traps,” and oral history.
Paula M. Nelson. The Prairie Winnows Out Its Own: The West River Country of South Dakota in the Years of Depression and Dust. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996.
This, the second of two volumes about the historical development of West River South Dakota during the early twentieth century, provides a hugely interesting and instructive explanation of the economic and environmental cycles of the twenties and thirties and people’s efforts—both successful and unsuccessful—to respond to these imposing challenges. Nelson, a professor of history in Wisconsin, is highly qualified to discuss agricultural practices, economic developments, weather and environmental hazards, town life, social and cultural practices, and political negotiation. This is one of the best historical accounts ever written about South Dakota.
Kathleen Norris. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993.
No book about Dakota life and culture written during the last several decades has generated more interest outside the state and region than Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Norris’s literary friends in New York thought she was crazy in 1974 to move out to Lemmon, South Dakota, where her family had roots and she inherited a house after her grandmother’s death. Staying longer than she had anticipated, Norris wrote a book casting a bright light upon Dakota life and culture, ranging from religion, values, social interaction, and group behavior to weather, gossip, economic dependence, and the importance of place.
Dorothy Hubbard Schwieder. Growing Up with the Town: Family and Community on the Great Plains. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.
The town is Presho and the families were the Hubbards and the Andersons. The family the author grew up in consisted of ten children, of whom she was the ninth. Born in 1933, she relies on local histories, newspaper accounts, interviews, and other evidence to describe the early history of the town. For the period during which she was growing up, the 1940s and 1950s, she is more reliant upon her own memories and those of her nine siblings. Her father ran a farm machinery store on Main Street, and all of the kids worked there for a time, so Dorothy got to see the working of the town from the inside. This is a compelling account of a single family and life in a small town, as it moved into the modern era.
Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve. The Trickster and the Troll. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.
Sneve, born and raised on the Rosebud Reservation, is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Medalist Award from the President of the United States. Her 25 books and many short stories and essays provide a wide-ranging picture of Indian life and culture in the state and region. The Trickster and the Troll, written especially for young people, is a book for people of all ages. Sneve adds imaginative plotting to well-known stories about the Lakota trickster figure Iktomi and Norwegian trolls and other myth figures to create a very thought-provoking narrative.
David A. Wolff. Seth Bullock: Black Hills Lawman. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2009.
David Wolff, a professor of history at Black Hills State University, draws upon his vast knowledge of the Black Hills region and intensive research in the historical sources to write a fascinating and highly readable account of Deadwood’s first sheriff, a legendary figure of the gold-mining era. The author cuts through the legends and myths surrounding Bullock to draw a detailed and multi-faceted account of his many activities in the business realm, politics, law enforcement, town boosterism, tourism promotion, and family matters. A much more complex figure than is generally known, Bullock became a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, which gave him an inside track on several of his appointments.
Charles L. Woodard, ed. Peril and Promise: Essays on Community in South Dakota and Beyond. Brookings: South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum, 2007.
“Community” is one of the most salient and significant topics of interest for any caring South Dakotan. This volume is the result of a unique collaboration of a dozen SDSU professors and several other writers and academics who gathered together to write a series of essays about the subject. Disciplinary perspectives involved include literature, history, philosophy, sociology, political science, biology, Indian studies, and education. Poetry selections include one by a former poet laureate of the United States. A photographic essay enhances the volume, and an annotated list of 56 books for further reading provides, in effect, an entire curriculum for the deeper study of the subject.