Plains folklore offers yet another set of tensions that surround survival in the Great Plains region. Amanda Rees offers a sense of Plains folklife and the varying ways in which folklorists worked to understand the life of the folk. Native oral traditions span stories of the beginning time when the world was forming and of the beginnings of tribal society and the establishment of tribal traditions and codes of behavior. They also reveal heroes and traditional characters such as the trickster who in turn reveal relations between Native and immigrant populations and the impact of Euro‐American diseases such as smallpox. There are the stories of big men in a big country who work to tame the region to provide an abundance of agricultural, mining, or oil products. Big animals and big fauna are also characteristic of both nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century folklore narratives, as well as incredible roadside attractions that feature “the largest prairie dog in the world” or the “biggest pheasant in the world.” But it is in the small‐scale family‐oriented folklore often associated with objects such as quilts or charm strings that the transfer of regional folklore in contemporary society can be best identified, and these small but important items reveal stories of social relations between Native populations and immigrants or between young girls. The stories of local heroes and outlaws become powerful reminders of what Plains people choose to value and remember about their past. Occupational folklore is also an important part of understanding the ordinary lives of Plains folk, such as the traditions that surround how and who counts the cattle. Plains folklore reveals the ways in which early settlers made sense of the new environment they were in and, more recently, how ethnic traditions have developed into large‐scale folk celebrations in the region, such as the Czech festivals that dotted Nebraska in the mid‐twentieth century and the late‐twentieth‐century rise of Scottish folk celebrations in western South Dakota.
According to food geographer Barbara Shortridge, beef and pie distinguish Great Plains food traditions, traditions that support both the agricultural base and the region’s ethnic heritages. Foodways or traditions, Shortridge argues, reveal a high caloric intake to supply the needs of hardworking farmers, and this heritage still pervades food traditions today, though only a very small percentage of the region’s population is engaged in agriculture. Place‐specific dishes and their preparation are discussed, including such items as bierocks, chicken‐fried steak, and the Jell‐O salad, an often highly constructed molded gelatin salad that can be found at the Thanksgiving dinner table and on restaurant buffets. She reveals the secrets of the slow‐cooking tradition that underpin hot dishes such as casseroles incorporating such ingredients as condensed cream soup, ground beef, Tater Tot brand frozen potatoes, or perhaps tuna, rice, or noodles. Regional ethnic traditions are revealed from the pan‐Indian tradition of fry bread to the Czech kolache. Shortridge shares her research on Plains foodways. Having asked Great Plains residents to provide a hypothetical menu for a meal that represents their part of the state and that they would serve to out‐of‐town guests, Shortridge presents a tour of a Plains dinner table with beef, starches, vegetables, salads, dessert, and beverage that offers a thoughtful sense of what people eat on the Plains and why.
The discussion by Pamela Innes of regional linguistics opens a window onto the health of Native American languages, the effects of languages on the culture in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Old World and recently introduced languages are faring. In the contemporary Great Plains, there are nine major Native language families, with multiple languages within most of these families, and Innes characterizes those families and languages that are thriving, those that are close to extinct, and the language programs at work in revitalizing language traditions. Innes explores the movement and influence of languages from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and East, Southeast, and South Asia. She concludes with a discussion of Black English Vernacular in the region and the rich and subtle subregional varieties of English spoken on the Plains.
