Plains writers, poets, novelists, and nonfiction authors reveal a rich tension between a romantic belief in community and a profound sense of endless potential wasted against natural and cultural environments. From early exploration journals and migrant diaries to present‐day accounts, Stacy Coyle argues that the landscape, the biology, and the botany of the place have dominated Plains writing, with a particular focus on the grasses that seem to create a feeling of being at sea. Coyle explores a strong sense of impermanence that pervades the region and refers to poet William Stafford’s image of a phone call to a farm on the Great Plains. He reaches someone, but that person is the last tenant in the region. Coyle concludes by articulating what she sees as a pervading sense of pessimism about the region’s survival and a sense that this may indeed be the last generation in the region.
The Great Plains is rich in both musical traditions and the hybridization of musical traditions, and Paula Conlon, Addie deHilster, and T. Chris Aplin nod to traditions and hybridizations in their examination of regional Great Plains music. They move from Native music and dance to polka, jazz, country and western, bluegrass, rock and popular, and classical music. Perhaps one of the more telling examples of hybridization, the mixing of genres in unique and interesting ways, can be found in polka music, which was brought to the region by eastern European immigrants and made famous in the American popular consciousness through the work of Lawrence Welk and his mid‐twentieth‐century television programs. The region embraced very specific “country‐of‐origin” styles such as polkas by Slovenian, Czech, German, and Polish performers. Mexican and Mexican American musicians in nineteenth‐century Texas then embraced these traditions. The Tejano style mixed Mexican instruments with the accordion (a traditional European instrument) and German and Czech songs. The Tejano tradition then spread north into the Plains.
The Great Plains is one of the most churched regions in the United States, with 60 percent of residents claiming membership in a religious group and attending church regularly. Steve Foulke reveals that one of the most important issues that shapes Plains religious practices is the declining rural population. Foulke explores Native American religious history, as well as the complexity of Christian traditions that spread across the region and the more urban non‐Christian traditions located in the metropolitan peripheries of the region. Foulke’s work ranges from the impact of the region’s largest religious denomination, Catholicism, claimed by a third of the population, to the smallest Anabaptist strains, the Hutterites and Amish, who retain distinctive religious and cultural traditions in the Dakotas and Kansas, respectively. Foulke concludes with a discussion of the rise of megachurches in such communities as Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, and Oklahoma City whose enormous congregations of up to 10,000 people contrast dramatically with the decrease in the Plains rural population, the aging in place of that declining population, and the struggle to locate clergy, all of which present an enduring challenge to parish life in the region.
“Sports for sports sake” is the Great Plains sports philosophy according to Thomas Wikle and John Rooney Jr. In contrast to urban areas, rural Plains schools have small enrollments and provide opportunities for most interested students. Plains participation for almost every major team sport is well above the national average, participation is valued over quality and success, and women’s athletics is celebrated. Professional sports are not represented well in the region, minor‐league and semiprofessional teams have established themselves, and intercollegiate sports have also taken an important role in Plains culture. Indeed, intercollegiate football forges powerful links between alumni and their alma mater, and Nebraska and Oklahoma provide particularly powerful examples. In addition, collegiate basketball and baseball are particularly strong in the central Great Plains. Recreational tourism does not provide a strong magnet for tourists, in part because of the large distances that separate recreational amenities, and Wikle and Rooney argue that for many, the Plains is a region of transit rather than destination. In relation to recreation, federal and state agencies as well as municipalities manage regional recreational activities and recreational lands. Water recreation is abundant on a large number of federally funded reservoirs. Hunting is twice as popular as the national average and occurs in private and state‐managed lands, in particular for waterfowl in the northern Plains.
