Great Plains Anywhere: John O'Keefe

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

11/16/2022 Added

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In this episode of Great Plains Anywhere, we talk with John O'Keefe, a professor of Theology and Journalism at Creighton University and the documentary filmmaker behind the film "The Last Prairie." The film examines Nebraska's Sandhills through the perspectives of ecologists, the people who live and work there, and the Lakota people whose ancestors were driven off the land. The Center is hosting a screening of the film on March 30 in Lincoln, Neb., at the Great Plains Art Museum. Details to be announced next early next year.

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[00:00:00.150]Welcome to Great Plains: Anywhere,
[00:00:02.190]a Paul A. Olson lecture
[00:00:03.780]from the Center for Great Plain Studies
[00:00:05.430]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:00:08.550]Today's guest is John O'Keefe,
[00:00:10.290]a professor of theology and journalism
[00:00:12.420]at Creighton University and the documentary filmmaker
[00:00:15.330]behind the film, The Last Prairie.
[00:00:18.030]The film examines Nebraska's Sandhills
[00:00:20.220]through the perspectives of ecologists,
[00:00:22.830]the people who live and work there,
[00:00:24.720]and the Lakota people whose ancestors
[00:00:26.610]were driven off the land.
[00:00:28.500]The University of Nebraska is a land grant institution
[00:00:31.590]with campuses and programs on the past, present,
[00:00:34.560]and future homelands of the Pawnee Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
[00:00:39.300]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples,
[00:00:44.490]as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk,
[00:00:47.100]Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
[00:00:49.710]My name is John O'Keefe
[00:00:51.480]and I'm a theology professor at Creighton University.
[00:00:55.410]And I'm starting my 31st year at Creighton
[00:00:59.280]and I started out more kind of traditional scholarship
[00:01:03.780]just my trainings in ancient Christianity.
[00:01:07.110]And along the way, and I'm not gonna go
[00:01:09.960]into all the details, I sort of found
[00:01:11.850]my way into filmmaking.
[00:01:13.800]And so really since 2007 I've been doing that
[00:01:17.760]with increasingly complicated projects.
[00:01:20.640]And most recently, the project we're talking
[00:01:22.920]about here is a film I made about the Nebraska Sandhills.
[00:01:27.840]But I have two colleagues at Creighton,
[00:01:30.570]one in communication studies named Jay Leighter
[00:01:33.240]and then one in biology named Mary Ann Vinton.
[00:01:36.360]And the three of us were friends 'cause we had collaborated
[00:01:39.870]on starting a sustainability major at Creighton
[00:01:42.390]or building out an additional sustainability major
[00:01:46.830]on the environmental studies program that was already there.
[00:01:49.950]And we were having drinks one night in Omaha
[00:01:54.600]and we found out about a grant possibility,
[00:01:57.660]an internal grant at Creighton.
[00:01:59.100]And we thought, "Well, we should do something together."
[00:02:02.070]And so on the spot we figured out that the three
[00:02:05.130]of us were really interested in the Sandhills.
[00:02:07.350]Yeah, the Sandhills are actually stunning.
[00:02:13.050]The first time I saw them was probably in 1997.
[00:02:16.890]I was driving back from Fort Robinson with my family
[00:02:21.270]and we took a turn on a road just for fun
[00:02:25.110]and it ended up crossing the Sandhills.
[00:02:26.880]And I didn't know what this was.
[00:02:30.090]I mean, it was just this unending ocean of grass.
[00:02:33.150]And I'm from the East Coast.
[00:02:34.230]I grew up in New York and in Florida
[00:02:36.630]and I spent a lot of my youth on the beach.
[00:02:40.620]And the Sandhills reminded me of a stable ocean.
[00:02:44.035]And I thought, "Someday I'm gonna go back there."
[00:02:47.520]And when I finally did get back there,
[00:02:48.870]it was really an association with this project.
[00:02:51.180]And so the first thing people need to know
[00:02:53.430]about it is it's just kind of amazing.
[00:02:56.310]Now technically it's one of the last remaining
[00:03:00.180]intact prairie landscapes on earth.
[00:03:03.120]In fact, I found out it there was an article
[00:03:05.820]that came out in January of this year, so 2022,
[00:03:09.600]that said it's the most intact temperate grassland
[00:03:13.500]in the world.
[00:03:14.670]So that's a lot.
[00:03:15.900]I mean, so it's a remarkable place.
[00:03:18.300]It's I think a place of global significance.
[00:03:21.180]And so it really is, it's hard to explain
[00:03:24.510]why a grassland could be so compelling, but it really is.
[00:03:32.010]This film took me a long time.
[00:03:34.140]I think from when I first thought of it
[00:03:36.210]to when I finished it, it was five years.
[00:03:40.740]And part of the challenge I had was access.
[00:03:46.565]It's hard to actually meet people out there.
[00:03:49.530]It's a fairly closed community.
[00:03:51.660]Now, my colleague Mary Ann, who I mentioned earlier,
[00:03:54.330]grew up in the Sandhills, so she kind of
[00:03:56.580]brokered a connection with her family
[00:03:59.850]who are still ranching out there.
[00:04:01.470]And I think I probably could have tried
[00:04:03.690]for 10 years to get access like that and never succeeded.
[00:04:08.550]So I think definitely having access
[00:04:12.810]to the ranching community was a huge head start.
[00:04:16.080]But as I began to work on it, I really knew
[00:04:19.170]that I didn't want the film to be just about ranchers.
[00:04:21.960]I didn't want to make a film about cowboys,
[00:04:25.080]even though I have enormous respect
[00:04:27.150]for ranchers and more now than ever before.
[00:04:31.140]But I was also interested in the ecology of the Sandhills.
[00:04:34.243]I actually from talking with my friends who in biology
[00:04:39.750]but I also didn't wanna make a nature documentary.
[00:04:43.920]And then as I was working on it,
[00:04:45.420]I became more and more aware
[00:04:47.070]of the Native American history of the place.
[00:04:49.440]And I thought, "Well, how am I gonna,
[00:04:51.840]how am I gonna do this?
[00:04:53.220]How am I gonna make a film about these
[00:04:55.860]very different constituencies, very different communities?"
[00:05:00.270]And what I wound up doing is I tried to make a film
[00:05:02.670]about the landscape where the landscape
[00:05:04.530]is the main character and the people
[00:05:06.930]in the film are sort of supporting characters.
[00:05:09.960]My favorite thing about the Sandhills is this sort of
[00:05:14.040]utterly implausible combination of wetland and grassland.
[00:05:21.120]The Sandhills are wet and it's amazingly ecologically
[00:05:26.730]and biologically diverse.
[00:05:28.620]So, if you drive across a lot of grassland,
[00:05:31.440]like say you drive from
[00:05:36.810]if you drive off of 80 sort of toward Denver
[00:05:39.150]from Big Springs, you cross a big grassland, but it's dry
[00:05:43.770]and you drive through the Sandhills and it's not,
[00:05:47.370]it's wet and there's just water everywhere.
[00:05:51.210]And that to me is just amazing
[00:05:53.520]and surprising and incredibly compelling.
[00:05:57.210]And if you get a chance to see the Sandhills
[00:05:59.340]after it's rained and it's really green,
[00:06:01.620]it's an amazingly beautiful site.
[00:06:05.790]The sand is kind of a local expression
[00:06:10.590]of the larger question, why should we care
[00:06:12.330]about the world at all?
[00:06:14.430]And so I've been influenced.
[00:06:16.950]One of the intellectual turns I made along the way,
[00:06:19.770]in addition to kind of the filmmaking turn
[00:06:21.870]I sort of started thinking more about theology
[00:06:24.660]and ecology and theology and the environment.
[00:06:26.760]And so I've been reading a lot
[00:06:29.610]and thinking a lot about the sort of, what is nature,
[00:06:32.910]and what is the human place in nature and where,
[00:06:35.880]what is the connection between human beings and nature?
[00:06:39.150]And I've been influenced a lot
[00:06:40.800]by the American conservation writer, Aldo Leopold.
[00:06:44.820]And he has this wonderful story in a Sand County Almanac
[00:06:49.380]about a lonely silphium plant that is growing
[00:06:54.360]next to a gravestone in the cemetery near where he lives.
[00:06:57.600]And every year the mowers come by and cut it down.
[00:07:04.230]And he says, "In a couple of years
[00:07:06.630]it'll just give up and go away."
[00:07:08.970]And for him, this is a little bit of a
[00:07:11.490]it's a story about we care about things that we know
[00:07:15.270]and we only love and conserve things that we know.
[00:07:18.900]And that if we're gonna care for the world,
[00:07:21.600]we have to learn how to care for places.
[00:07:24.690]And I think the people who live in the Sandhills love it
[00:07:29.550]and they care for it, but it's easy
[00:07:32.040]to just sort of drive past it and not care at all.
[00:07:35.280]But if we can sort of learn to love and care
[00:07:36.960]for a place like this by spending time in it
[00:07:39.930]and allowing it to speak to us,
[00:07:43.320]then we might be able to care more broadly
[00:07:45.180]for the world as a whole and do more
[00:07:48.270]than we're actually doing to preserve it.
[00:07:51.030]Just a follow up on that, in my film, I mean
[00:07:53.400]one of the things I'm trying to do is get people to care.
[00:07:57.540]And I think we have this sort of narrative
[00:08:00.180]of prairies in our collective imagination that goes back
[00:08:04.200]to like Little House on the Prairie.
[00:08:05.970]And I'm from the East Coast and when I first moved
[00:08:08.880]to Nebraska 30 years ago, everybody was like,
[00:08:10.777]"How's it going out there in the prairie?"
[00:08:12.450]And I eventually learned that there is no prairie.
[00:08:15.780]I mean, the prairie is the prairie that gets described
[00:08:18.840]by them in those books and in Willa Cather is 99% destroyed.
[00:08:24.870]So I mean, they might as well say,
[00:08:26.287]"How's it going out there in cornfields?"
[00:08:28.530]I mean, it's mostly gone.
[00:08:30.090]And so the destruction of that place was allowed to happen
[00:08:37.290]'cause no one cared or no one was paying attention.
[00:08:40.830]But if we start paying attention and start loving it,
[00:08:42.900]then there's probably, there's gotta be a better way.
[00:08:45.720]A different way.
[00:08:46.980]We'd like to thank John O' Keefe
[00:08:48.270]for speaking with us today.
[00:08:49.830]Follow the Center on social media to hear
[00:08:51.780]about opportunities to see the film.
[00:08:54.120]Find all of our short Great Plains talks and interviews
[00:08:57.120]as videos and podcasts at go.unl.edu/gplectures.

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Great Plains Anywhere: John O'Keefe

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