40 years of fantastic projects at the Center for Great Plains Studies

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

09/15/2016 Added

178 Plays

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Gary Moulton, David Wishart, Clark Archer, and Larkin Powell talk about the projects they have worked on for the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska.

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[00:00:10.355]1978, I was teaching at a regional Oklahoma university,
[00:00:17.656]and I was going to be without a chop
[00:00:19.740]because I'd only been there on a temporary appointment.
[00:00:23.390]My wife actually saw the advertisement for the project
[00:00:28.783]of Lewis and Clark in a professional magazine.
[00:00:33.359]She came home and said, "Gary, this looks like your resume."
[00:00:37.947]So I applied, and I was the lucky person to get the job.
[00:00:42.213]A negative was I didn't know anything about Lewis and Clark,
[00:00:45.703](laughs) but thank God Willie has Ph. D. combe laureate
[00:00:50.398]about Lewis and Clark.
[00:00:53.204]When I first came here I met Fred Luebke.
[00:00:56.034]I met Paul Olson, I met Brian Blouet,
[00:00:58.750]early leaders at the Center for Great Plain Studies.
[00:01:02.699]I was fortunate to work with these early people,
[00:01:05.876]and not only get the Lewis and Clark project started,
[00:01:09.475]but be active in the Center for Great Plains Studies.
[00:01:14.027]It has emerged as an important entity on campus.
[00:01:19.646]When we first started the journals
[00:01:22.627]of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
[00:01:24.493]the expectation was we would take nine years to do it,
[00:01:29.498]and have like six or eight volumes.
[00:01:32.413]As it turned out, it was 13 volumes over 20 years.
[00:01:36.765]One aspect of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
[00:01:40.546]that was overlooked for years and years,
[00:01:44.031]and only Willie came into the general knowledge,
[00:01:47.995]and not even that much into general knowledge,
[00:01:50.910]and probably the journals publication helped
[00:01:55.484]in this awakening knowledge,
[00:01:57.484]was that the scientific aspects
[00:02:00.114]of the Lewis and Clark Expedition had been downplayed
[00:02:03.767]or overlooked or neglected.
[00:02:06.481]One of the things we did in the project,
[00:02:10.400]was to bring these matters to the forward.
[00:02:13.588]I worked with biologists and zoologists
[00:02:17.868]and climatologists and people in all sorts
[00:02:22.588]of scientific realms.
[00:02:24.593]Now what was critical to that work,
[00:02:27.455]because I certainly didn't know anything
[00:02:29.799]about those disciplines,
[00:02:31.691]is that I had the Fellows of the Great Plains Center
[00:02:35.375]to tap, to get that information.
[00:02:38.083]Many of my consultants,
[00:02:39.919]and I used over a hundred consultants
[00:02:42.119]during the life of the project,
[00:02:43.910]many of them came from the Fellows
[00:02:46.629]of the Center for Great Plains Studies.
[00:02:48.993]They were vital to telling that story.
[00:02:58.069]The encyclopedia was the idea of John Wunder
[00:03:01.613]who was Director of the Center at the time,
[00:03:05.256]and there'd been a very successful encyclopedia
[00:03:07.873]of sung culture that had come out a few years before.
[00:03:11.234]We had a model and what we wanted to do
[00:03:14.159]was produce a region-defining work.
[00:03:19.550]Great Plains needed definition.
[00:03:23.641]That's what we set out to do.
[00:03:26.784]It was supposed to only take about four or five years.
[00:03:28.579]It ended up taking almost ten.
[00:03:30.952]I was very fortunate in having a wonderful group
[00:03:34.158]of people who worked with me.
[00:03:36.663]Researchers like Pekka Hamalainen and Mark Ellis,
[00:03:41.204]Jeff Vollan, and assistants,
[00:03:43.988]administrative assistants, more than that,
[00:03:47.354]but Beth Ritter, Scarlett Presley,
[00:03:49.905]and Sonya Rossum, now Sonya Barber.
[00:03:57.488]She held it all together.
[00:03:58.915]It was a massive piece of information management.
[00:04:02.553]We ended up having more than 900 authors
[00:04:05.691]for the thousand or so entries.
[00:04:09.231]It was a big job.
[00:04:10.915]One of the hardest things was to get people
[00:04:12.619]to turn their work in of course.
[00:04:14.532]There are many entries on people you mightn't expect
[00:04:18.250]to have come from the Great Plains.
[00:04:19.907]Buster Keaton the great silent star was from Piqwa Kansas.
[00:04:25.685]And of course, Malcolm X, Malcolm Little was born in Omaha.
[00:04:29.613]There were surprises when we dug
[00:04:31.877]into the riches of the Great Plains.
[00:04:34.505]Now the impasse, being very good
[00:04:36.159]it was reviewed very well,
[00:04:38.405]and it's used as the standard reference source
[00:04:41.902]on the Great Plains.
[00:04:43.210]Of course it's outdated.
[00:04:46.137]Imagine the entry on wind energy now or coal.
[00:04:50.012]Our entry before was hydraulic fracturing,
[00:04:54.663]and people they show us,
[00:04:56.244]and other things have happened on the Great Plains.
[00:04:59.439]You do get dated.
[00:05:00.812]That was a challenge.
[00:05:02.536]We decided to do contemporary people
[00:05:05.846]as well as past people.
[00:05:09.122]And contemporary people, of course,
[00:05:10.371]their lives are still unfolding.
[00:05:12.490]The circumstances were great and of course
[00:05:14.223]the Center for Great Plains Studies
[00:05:16.303]was the only place probably it could have been pulled off.
[00:05:24.007]Hi, I'm Clark Archer.
[00:05:25.950]I'm one of the editors and mapmakers
[00:05:28.826]for the Atlas of the Great Plains.
[00:05:31.379]We're standing right next to one of the maps
[00:05:34.350]that came from the Atlas.
[00:05:35.818]This is a large map.
[00:05:38.178]It's blown up from page-size from the Atlas.
[00:05:41.410]Saying a few words about who contributed to the Atlas.
[00:05:45.611]Stephen Lavin, Fred Shelley, and Clark Archer
[00:05:48.709]were the main editors.
[00:05:50.431]The division of work on that was
[00:05:52.175]that I did most of the GIS work, the data collection work.
[00:05:55.776]Stephen Lavin did most of the cartography and finishing work
[00:05:59.743]and Fred Shelley did most of the writing and the essays.
[00:06:03.902]Other contributors to the Atlas included David Wishart
[00:06:07.178]who wrote the preface or the introduction.
[00:06:11.943]John Hudson at Northwestern University
[00:06:14.755]who wrote the introduction, the first part of the Atlas.
[00:06:18.073]Now in terms of how the Atlas got started,
[00:06:20.655]I was one of the folks who worked on
[00:06:22.861]the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains,
[00:06:24.666]and did some of the back work for that.
[00:06:28.693]The Atlas of the Great Plains was designed
[00:06:32.064]to be a stand-alone companion or followup
[00:06:35.760]to the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains,
[00:06:37.776]and that's basically how it got started.
[00:06:40.402]Jim Stubbendeck, who was the Director
[00:06:42.427]of the Center for Great Plains Studies,
[00:06:44.832]promoted the project.
[00:06:46.450]There were a number of other people
[00:06:47.508]who promoted the project: Susan Norby
[00:06:49.693]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:06:50.794]Foundations of others contributed
[00:06:52.655]to raising funds for the project.
[00:06:55.332]Most of the funds, by the way, that were raised
[00:06:57.485]were used to help publish the atlas in color.
[00:07:01.086]It's expensive to publish color maps,
[00:07:03.796]or to support a number of graduate students,
[00:07:06.063]and I think a couple of undergraduate students too,
[00:07:09.853]who worked as interns of the Atlas.
[00:07:13.509]So it was a Center of Great Plains Studies project
[00:07:16.535]that was, I think, the first atlas that's ever been done
[00:07:20.769]of the Great Plains to include both
[00:07:23.799]the United States Great Plains
[00:07:25.095]and the Canadian prairie provinces.
[00:07:32.925]When I joined the Center for Great Plains Studies,
[00:07:36.402]I became part of a group of Fellows
[00:07:38.292]that did a lot of basic research in biology
[00:07:42.819]and conservation related things,
[00:07:46.095]but also a lot of applied things
[00:07:48.834]in natural resources and ecology.
[00:07:52.919]That individual work that Fellows have done
[00:07:55.629]over the time has been supported
[00:07:57.789]and kind of trumpeted by the Center,
[00:08:00.532]but recently the work on ecotourism
[00:08:04.310]has built on the foundation that's been there in the past
[00:08:09.798]and now we're really sharing with landowners and visitors
[00:08:14.177]to Nebraska through that ecotourism venture.
[00:08:17.284]So I think the exciting thing about the future
[00:08:19.196]is that we're going to be reaching out to people
[00:08:21.537]around the state to connect people,
[00:08:25.265]landowners, that might be interested in sharing the story
[00:08:28.636]of their lands with people that are visiting
[00:08:32.110]Nebraska and the Great Plains.
[00:08:33.979]We're going to be bringing these two groups together:
[00:08:37.599]the researchers that are trying to find out
[00:08:40.626]the in depth nature of the story of the lands of Nebraska,
[00:08:45.434]and the people of Nebraska to share with the visitors,
[00:08:47.850]with the people that are actually going to do the work
[00:08:51.411]to be the guides, to be the outfitters,
[00:08:53.447]to be the people that will house folks and tell that story.
[00:08:59.211]I think the importance of conservation
[00:09:02.267]and the activities of the Center
[00:09:05.008]really comes down to the landscapes of the Great Plains.
[00:09:10.903]We know that we can't keep landscapes.
[00:09:13.220]Landscapes are going to change as they go through time,
[00:09:15.654]but we also really need to think about as a society
[00:09:18.358]how those landscapes are affected,
[00:09:21.850]how they're build through changes to them.
[00:09:24.854]That's really whether the research is applied
[00:09:29.370]or theoretical and learning just very specific things
[00:09:33.243]about the animals and plants
[00:09:34.839]that are out there in the landscape.
[00:09:37.190]That's the importance of the research
[00:09:39.450]is bringing that into future planning
[00:09:41.979]so that we make sure that we have, as I like to say,
[00:09:45.255]"landscapes for tomorrow"
[00:09:46.725]for the people of the Great Plains.

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40 years of fantastic projects at the Center for Great Plains Studies

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