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

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

09/15/2016 Added

180 Plays

Description

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.

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[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.

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

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

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments