Center for Great Plains Studies

A conversation between Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), Associate Curator of Native American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Margaret Jacobs, Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Norby, the first full-time curator of Native art in The Met’s 153-year history, spoke about her vital curatorial work that foregrounds Indigenous perspectives and experiences. The “Centering Indigenous Voices in Museums" speaker series features Indigenous museum and cultural professionals who are working to change the narrative and elevate Native creative expression. This series is part of the “Walking in the Footsteps of our Ancestors: Re-Indigenizing Southeast Nebraska” project at the Center for Great Plains Studies, funded by the Mellon Foundation.

In this episode, Stephen Bridenstine, assistant director of the Flint Hills Discovery Center in Manhattan, Kansas, talks about what the Flint Hills are, who cares for the land, and how people can experience this unique landscape. The Discovery Center's mission is to inspire people to celebrate, explore, and care for the Flint Hills with an array of exhibits and programs meant to educate about the geology, ecology, and cultural history of the area.

Legal experts Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) spoke at the Center for Great Plains Studies on Nov. 17 about racism and reconciliation on Canada’s Great Plains. Sniderman and Sanderson’s “Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation” (Harper Collins, 2022), is the winner of the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize.

Jodi Voice Yellowfish (Muscogee Creek, Oglala Lakota, and Cherokee) spoke about the history and current day realities of the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women crisis on Oct. 24, 2023. Yellowfish is founder and chair of the Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women Texas Rematriate, a Dallas-based organization that helps Indigenous families search for and bring home missing and murdered relatives, to support and offer healing processes to the missing and murdered and their families, and to advocate for social change.

Rosalyn LaPier is an award winning Indigenous writer, environmental historian, ethnobotanist, and professor at the University of Illinois. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge, to address the growing climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy around Indigenous languages. LaPier is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.

Erica Larsen-Dockray, Cybele Moon, Steph Coley, Eve LaFountain, and Marissa Magdalena Sykes will discuss the historical women that inspired their work, their personal experiences as female artists, and the creative process behind the collaborative exhibition “Threads & Trails: Contemplations of Our Herstories.” This exhibition and panel were made possible by the generous support of the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Humanities Nebraska and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Kimmel Charitable Foundation, Lincoln Community Foundation, Union Bank & Trust, UNL Research Council, and UNL Faculty Senate Convocations Committee.

The Center for Great Plains Studies and its Reconciliation Rising Project hosted the second annual Proclamation Day and Homecoming Ceremony for the Otoe-Missouria nation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Sept. 21.

José Francisco García presents a historical and contemporary perspective on almost 500 years of the Mexican-American presence in Nebraska and the Great Plains, from early Spanish conquistadors and explorers to later years’ traders, settlers, and immigrants.

Members of the community rally around welcoming back indigenous people to their tribal homelands. Learn more about the 2023 Otoe-Missouria Proclamation Day on University of Nebraska–Lincoln's campus at https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/otoe-missouria-center-for-great-plains-studies-earn-mellon-funding/

Vagell is a meteorologist and storm chaser who travels the country documenting and researching severe weather. Previously he worked as a meteorologist for The Weather Channel and doing on-air broadcasting for TV. As a storm chaser for the last decade, Vagell has visited all but a handful of counties in the Great Plains. We spoke with him about severe weather and why the Great Plains is ideal for storm chasing.

This episode of Great Plains Anywhere features Carson Vaughan, the author of "Zoo Nebraska" and a journalist who covers the Great Plains region. His recent works include covering the October 2022 Bovee Fire at the Nebraska National Forest Bessey Ranger district and writing about author Mari Sandoz.

The Great Plains Art Museum will host Omaha-based artist Linda Rivera García as the 2023 Elizabeth Rubendall Artist in Residence. Rivera García is a Mexican-American Chicana artist, teacher, and storyteller who has been sharing her culture throughout Nebraska for decades. A graduate of Omaha's College of Saint Mary and a retired children's librarian, she is a multifaceted artist who works in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and with traditional Mexican art forms such as papel picado (cut paper) and repujado (metal embossing), among many others. A solo exhibition of Rivera García's artwork will be on view at the museum from March 24 to September 22, 2023.

"The Sociology of Soil and Water Conservation in Agriculture: What have we learned, and where are we headed?" Arbuckle will trace the history of social science research on farmer adoption of new agricultural technologies and practices from the 1940s to the present. In the past 80 years, agriculture has rapidly transformed from diverse production systems to highly specialized monocultures. In the 1980s, social scientists began to look at the adoption of soil and water conservation practices in response to major environmental impacts associated with specialized commodity production. Arbuckle identifies the facilitators of and barriers to farmer adoption of soil and water conservation practices and agroecological approaches to farming. He will discuss research gaps and future research directions to inform transformations that work better for people and planet. Arbuckle is professor and extension rural sociologist at Iowa State University focused on improving the environmental and social performance of agricultural systems. His primary areas of interest are drivers of farmer and agricultural stakeholder soil and water conservation behaviors, especially related to climate change adaptation and mitigation. He is director of the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll, an annual survey of Iowa farmers. Part of the 2023 Great Plains conference.

"Through the Eyes of a Meatpacker's Daughter" Immigrants represent over 50% of Nebraska’s meatpacking workforce. At work, immigrant workers face unsafe working conditions while at home they face an immigration system threatening to tear their family apart. Godinez will relate the story of her families’ experience with and in the meatpacking industry. She will discuss how both the immigration process and the health and safety standards during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted advocacy across the state all the way to the nation’s capital. The advocacy opportunities do not stop there: Godinez will end her presentation with advocacy opportunities we can all undertake to support safe working meatpacking workers and their families. Godinez is Senior Legal and Policy Counsel for ACLU Nebraska. She was raised in Lexington and is the proud daughter of immigrants and former meatpacking plant workers. Godinez has been a strong advocate for workers’ rights and safety both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of the 2023 Great Plains Conference.

"The Farmer's Lawyer" In 1983, Vogel filed a lawsuit against USDA on behalf of nine North Dakota farmers, then expanded the lawsuit to protect 245,000 farmers across the United States. It was a David and Goliath fight, but it successfully stopped thousands of foreclosures and permanently changed the way USDA treated farmers. Vogel will show how the lessons learned in the 1930s and 1980s farm depressions are again relevant as drought, floods, low prices, high costs, corporate consolidation, and uncertain federal policies squeeze out family farmers today. Vogel, is an attorney, advocate, and author of The Farmer’s Lawyer, a memoir about her landmark class action lawsuit, Coleman v. Block. She brought this historic case against the federal government, on behalf of 240,000 family farmers facing foreclosure during the 1980s farm crisis. Vogel has spent most of her career as an advocate for family farmers, women, and Native Americans. She also served two terms as North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture, and was the first woman in U.S. history to be elected to this position in any state. She currently serves as a Member of the Agriculture Subcommittee to USDA Equity Commission. Part of the 2023 Great Plains Conference.

"Learning the Roots of the Plants We Live By: Perennial Cultures & Perennial Grains in the Great Plains" How do we build more just and enduring food cultures that are grounded in the sufficiency of the Great Plains? Our work begins in recognizing the few, mostly annual plants by which many of us currently live—and continues in remembering and restoring the diverse, mostly perennial plants our societies can live by for the long term. By creatively investigating the relational roots of the plants we live by in the Great Plains, we can find possibilities for a more just, perennial future in which grain crops and food systems feed people while sustaining land communities. Streit Krug is Director of Ecosphere Studies at The Land Institute, where she leads research into how humans can learn together to develop more just cultures while realizing diverse, perennial grain agricultures in the context of the ecosphere. Streit Krug holds a PhD in English & Great Plains Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Part of the 2023 Great Plains Conference.

"Sacred Seed: Indigenous Environmentalism and Living Red in the Postcolonial Era" Taylor Keen’s historical journey with Indigenous seed keeping has led him to understand some of the ancient tenets of Indigenous agricultural lifeways and Indigenous environmentalism. In this talk, Keen investigates new Indigenous philosophical theories of “Living Red” in today’s turbulent times. Keen is a full-time instructor at Creighton University and holds a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College as well as a Master of Business Administration and Master of Public Administration from Harvard University, where he served as a Fellow in the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Keen is the author of the manuscript Rediscovering America: Sacred Geography, the Ancient Earthen Works and an Indigenous History of Turtle Island. Keen carries the name “Bison Mane” of the Earthen Bison Clan of the Omaha Tribe, The People Who Move Against the Current. Taylor Keen is the founder of Sacred Seed, which educates and celebrates Indigenous agricultural lifeways. Part of the 2023 Great Plains Conference.

Today's guest is John Wunder, Emeritus Professor of History and former Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Though he spent his career studying the history and cultures of the Plains, his recent work has shifted into creative prose poetry about growing up in the region. We talked with Professor Wunder and asked him to share a poem about Great Plains tornadoes.

Nebraska is home to the largest hand-planted forest in the Western Hemisphere, the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands. The Great Plains Art Museum is currently displaying an exhibition of photographs of the forest by UNL Art Professor Dana Fritz through March 11. The forest and the photographs was the topic of a panel discussion at the Museum on Feb. 23. Fritz’s new book, “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape,” combines her photos with environmental essays, maps, and historical photographs that delve into the natural history of the site. It also features essays by Katie Anania, assistant professor of art history; Rebecca Buller, associate professor of practice in geography; and Rose-Marie Muzika, director of science at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, as well as maps and a timeline by Salvador Lindquist, assistant professor of landscape architecture. The panel, featuring Fritz, Anania, Buller, Muzika and Lindquist, will be moderated by author and journalist Carson Vaughan, who covered the Bovee Fire which burned more than 18,000 acres in and around the forest in 2022. This event received funding support from the UNL Faculty Senate Convocations Committee.

In this episode of Great Plains Anywhere, we talk with Taylor Brorby, the author of "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land" and co-editor of "Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America." He regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change. Brorby is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.