Notes and News

Forty-First Annual Great Plains Symposium

The 2015 Great Plains Symposium will be “Standing Bear and the Trail Ahead,” May 14–15, 2015, in Lincoln, Nebraska. The symposium is a two-day interdisciplinary event intended for scholars, public officials, tribal members, and other interested members of the public from across the Great Plains. The story of Ponca chief Standing Bear brings up issues people still identify with today, and it will engage the public in examining a variety of historical, ethical, and legal lessons including the displacement of the Ponca tribe to Oklahoma, tribal sovereignty, and issues of equality. The symposium is a partnership with the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs (ncia), which is in the process of planning, researching, and gathering resources necessary to apply for the establishment and designation of a Chief Standing Bear Trail running from Nebraska to Oklahoma. The establishment of this trail will increase the general public’s knowledge and awareness of the story of Standing Bear. The ncia is the state liaison between the four headquarter tribes of the Omaha, Ponca, Santee Sioux, and Winnebago Tribes of Nebraska. The commission helps ensure the sovereignty of both tribal and state governments is recognized and acted upon in a true government-to-government relationship. The commission also serves all off-reservation Indian constituencies in the State of Nebraska. All goals of the commission are accomplished through advocacy, education, and promotion of legislation. Additional information can be found at www.unl.edu/plains/2015-symposium-standingbear, and the Center for Great Plains Studies, 402-472-3082, cgps@unl.edu.

Fellowship Program

Each year, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, offers a limited number of research stipends for promising and established visiting western scholars in their fellowship program. Scholars can research, write, and develop ideas and manuscripts that expand the horizon of western studies. Fellows may pursue field research in the Cody area (i.e., the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or the Big Horn Basin and Mountains of the Northern Plains) or work in the collections of the McCracken Research Library or one of the museum galleries. Possible areas of research include western American art and artists; William F. Cody; western exploration, settlement, and the rise of American western culture; Plains Indian cultures; history of firearms technology; western American literature and music; distribution, movements, and ecology of Greater Yellowstone Area wildlife in relation to environmental change; and human dimensions of wildlife conservation and management in the American West. Recent awards have covered topic such as The Native as Naive: Playing Indian in France; Performing Native Americans: Buffalo Bill and the Embodiment of the Wild West; The Bison in the Room: Taxidermy Animals, Storytelling, and the American West; and Firearms and the Transformation of Native America. Fellows will be granted a stipend based on their submitted budget and the availability of funding, not to exceed $5,000. Fellowships require at least a one-week residency, or more, dependent upon the parameters of the fellow’s research needs. For additional information, please contact Chris Searles at chriss@bbhc.org or 307-578-4089.

2014 Willa Cather Spring Conference

The Willa Cather Foundation will host the Willa Cather Spring Conference and Scholarly Symposium on the topic of “Mapping Literary Landscapes: Environments and Ecosystems,” June 5–7, 2014, in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The Fifty-Ninth Annual Spring Conference and the one-day scholarly symposium preceding it will focus on the complex impact of the natural environment on Cather and her contemporaries and on the writers and artists of the generations that have followed. Drawing upon recent scholarly analyses focused on Cather’s “ecological imagination,” this conference seeks to broaden and extend these ideas, both within Cather studies and beyond. From her earliest fiction, Cather was closely attuned to the world around her, and her beautifully limned landscapes are integral to her characters, defining them and their situations. In O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Cather was the first American novelist to treat the plains of Nebraska as setting; as such, she taught her readers how to read that landscape, how to integrate with it. Beyond grasslands, Cather mapped many other literary landscapes: the Southwest in three...