Contact: Bruce Conley, News Information Director
Phone: (605) 274-5526
Fax: (605) 274-4903
e-mail: bruce_conley@augie.edu
www.augie.edu

April 15, 2004

Augustana, Center for Western Studies Host Dakota Conference

SIOUX FALLS - Kansas State University environmental historian James E. Sherow, Ph.D., headlines a two-day humanities conference examining land and water issues on the Great Plains.

The 36th annual Dakota Conference on Northern Plains History, Literature, Art, and Archaeology will be held April 23-24 on the Augustana campus. This year's conference theme highlights the depopulation of the rural plains and the implications for those who remain. With fewer than six residents per square mile in many of its rural counties, the Great Plains is becoming America's new frontier. Of the 261 plains counties with frontier status, most are found in the northern plains.

Sherow is the editor of A Sense of the American West: An Anthology of Environmental History and author of the forthcoming Their Days Were as Grass: An Ecostory of the Central Grasslands, 1780-1870.

Other keynote speakers include David Allen Evans, South Dakota Poet Laureate and professor of English at South Dakota State University; Lydia Whirlwind Soldier, Lakota author and teacher; and Robert Steensma from the University of Utah.

More than 80 presenters from as many as 18 states will give papers or talk about their recent book publications, all focused on the northern Great Plains. Twenty-five authors will gather at the conference's 17th annual Regional Authors' Autograph Party on Saturday, April 24, to sign copies of their books. Craig Ryan of Portland, Ore., will sign his book, Magnificent Failure: Free Fall from the Edge of Space, the story of adventurer Nick Piantanida, whose high-altitude balloon fell to earth in South Dakota.

The Northern Plains: A New Frontier session will focus on the rural economic development efforts of the Miner County Community Revitalization organization in Howard, S.D. Presenters for this session are Randy Parry, Michael Knutson, James Beddow, and Tom Kilian.

Other session topics include Native American cultural identity, Sioux Falls history, improving Dakota life, crime and punishment, writing plains history and literature, and Dakota stories.

Bruce Blake, Sioux Falls attorney and director of the Minnehaha County Historical Society's marker program will be honored with the award for Distinguished Contribution to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of South Dakota and the Northern Plains. Two new markers will be dedicated at the conference, Fort Dakota and Great Bend of the Sioux River.

Major funding for the conference is made possible by grants and gifts from the South Dakota Humanities Council, Richard and Michelle Van Demark, and Augustana College's Mellon Fund Committee. Harry Thompson of the Center for Western Studies is the conference director.

A copy of the conference program may be obtained by visiting www.augie.edu/CWS