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New book documents Arikara Tribe’s traditional use of plants
LAWRENCE — A new book by University of Kansas faculty member Kelly Kindscher and three co-authors is the first published compilation of traditional plant uses of the Arikara Tribe. The work, “Sahnish (Arikara) Ethnobotany,” serves as a regional ethnobotany of the Arikara, one of the most influential tribes on the Northern Great Plains.
KU Symphony Orchestra receives national recognition
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Symphony Orchestra (KUSO), led by Carolyn Watson, conductor and director of orchestral activities, was honored earlier this month with the 2019-20 American Prize for Orchestral Performance (College/University Division) for its performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 “The Year 1917.” The concert took place on the Centenary of Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 2018, at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City, Missouri.
Nine faculty members win awards for excellence in teaching
LAWRENCE — Nine faculty members at the University of Kansas have been recognized as winners of annual distinguished teaching awards. They represent the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and schools of Business, Education, Engineering, Medicine, Music and Nursing. Faculty members were honored last month during the online KU Teaching Summit.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Kirsten Bosnak, KU Field Station, 785-864-6267, [email protected], @KUFieldStation
New book documents Arikara Tribe’s traditional use of plants
LAWRENCE — A new book by University of Kansas faculty member Kelly Kindscher and three co-authors is the first published compilation of traditional plant uses of the Arikara Tribe. The work, “Sahnish (Arikara) Ethnobotany,” serves as a regional ethnobotany of the Arikara, one of the most influential tribes on the Northern Great Plains.
Kindscher, lead author and ethnobotanist, is a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey. Michael Yellow Bird, co-author and former director of KU’s Indigenous Studies Program, is professor and dean of the faculty of social work at the University of Manitoba and an Arikara tribal member.
The book, which had its beginnings more than 100 years ago, describes the traditional use of wild plants among the Arikara for food, medicine, craft,and other uses. The tribe grew corn, hunted, foraged and traded with other tribes in the region, but wild plants were key to their diet, medicine, craft and daily life. Their villages were located along the Missouri River in northern South Dakota and North Dakota. Today, many Arikara tribal members live at Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota, as part of the MHA (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) Nation.
“The importance of this book cannot be overstated,” Yellow Bird said. “It provides compelling evidence of the traditional plant knowledge of the Arikara people, illuminates an important period in the history of the tribe and helps to restore an understanding of the Arikara ethnobotany that will be beneficial to ethnobotanists and members of the tribe.”
The book documents the use of 106 species from 31 plant families, based primarily on the work of Melvin Gilmore, who recorded Arikara ethnobotany from 1916 to 1935. Gilmore interviewed elders for their stories and accounts of traditional plant use, collected material goods and wrote a draft manuscript but was not able to complete it due to debilitating illness.
Fortunately, his field notes, manuscripts and papers were archived, and they form the core of the new book. Gilmore’s detailed description is augmented with historical accounts of the Arikara gleaned from the journals of Great Plains explorers — Lewis and Clark, John Bradbury, Pierre Tabeau and others. Additional plant uses and nomenclature are based on the field notes of linguist Douglas Parks, who carried out detailed documentation of the tribe’s language from 1970 through 2001.
“It was exciting to know that Gilmore had studied the Arikara’s plant uses in the 1920s and 1930s,” Kindscher said. “The elders he visited with had memories that went back to the old ways and the times when they lived traditionally along the Missouri River and gathered wild plants for important uses.
“It was delightful to work with the manuscripts, notes and material goods, and to see all the details he recorded. The objects he collected and archived at the Smithsonian Institution, such as chokecherry pounders, dried juneberries, and reed mats bring the ethnobotany back to life.”
Although based on these historical sources, the new work features updated modern botanical nomenclature, contemporary spelling and interpretation of Arikara plant names, as well as color photographs and range maps of each species.
Kindscher collected and assembled the historical Gilmore materials. Co-author Logan Sutton contributed the Arikara spellings and linguistic analyses. Michael Yellow Bird and Loren Yellow Bird, who are brothers, provided the cultural context. The book is Kindscher’s fourth on human uses of wild plants.
Sutton is a research associate with the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University and language material developer with the Culture and Language Department of the MHA Nation. He served as primary curator of the Arikara language dictionary database under Douglas Parks and, since 2015, has served as an Arikara language consultant. He lives on the Fort Berthold Reservation.
Loren Yellow Bird Sr. is an Arikara historian, traditionalist and member of the Sahnish (Arikara) Nation. He has served as a subject matter expert in several articles and film documentaries and was the technical adviser for the 2016 Oscar-winning film “The Revenant,” where he advised actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu. He has been active with the MHA Nation in helping to identify historical locations of uncovered human remains and has worked to help facilitate recovery and traditional burial practices of the Sahnish.
The new book was published by the Society for Ethnobiology, which also, through a grant, is providing copies to Arikara youths on the reservation.
The Kansas Biological Survey was established at KU in 1911. It houses a diverse group of ecological research and remote sensing/GIS programs. The survey also manages the 3,700-acre KU Field Station, established in 1947; it offers sites for faculty and student study in the sciences, arts, humanities and professional schools.
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Contact: Jennifer Lane, School of Music, 785-864-9742, [email protected], @MusicKU
KU Symphony Orchestra receives national recognition
LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Symphony Orchestra (KUSO), led by Carolyn Watson, conductor and director of orchestral activities, was honored earlier this month with the 2019-20 American Prize for Orchestral Performance (College/University Division) for its performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 “The Year 1917.” The concert took place on the Centenary of Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 2018, at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City, Missouri.
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 chronicles the dramatic events in Russia in 1917. It was also the year in which the U.S. entered World War I, and the work was the feature work at the KU Symphony Orchestra’s Centenary of Conflict concert. Watson described the award as “a great honor and one which heralds a new era of orchestral excellence at the University of Kansas.”
The American Prize for Orchestral Performance is a national, peer-reviewed competition recognizing American Excellence in the Arts. As described on its website, “The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts is the nation’s most comprehensive series of contests in the classical arts. The American Prize is unique in scope and structure, and is designed to evaluate, recognize and reward the best performers, ensembles and composers in the United States based on submitted recordings.”
Additionally, KUSO placed second in the 2019-20 Ernst Bacon Award for the Performance of American Music (College/University Ensemble Division).
“We are honored to be the only orchestral ensemble amongst the national winners, and to have been awarded for our recording of Jennifer Higdon’s virtuosic “Fanfare Ritmico,” we are especially delighted,” Watson said.
The Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music recognizes and rewards the best performances of American music by ensembles and individual artists worldwide, based on submitted recordings. Applications are accepted from professional, college/university, community and high school age solo artists, chamber ensembles or conducted ensembles, competing in separate divisions, and from composers with excellent recordings of their works.
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Contact: Christy Little Schock, KU News Service, [email protected]
Nine faculty members win awards for excellence in teaching
LAWRENCE — Nine faculty members at the University of Kansas have been recognized as winners of annual distinguished teaching awards.
“These educators have earned the respect of their peers and have demonstrated their ability to help our students attain their full potential,” Chancellor Douglas A. Girod said. “These teachers should be proud of their contribution to our university’s work, and I congratulate them on their outstanding accomplishments and commitment to their craft.”
The nine award recipients were honored Aug. 20 at the KU Teaching Summit, held this year in a virtual format.
This year’s winners are as follows:
David Slusky, the De-Min and Chin-Sha Wu Associate Professor of Economics, received the Byron T. Shutz Award. Established in 1978, the award alternates between recognizing excellent teaching in business and economics in even-numbered years and outstanding teaching in any discipline in odd-numbered years.
Michael Bauer, professor of music, received the Ned N. Fleming Trust Award. This award, established in 1990, recognizes outstanding teaching.
David Griffin, lab professor in the Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering; Lauri Hermann-Ginsberg, lecturer in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching; and Alee Phillips, lecturer and director of the Master of Accounting Program in the School of Business, were the recipients of this year’s Bob & Kathie Taylor Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes nontenure track faculty.
Four faculty members at KU Medical Center received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Awards, selected by a committee of Medical Center faculty and students. The awards recognize a demonstrated teaching ability of a clearly superlative nature.
The recipients of these awards:
- Joanna Brooks, assistant professor, Department of Population Health
- Julie Christianson, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies, Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology
- Qiuhua Shen, assistant professor, School of Nursing
- Stephen Tarver, associate professor and director of Medical Simulation, Department of Anesthesiology
The KU Teaching Summit takes place each August and is co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence, Office of the Provost and KU Medical Center. The conference is designed for faculty and instructional staff from the Lawrence, Edwards and Medical Center campuses. The 2020 event, with the theme “Teaching in a Transformed World,” included keynote sessions as well as a series of podcasts hosted at the KU Teaching Summit website.
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