American West & Pacific Northwest
Past Programming
Columbia Plateau Seminar Speaker Series, Fall 2010
Professor Andrew H. Fisher
Department of History, The College of William and Mary
11 October 2010
Public Lecture at 1:00 p.m. in the CUB Junior Ballroom (Room 210)
Brown-Bag Seminar at 4:00 p.m. in Wilson-Short Hall 333
Andrew Fisher received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University. His research and teaching interests focus on modern Native American history, environmental history, and the American West. His recently completed book is Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). It examines off-reservation communities and processes of tribal ethnogenesis in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest. You can find more on this important work at www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/FISSHA.html.
Professor Kate Brown
Department of History, University of Maryland
4 November 2010
Public Lecture at 1:10 p.m. in the CUB Junior Ballroom (Room 210)
Brown-Bag Seminar at 3:00 p.m. in Wilson-Short Hall 333
Kate Brown earned her Ph.D at the University of Washington. An expert in Russian and Eastern European history, Professor Brown's publications have included Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Border to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). It won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Society given in recognition of outstanding contributions to modern European international history. Her current project is "A Tale of Two Nuclear Cities," which explores and compares the histories of Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R. and Hanford in Washington state.
Heartsong of Charging Elk, Spring 2010
March 27, 2010 | 5:30–9:00 p.m. | Kimbrough Music Building, Room 101
Washington State University, Pullman
| 5:30–7:00 | Kathryn Shanley and Raymond DeMallie |
| 7:00–7:30 | Reception |
| 7:00–9:00 | Wayne Horvitz and "Heartsong of Charging Elk" |
World-renowned Seattle composer Wayne Horvitz will present his oratorio "Heartsong of Charging Elk" at Pullman.
The performance will take place the evening after a performance at WSU Vancouver; it culminates for that campus a weeklong humanities and honors mini-course and lecture series on indigenous peoples, historical fiction, and the mythical Wild West.
Horvitz's oratorio for four voices and ten chamber instruments is based on James Welch's novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk (New York: Doubleday, 2000). Welch (1940–2003) was one of the best-known Native American writers of his time. Of Blackfeet and Gros Ventre ancestry, Welch studied writing under Richard Hugo at the University of Montana. His early works include Winter in the Blood (1974) and Fools Crow (1986).
Heartsong, which is inspired by actual historical events, tells the story of Oglala Sioux Charging Elk who, while touring with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, was hospitalized for broken ribs and influenza in 1889 Marseilles, France. The Wild West Show moved on, leaving Charging Elk, now recovered from his illness and injuries, stranded and speaking neither French nor English.
"Using that historical predicament for his springboard," Horvitz has written, "James Welch conjures a poetic narrative of Charging Elk's displaced existence following his abandonment in The Heartsong of Charging Elk."
Wayne Horvitz is a native of New York and now resides in Seattle. He is an internationally known keyboardist, composer, and producer. Perhaps best known as a jazz musician, nevertheless, Horvitz works in many musical genres. He has had commissioning grants from Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Arts Council, the Mary Flagler Carey Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the Fund for U.S. Artists, and a Rockefeller MAP grant. He has composed and produced music for PBS programming and even for film director Gus Van Sant.
Horvitz will travel to Pullman with his musicians and a conductor. The latter will perform the piece, and Horvitz will provide a short lecture and question and answer about the oratorio with the audience.
In addition to this performance and Horvitz's discussion of his music, the event will also bring to campus two speakers, Professors Kathryn Shanley and Raymond J. Demallie, who are experts on James Welch and on Black Elk, a real Sioux man who did travel with the Wild West Show and actually was stranded in France, eventually making his way to England and then back to his home on the Great Plains.
Professor Kathryn Shanley earned her Ph.D. in English and Native American literature at the University of Michigan. A member of the Assiniboine Tribe, Shanley is now a professor of Native American studies and assistant to the president and provost of the University of Montana. She has edited Native American Literature: Boundaries and Sovereignties (2001) and is working on a book on James Welch.
Professor Raymond J. Demaille is chancellor's professor of anthropology and adjunct professor of folklore, director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute, and curator of North American ethnology at the Mathers Museum at Indiana University. Demaille has researched and written extensively on Great Plains tribes. In 2008 he annotated a new edition of John G. Neihardt's famous Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, first published in 1932.
Columbia Chair in the History of the American West, sponsor
Humanities Washington, co-sponsor
Plateau Center for American Indian Studies, WSU, co-sponsor
Visual, Performing, & Literary Arts Committee (VPLAC), WSU, co-sponsor
School of Music, WSU, co-sponsor
Global Travel, Pullman, Washington, co-sponsor