Into the COLAverse – Episode 5: Erika Bsumek

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Into the Colaverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today.

[00:00:22] Frederick: It’s my great honor to have Erika Bsumek as my guest for Into the Colaverse today, Erika is a award-winning author, distinguished teacher, and Eugene C. Barker, Centennial chair in American History. Erika, welcome.

[00:00:44] Erika: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:46] Frederick: So Erika, tell us, tell us how you got to where you know, this place of deep research in Native American history, environmental history, history of the West, and in true kind of built environments studies, um, I, I know you were at, at Rutgers at a certain point and University of Utah, but yeah, tell, tell, Maybe you can share a little bit about your origin and journey to this place where you found, um, yourself doing this incredible work.

[00:01:24] Frederick: Um,

[00:01:25] Erika: well thank you for that. I, It is really interesting to think about how we get to where we are in our careers. Um, I, okay, so I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I think for many of us, our family history kind of shapes our connection to the past. Um, and that is certainly true in my case. Sometimes we think about it more deeply than others.

[00:01:52] Erika: Um, so I grew up. My father, um, was, um, immigrant from Germany. He immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Um, the LDS church sponsored him to get to Salt Lake City. His family had converted to Mormonism in Germany, um, in the 1920s. Um, and my mother. Comes from Italian immigrants. Uh, her family are, she’s related to Italian immigrants who were, um, you know, ended up in southeastern Utah hurting sheep and mining coal.

[00:02:28] Erika: They were, you know, recruited by these agents who, you know, brought people into the American West. And both my parents met, um, and I grew up in Salt Lake City as a non-Mormon. And one of the kind of interesting things, And you know, if you grow up with a family who you know, has dinner at the kitchen table and they’ll talk about their histories and how it shapes, um, their lives, you begin to think about how it shapes your life.

[00:02:59] Erika: And, you know, I would hear these stories about, um, Italians hurting sheep, lack of water, um, Various conflicts. Mormon, non-Mormon, in southeastern Utah. And then I would go to school and take a Utah history class and you know, that history wasn’t represented. And then I would go home and hear these stories about.

[00:03:25] Erika: You know, growing up in Germany during the middle of World War II and uh, having to flee the country, and that wasn’t the story that was told, uh, you know, by and large. Um, and so just beginning to, you know, as I went to college, I actually went to college to be an artist. I went to the University of Utah as an art major and um, you know, I just, in high school, The history that I learned didn’t necessarily seem relevant to my life.

[00:03:51] Erika: It didn’t reflect my family’s experiences. It it, you know, I know I had a hard time connecting to it. I guess I’ll just say it like that. Say it like that. Uh, in other words, I never expected that I would be a history major and I took a required history class as an art student. Um, got tired of drawing stuff.

[00:04:11] Erika: Um, really, really liked it. Got to go into the archives for the first time as a sophomore. Took a class from this amazing professor named Peggy Pasco, who had, you know, went on to have this amazing career and became my undergraduate advisor. And, you know, suddenly there I was reading these documents that seemed to have more relevance to the kinds of stories that were missing or that were relevant to the stories that were missing.

[00:04:36] Erika: And I really like that, right? Like what is the narrative, et cetera. So I became a history major, um, and then, You know, and this is, I love my family. Big, tight, close knit family, but Utah can feel, it felt kind of limiting to me. I wanted to move beyond Utah, so I, when I applied to graduate school, I took the offer at the place that was furthest away from Utah, which is.

[00:05:02] Erika: Rutgers. So I moved to New Jersey because it seemed very exotic to me as somebody from Utah. Um, and there I have, you know, other amazing professors who were really interested in public history and public facing scholarship, um, and material culture. So Rutgers really at the time was a kind of place where you thought about, uh, cultural history, how, you know, You know, music, art, artifacts, material culture, all those kinds of things.

[00:05:30] Erika: So that’s kind of how I got to graduate school. And from there, um, I worked at a public facing the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity culture and Modern Experience. Um, that was out of Rutgers Newark, um, as a postdoc. And we did all public facing scholarships. So how do we make all this stuff that we study in the academy relevant to the lives of people who are not in the academy?

[00:05:51] Erika: Um, how is. The history that we tell and think about Rooted, um, to those people. Um, and how can we get their stories into the academy? And what more importantly can the Academy learn from. Know people beyond its walls. And that was revelatory for me. I love that. The person I worked with there was Clemen Alexander Price.

[00:06:13] Erika: That center is now called the Price Institute. Um, and then I got a job at UTEP and then I ended up at ut and that’s a very long winded way, probably of telling you my origin story.

[00:06:24] Frederick: No, it’s fascinating. Also, just a really important and clear reminder. You know, history and the archives isn’t something that is dead and in the past, very much something that is living and relevant to.

[00:06:44] Frederick: Us today.

[00:06:47] Erika: Yeah, I, I think that is the main lesson that I try to convey in almost all my classes with students at ut, which is you might be an engineering major or an art major and you might think you hate history, but you probably don’t. What has happened is you probably. Just been given the same version of history over and over again and you don’t see how it’s relevant to your life.

[00:07:10] Erika: But if you can begin to think about how the past has shaped who you are, where you are, the world we live in, it becomes super exciting. So that’s one of the things I think about a lot.

[00:07:23] Frederick: Your first book, multi award winning book Indian Made had me thinking a lot about, um, Art, art created by indigenous communities.

[00:07:37] Frederick: But then of course, this thing called tourism and how it created and creates a marketplace in and around these sacred traditions. Can you share a little bit of, um, your work from that book and some, some insights, some takeaways?

[00:07:59] Erika: Um, Sure. Um, So the kind of key issues that I deal with in that book. Um, you know, I, I just started to look into, I, I, I’m very interested in material culture, how material culture is produced, how it reflects, um, different groups and societies.

[00:08:19] Erika: And I became, you know, I interested in anthropologists and archeologists and, you know, these. Essentially like white people who went to Indian reservations and started to collect a lot of material culture from indigenous people. It was called at the time, kind of salvage anthropology. And as part of this, um, narrative that native peoples were disappearing, um, in the American West.

[00:08:50] Erika: Um, Commercial entities try to capitalize on that, right. And convince Well, they, yeah. They try to capitalize on that and they, they begin to think about how can we market these goods as rare and charge more for them? Wow. paying indigenous people to produce these goods. And underpaying, like severely underpaying them.

[00:09:17] Erika: So I became kind of interested in that market interaction. So who was making, who were making the goods for the tourist marketplace? So in particular, I looked at the Ashes and Topeka in Santa Fe railway, which traveled essentially from Kansas to California. Um, Had a, one of the most successful marketing campaigns in American history, early advertising campaign to convince people to take the train, um, from the East Coast to the West coast.

[00:09:45] Erika: A lot of that has to do with a large economic depression where shipping goods like. Um, trees or resources, lumber, resources like that, you know, had gutted and they needed a new market. And so they were like, We’ll get people to travel. And they do. And part of that is selling the place sell, selling the Southwest as a region of sunshine, the land of sunshine, um, you know, California.

[00:10:10] Erika: Um, in similar terms, you know, getting people to travel out there and along the way. You know, it’s a long, arduous journey across the continent by rail. Um, even a luxury train in the early 20th century. So, you know, they needed to create some tourist experiences for those travelers so that that trip was enjoyable.

[00:10:32] Erika: Um, that meant Fred Harvey built a hotel chain, first hotel chain, um, in America, First chain in America, um, where he could market, you know, You would get a decent meal and a good cup of coffee. Oh, and we can help you, um, come into contact with indigenous people who you’ve read about all through the 19th and early 20th century as being.

[00:10:59] Erika: Either in various stereotypical terms, cast as savages or primitives, but now you can, you know, see them in Albuquerque or Santa Fe or Gallup, um, or the Grand Canyon making their wares. You can have a conversation with people, you can learn about their culture, and you can more importantly bring home an artifact that they make.

[00:11:21] Erika: The question, right? So we understand like how that mar, I started to understand how that marketplace developed, but why would indigenous people participate in that marketplace? And the answer is simply indigenous people have always traded. They have always been market oriented. This is not something new for them.

[00:11:41] Erika: What is new is the industrial economy and the idea of kind of, um, economies of scale in a certain sense. And so the, um, you know, ind and the way their cultures and traditional economies, the older economies, pre-industrial economy have been gutted by, you know, genocide, governmental policies, Uh, um, Their treatment, their, the way they were rounded up, put on reservations.

[00:12:12] Erika: That’s certainly the case in the dne, the Navajo, who are the primary, um, indigenous people that I study in that book. Um, so, you know, they wanna make money, they wanna support their families. They have a long tradition of making these artifacts. They are willing to work with traders on the reservation and tourist entities like Fred Harley to create.

[00:12:35] Erika: Different versions of those that meet more Western sensibilities. So there’s a lot of kind of give and take in that marketplace. And that’s really what that book, um, is about. And it’s about the bind, the way in which the market, the modern industrial marketplace opens up opportunities for indigenous people that also closes them down as well.

[00:12:56] Frederick: It’s interesting that you have, uh, and of course we have to kind of pick periods, otherwise, our right, our work would be impossible. But you ended in 1960. What did you, what did you start to see? Uh, more of the same, uh, something different as we moved into those kind of middle, middle, um, decades of the 20th century.

[00:13:17] Erika: Yeah, I, I really stop actually right before World War. I think it’s 1940. Maybe there’s a typo in my bio there. Okay. But, um, yeah, so I, I really stop in 1940 pre World War II because the war changes. World War II kind of changes everything for, um, indigenous people, especially the Navajo, when. , you know, for a variety of reasons.

[00:13:39] Erika: But, um, so what I look at is how the great I look at the book really kind of closes with the Great Depression. Uh, and so some of the pressures. That all Americans feel during this great economic depression, uh, indigenous people feel more intensely, and that tourist market is pretty subdued. Only the wealthiest Americans are traveling.

[00:14:06] Erika: That prices for artifacts is being, you know, depressed. It’s, it’s going down. People aren’t making as much money. Nobody’s making as much money. And we get a group of traders who look at mass manufacturing of goods and they think, Well, we can streamline the manufacturing of something like silver jewelry, which the, um, Navajos have become known for.

[00:14:35] Erika: We can hire Indians, indigenous people, Navajo men, to run the machines, and then we can call those goods Indian made. So we’re making more of them for less time. We can charge less and sell more. And that’s where the title of the book comes from. Indian made the question at the center of the, at the end, by the ti, by the 1930s into the 1940s, becomes what can be called Indian made.

[00:15:04] Erika: And what does it mean for something to bear that label? Is it just that there were hands that belonged to a Native American on that good, or did it mean that something of. The artist, him or herself was put into that piece through, according to these kind of meaningful, um, styles of artistry that had been developed over hundreds, if not thousands of years in some cases.

[00:15:38] Erika: So that that court case, So these traders do that. The federal government is. Sending Navajo boys to boarding schools, they’re learning these industrial skill sets. Um, People it, you know, around the train stations where Harvey’s trains are, or where the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe tra trains are coming and Harvey’s got his hotel set up.

[00:16:03] Erika: They hire Navajos to work Navajo’s, Hopies and Pueblo people to work on an assembly line to produce these goods. And consumers feel betrayed when they find this out. And the Federal Trade Commission. Um, says, Wait, that’s not what consumers think they’re buying when they buy something with this label. And anthropologists come in and testify about the history of the artifacts themselves, and Native peoples are kind of on both sides of this issue.

[00:16:32] Erika: They like the wage work. It’s, you know, getting paid to work in a machine shop during the Great Depression seems like a good deal, as opposed to like selling piece work on. You know, trying to sell it on to tourists who might, may or may not buy it from you. So, but in the end, essentially the Navajo nation and indigenous people, um, come out against that form of manufacturing of goods as a, you know, as a real kind of appropriation of indigenous.

[00:17:07] Erika: Artistry for the commercial marketplace. So that’s, that’s kind of why I end. So I end with the kind of close of that case, World War II is gonna shift everything around again. So I look at this, this period kind of after the Navajo get out of a prison camp, essentially up until the beginning of World War ii.

[00:17:29] Frederick: Wow. Uh, amazing. Thank you, uh, for that work and for sharing some of that. You also, Erika, um, gosh, you do so much in and around this, this, um, important knowledge. Archive repository. Um, I noticed as well you published on Norman Rockwell in Navajos, um, Lady Bird Johnson in a sort of public facing pieces, Navajo and fashion.

[00:17:58] Frederick: Oh gosh. Like so much going on here in terms of artifact that the kind of material artifact, um, and also the cultural artifacts and. How they resonate and ripple across. Right. Uh, indigenous, uh, life. Could you share a little bit of some of that work?

[00:18:21] Erika: Yeah. So, um, the, the Rockwell piece and the Ladybird Johnson piece are part of, kind of grow out of my newest book.

[00:18:30] Erika: Um, so in Indian, made Navajo culture in the marketplace. I looked at material culture on a very small scale. So the textiles, um, that have a different history than the silver jewelry that I just discussed. But, so in that book, I really look at textiles and jewelry, but in this book, I became really interested with.

[00:18:52] Erika: Material culture on a large scale. So, um, in particular, Glen Canyon Dam, which is built right on the Utah, Arizona border and was in, is the subject of intense political scrutiny even today because the water level of that due to climate change of that Lake Powell and that the reservoir associated with that dam is decreasing rapidly in a kind of crisis situation.

[00:19:20] Erika: Um, but I became really interested with how did indigenous people think about that dam, the debates around that dam as it. Happening, starting, you know, as, as the dam was being proposed. And so the two pieces, the public facing pieces that you, that you just mentioned are of a part. So at the very beginning of that journey, I started to think about like, Oh, it’s so interesting that.

[00:19:47] Erika: You know, why does the Bureau of Reclamation commission Norman Rockwell to paint a picture of Glen Canyon Dam? And it turned out it was part of a PR campaign, um, where they brought famous artists to paint, draw, sculpt, um, the Bureau of Reclamation hire these famous artists to paint, draw, or sculpt famous reclamation projects across the American West to kind of boost the image of reclamation at a time when people were starting to think about environmental destruction.

[00:20:17] Erika: Um, you know, there wasn’t something such as an environmental impact statement that the Bureau of Reclamation would have to do in 1940 or 50 or 60 to, um, before they launched into building a big dam. Now, of course, we would have to do that or they would have to do that. Um, so, you know, so they’re, you know, people are beginning to criticize this government agency for.

[00:20:40] Erika: Transforming nature in really profound ways. The Sierra Club, there’s a long longer debate and the Bureau of Reclamation wants a PR campaign. So they hire these artists and the most famous artists gets the most famous location. So Norman Rockwell gets Glen Canyon Dam and he goes out to to look at it and he, it’s like a slab of concrete in the middle of the desert.

[00:21:01] Erika: And it’s beautiful in ways and severe in other ways. And finally he just says to the people, he’s with something along the lines of, You know, I really just, I kind of paint people and so Norman Rockwell is actually, you know, they, they decide like they should put some people in it, and the people who live closest in closest proximity to the dam are Navajos.

[00:21:25] Erika: The dam was built. Part of the, well, part of the town of Page Arizona, which was the staging area for the dam, was actually land that belonged to the Navajos, that the Navajos actually gave the government as part of a land swap, um, in exchange for, uh, land somewhere else to, to build this project. There are thousands of books and articles on Glen Canyon Dam, and almost none of them mention indigenous people.

[00:21:50] Erika: So the allocation of resources, the construction of, um, this dam, the transformation of the landscape had profound effects for indigenous people, um, in the region. And Norman Rockwell is the first person to think like we should, you know, We should present some indigenous people in proximity to the dam and they led him.

[00:22:10] Erika: And that painting becomes, you know, there’s lots of debate about that. People who are, uh, about that painting. Um, was he painting a criticism of the dam being built and its effect on indigenous people or wasn’t he? And. , Um, there’s some good in, in evidence to indicate that Norman Rockwell was becoming, he was kind of in the middle of his civil rights paintings when he paints that picture of Navaho at Glen Canyon and Dam, where he’s really thinking about, um, disparate dis um, wealth disparities, racism, um, you know, in American culture.

[00:22:47] Erika: Um, and most people don’t actually have that impression about Norman Rockwell, that he was kind of. That some of his paintings were beginning to verge on social commentary. They think of him as more an illustrator of the, you know, of kind of white culture and white society. Um, so that painting got me thinking.

[00:23:05] Erika: I mean, I was thinking about it before, but that painting really kind of helped me think more deeply that there was. A interesting project and then I started going through the dedication photographs of the ceremony of Glen Canyon Dam and there’s Lady Bird Johnson. And behind her is a big contingent of, um, Navajo musicians all dressed, um, velvet shirts.

[00:23:30] Erika: And so they hired a Navajo band. And when Lady Bird Johnson dedicated the dam, she actually pulls back. She references indigenous culture and. In the region and material culture, the rugs, she pulls back a rug and she kind of connects these older material traditions to these newer ones, right, that are gonna power the homes through hydroelectricity.

[00:23:56] Erika: Um, of the American West and provide water and irrigation and um, you know, like one of the key problems in the US West is, is a really AED region. Where are we gonna get this water? And who’s gonna benefit from it? And so then I began to think through that question and how these kind of symbolic moments can.

[00:24:16] Erika: Provide little windows into questions and when you crack them open, lots of interesting stuff kind of falls out and tells us about dis dispossession, inequality, inequity, all those different things.

[00:24:28] Frederick: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, um, not just ex appropriation, um, land use, but as you pointed out, so pointedly here.

[00:24:40] Frederick: Water, Right? Water use, who has access, um, and especially poignant today.

[00:24:47] Erika: Yes. Um, I mean, we’re coming up 19 November, 1922 will be the signing of the Colorado River. That 100th anniversary of the signing of the Colorado River Compact, where the governors from the seven Western states who were interested in, you know, using the water of the Colorado River, all met and divided up that water without a single Native Nation represented being represented at that conference.

[00:25:13] Erika: Right When treaty rights give. Indigenous people between 20 and 30% of of the Colorado River. Right? So, you know, this is still, this is an ongoing issue. These decisions that were made so long ago, the infrastructure that was built based on those decisions, that the allocation of those waters are really, you know, what do we do now in this time period when we know the numbers that they use to.

[00:25:46] Erika: Determine the, um, the capacity of the river. We’re just wrong to begin with, and climate change is making them worse, so there’s even less water to go around, and there are more people who need that water and more pressures on that water. You know, how do we even begin to think about what’s fair? It, it becomes really interesting to think about.

[00:26:06] Erika: You know, I mean, I got from Yeah. Concrete to water, you know, just through like thinking through material culture,

[00:26:16] Frederick: you know, it, uh, it brings up something. Um, as well, uh, we’ve, I mean we’ve, we’ve seen it, um, you know, with the sitting, the sitting, uh, bull, the Standing Rock stuff, but also, um, the, the Bear’s Ears in Utah where, you know, Obama.

[00:26:34] Frederick: CR created the Bear’s Ears National Monument. And then, uh, about a year later, a huge part of that was basically taken away. Um, but I was thinking, gosh, you know, a lot of the kind of, this happened because of lobbying, and I know you’re a problem solver. You always look for ways to kind of. Progressively and positively kind of, you know, get us in front of issues.

[00:27:07] Frederick: But my goodness, sometimes the lobbying, uh, just feels like it’s an I imposs, like everything we do feels so impossible. Yeah.

[00:27:19] Erika: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s one of those things when you observe, um, history and the forces, the social forces that. Given shape to historical events like we were thinking about earlier.

[00:27:33] Erika: That’s, I think that’s when it becomes to really valuable to think, Okay, wait, how did we get to this place where, um, lobbyists have so much power and you know, who are they representing? Who are these lobbyists representing Bearers is really interesting, um, for a number of different reasons. So the book that is, Kind of, you know, that I’m finishing up right now, traces, um, indigenous people on the Colorado Plateau from, you know, before the arrival of the lds, um, from the latter day Saint Settlers, um, all the way to Bears Ears.

[00:28:14] Erika: And these are connected stories where we have, um, you know, settlers coming in, doing, thinking about, so, There’s a great, there’s a wonderful DNE novel post scholar named Angela Bacca who says, Displace people. Displace people. And what Angelo is talking about there is, you know, you have Joseph Smith who creates this new religion.

[00:28:44] Erika: Um, it’s a pro, It’s not viewed, It’s not viewed. Um, There’s lots of hostility by Protestants, by mainstream Protestants. Um, it is, if you know, these are kind of people looking for a place to call home and they have very specific ideas about who Native Americans are and where they fit in their theology.

[00:29:11] Erika: And they end up in Utah and they began thinking about. Well, what they end up in, what we today call Utah, the Colorado Plateau, and they begin to think about settling there and the first thing they do is they kind of scout out the area and they look for where indigenous people have settled and lived and irrigated and had infrastructure, and then they settle and live and build their own infrastructure on top of that infrastructure and.

[00:29:36] Erika: That is kind of an allegory that’s carried through from the 1840s all the way to Bears Ears today in terms of how settler colonialism, this idea of settler colonialism, that people come in to replace the people who are already there and that’s what they do in many ways. You know, that’s, you know, if we’re moving from that moment of settlement to the creation of Bears Ears, Bears Ears.

[00:30:06] Erika: Turns that story a little bit in really interesting ways because you have suddenly, well, not suddenly indigenous peoples have fought this all along, but indigenous people petitioning the government, five different tribes, tribal entities coming together, tribes who haven’t always gotten along in the region, tribes that were sometimes even at war with each other coming together.

[00:30:27] Erika: I mean, that was a long time ago, but coming together to create a coalition to petition the government to create. A national monument. National monuments are different from national parks. National monuments represent, um, both the protection of a natural environment that is important to human habitation, that has a deep, long human history, um, kind of significant human history, and they give that sign into law, right?

[00:30:54] Erika: That is a kind of possessive claim. We are still here. This is our land, um, recently. Right. Um, through they, they just, um, signed an agreement where they’re gonna co-manage the space. Right. That is a really powerful, um, shift in terms of what is happening to that space. There’s a constant threat, right, that the monument.

[00:31:24] Erika: Presidents create monuments. Presidents can uncreate monuments, as we saw with Trump. Biden recreated the monument. Um, you know, there’s a should Indigenous people have the rights to those spaces. Um, lots of the descendants of the white sellers in, in around bears ears don’t like it for a variety of very complex historical reasons.

[00:31:48] Erika: Um, so is kind of, is a really interesting kind of, Moment in history where we see, you know, indigenous people pushing back very successfully to mana, to claim to have the government recognize their claim to a place that they have lived on since, in their words, time and memorial, or used in since time and Memorial, And the government recognizing that that.

[00:32:16] Erika: That is very powerful, I think, and kind of uplifting

[00:32:21] Frederick: in my view. Yeah, no, I’m glad you, I’m really glad you brought that into the conversation. Um, so that we’re, Yeah, we can also. See the, the other side to activism. Say, um, I, with the positive side to this, the climate change, um, preservation, you know, the designating, uh, areas as monuments, uh, reclamation of land.

[00:32:49] Frederick: It’s not a local, uh, just a US or local phenomena. It’s also a global issue, and I know that your important co-edited volume nation states in the global environment gets into this. Um, what. Nation states. If you, if you don’t mind, and maybe, uh, I’m putting you on the spot here, where do you see things going really well, I guess, Oh, going

[00:33:20] Frederick: Um, or if, if that’s not a fair question. Um, yeah, just wherever you’d like to go with this in terms of, you know, global environment and. You know how different governments have struggled with this. Yeah.

[00:33:34] Erika: Okay. So that’s a, that’s a super interesting question. So one of the, so, um, that book has, is co-edited. I quoted that book with Mark Lawrence and Dave can kill it.

[00:33:44] Erika: And Mark is a diplomatic historian and Dave, uh, is an environmental historian. So Dave, Writes about D D T and Mark writes about diplomacy and I write about sort of indigenous peoples and environment and. You know, we we’re having these conversations about environmental issues. By and large, we think about pollution, extractive industries, um, climate change, uh, large, large scale environ, pesticide use.

[00:34:17] Erika: Um, they don’t obey borders. It’s not like, you know, a chemical company can dump a bunch of pesticides or can spray a bunch of pesticides on crops. On the US side of US Mexico border, and they’re not gonna go to Mexico. Right? Um, so we, we just started to think about who is doing work on these topics that can help us gain a deeper perspective about, you know, when and how different people have tackled environmental issues at different points and time in history.

[00:34:57] Erika: And when have they been successful? And if they weren’t successful, what can we learn from them? So that book is real, is a collect, you know, um, a whole bunch of different scholars writing on everything from the Rhine River in Germany, uh, to, uh, the de militarized zone, um, between, um, North, uh, North Korea and South Korea.

[00:35:20] Erika: Um, and, you know, people looking at. You know, what we can learn from these case studies. So, you know, I would encourage anybody who’s really interested in thinking about, you know, that that idea that nation states can kind of individually stop environmental problems. They can do things internally to stop environmental problems, but most, if not, some of our most pressing environmental problems are really global problems that require global solutions and.

[00:35:53] Erika: Thinking about, thinking about that can be really depressing because we know sometimes the state of global diplomacy is not as what we’d like it to be. There are, like, there are, in the southwest, there are inequities, um, in, you know, um, economic, cultural, social, political that affect the way countries can will.

[00:36:20] Erika: Um, Canon will work together or all these different things. So we kind of, that’s what that book is really about, us trying to start a conversation, um, that could be continued.

[00:36:34] Frederick: Erika, you also brought together a team, a collective to put into practice this concept of radical hope. Maybe you can talk a little bit about this.

[00:36:49] Erika: Yeah, that kind of grew out of that, um, around the hills of the global environmental problem. Um, project, um, I had a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany for the summer to start working on the Glen Canyon book and. Um, while I was there, I met a lot of people working on environmental issues.

[00:37:13] Erika: Ra Rachel Carson was, um, you know, she’s often credited as being one of the most influential voices in the American environmental movement, if not global environmental movement, thinking about things like pesticide use, D D T, et cetera. So her book, Silence Spring kind of started a whole new generation’s, um, environmental awareness so that the.

[00:37:36] Erika: LMU Lit. Maximilian University in Munich has this Carson Center. And so there were, you know, artists, biologists, um, historians, uh, literature people, English professors, all sorts of different people there thinking through various, um, Environmental issues and it would get kind of depressing because there wasn’t a lot of good news often.

[00:38:06] Erika: So there would be kind of small victories. But then, you know, we’d circle back to, you know, a blob of plastic in the ocean, the size of Texas, and you know, people would get kind of depressed. And so we started having these conversations about, you know, what fuels. People’s activism, is it hope or despair?

[00:38:29] Erika: And I sort of feel like, um, it’s hope for a variety of reasons. And, um, my colleague John Barry. Agreed. And he was very enamored with this book called Radical Hope by Jonathan Leer, um, which is a really wonderful introduction to the concept. There are other scholars who have also talked about it. Um, I don’t love all aspects of that book as a scholar of native and indigenous people, but the basic premise of the idea is how do.

[00:39:09] Erika: People or cultures face, moments of despair, and how do they create a generative, hopeful solution forward looking solution to the problems they’re facing? Like how do they move forward in the face of despair? And in that action is a very radical concept of hope, is the very radical concept of hope. And so we.

[00:39:35] Erika: Created a conference based on this idea, and we brought a whole bunch of different people in to talk about their work as it related to this concept. Everything from early modern England to wind the creation of contemporary, um, wind power in Greece, um, engineers, artists. Um, uh, literature professors, uh, every everyth, you know, people from all different disciplines, and we have this amazing conference.

[00:40:03] Erika: And normally what you do is you publish another collection, like the Global Environmental Collection, but we decided that we wanted. Something practical and actionable. Something that people could access and use. And so instead of having people write essays, we had them take their papers and their research and create teaching units.

[00:40:24] Erika: Here’s their, here’s how they define radical hope in their case studies. Here’s how it’s manifested. Here are resources you could get yours. Students or your reading group or whatever to look at in order to think through some of these issues as case studies that P could potentially help us both find that hope when we need it , and also maybe influence or help policy makers make better decisions.

[00:40:53] Erika: And so we created the Rattle Club syllabus project out of that, um, conference.

[00:40:59] Frederick: Absolutely amazing. Um, another important space that you have cleared and made for us and your students. This use of digital space to. Allow for the kinds of interconnections of events, historical figures, chronologies in visualizing history.

[00:41:25] Frederick: Can, Can you tell us a little bit about the Cleo Viz. Uh, project.

[00:41:30] Erika: Yeah. So the, uh, Radical Hope Project is a, you know, kind of a group crowdsource syllabus that anybody can access. Clevis is, um, I mean if you just think about all the things I talked about, there are lots of overlapping connections and one of the things that I really to circle back to where we started, I hope my students can really begin to understand is how historical events are connected and, And so I, you know, I had this idea for some software.

[00:42:02] Erika: I thought like, Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could visualize, if we could have our students be kind of history detectives in a, you know, like a, you would watch on TV where they create the big whiteboard and they think about. You know, the history of the Colorado River being, you know, exploration of the Colorado River being linked to the, you know, treatment of indigenous people, et cetera.

[00:42:26] Erika: So how could I help my students visualize all these things, these kind of complicated stories, like they were detectives and I thought like, something like this must exist, but it didn’t. And so I built it. Um, you know, which maybe was a little ambitious, but hey, there we go. Um, and the, What the platform does is the students fill out a little form.

[00:42:48] Erika: It plots the event. Um, they can, you know, once they get their events plotted, they can, they literally draw the connection with their cursor. They make a connection, and then they have to explain what that relationship is. Why did you just connect event A and event B? What’s that relationship? Is it economic, social, political, cultural?

[00:43:06] Erika: Um, so the students begin to think analytically about the narrative they are creating and learning and crafting, and they can add visuals and audio and memes and videos. Um, And that it, it’s a very interactive platform. You can embed the timelines on websites, and we have a bunch of them embedded, um, that different students and instructors have used for various classes, um, that have now become resources, teaching resources.

[00:43:35] Erika: So, you know, it’s a way for students to take what they’re learning, put it in a format that really helps them learn, become better writers, thinkers. Um, Uh, display that information and present that information to public audiences.

[00:43:51] Frederick: Amazing. Wow. Oh my goodness. We’ve, you’ve taken us on a journey from Navajo silver and textile making, and the construction of the, maybe what we could call the tourist industrial complex Norman Rockwell, Lady Burt Johnson, Water and Land Rights to Cleo.

[00:44:13] Frederick: And digital platforms for learning. Uh, Erika, thank you so much. This has been

[00:44:18] Erika: amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time, um, and asking me such wonderful questions.

[00:44:40] Outro: Into The Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the Colaverse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.