Heritage Renewal

Dakota War forums resume next weekend, Friday night in Ellendale and Saturday night in Devils Lake. If you can't get to one of these, or if you want to talk about them, get into our Facebook group, Dakota War Dialog. For the schedule of forums, go here.

A long-term project of the center is the documentation of Highway 281, which bisects the Great Plains from Dunseith to Brownsville. Eventually we'd like to forge a comprehensive guide to heritage tourism along 281. Our Facebook page, 281: Great Plains Highway, has 215 likes from multiple states. Get into the page if you'd like to receive updates from the road. Images from the highway are assembled into a Flickr collection, comprising 28 sets and growing. Check out the Kiowa flat-painting from Anadarko, for instance; the fabulous post-rock architecture of central Kansas, such as the old Russell County sheriff's residence; or the abandoned drive-in theater at O'Neill, Nebraska. We'll keep building the database on 281 incrementally until we capture resources to launch a larger effort along these lines.

Images from the Dakota War forums in Fort Yates and Watford City - http://www.flickr.com/photos/heritagerenewal/sets/72157633083599703/

One of the center's key lines of work has to do with development of heritage tourism capacity, and highways are important to this. 281, for instance, which goes by many names - American Legion Highway, Willa Cather Roadway, Tom Osborn Expressway, and others. We call it the Great Plains Highway. Dunseith to Brownsville, 281 is a transect of the plains. Incrementally, we're building capacity to do a heritage tourism initiative oriented along this transect. We have a Facebook page in operation. You also can visit our Flickr site and view a large and growing collection of images.

The center is well underway with its research on the Siege of Fort Abercrombie, funded by the American Battlefield Protection Program of the National Park Service. Now, with funding from the North Dakota Humanities Council, we launch a series of four public forums on the Dakota War in Dakota Territory. These programs take place in Fort Yates on 22 March, in Watford City on 23 March, in Ellendale on 5 April, and in Devils Lake on 6 April. Go here for details.