Heritage Renewal

Check out the link at right of the home page. Or, if you're easily distracted, just use this one. Either way, you'll get information about a cool series of public forums being facilitated by the Center for Heritage Renewal - the Man Camp Dialogues. These feature the research scholars of the North Dakota Man Camp Project going public with their research on man camp life. The first forum is 1-3pm Sunday 8 May at the High Plains Cultural Center in Killdeer. It's being hosted by the Dunn County Historical Society & Museum. Funding comes from the North Dakota Humanities Council. The website gives a link to an excellent study guide composed by Bill Caraher. Within a few days this same document will go live at Amazon CreateSpace as Circular No. 1 of the Center for Heritage Renewal.

He's new to us, and pretty much new to the rest of the world, too. We're talking about Kippy the Keystone Bear, a newly discovered big thing in Dawson, North Dakota. Check him out in uour Flickr album, here - https://www.flickr.com/photos/heritagerenewal/sets/72157648372133883/

Big things - roadside monstrosities - are important heritage resources that speak to grassroots heritage tourists and express regional identity, or sometimes just playfulness.

Research on battlefields of the Dakota War, conducted for the Battlefield Protection Program of the National Park Service, is forging ahead nicely. Going over the ground, maps and documents in hand, produces fundamental new insights about what went down in these places. Here are a couple of places to follow developments.

Heritage Trails - the center's Facebook group for grassroots heritage tourism. Since the research is about historic sites, we're posting notes here about accessible Dakota War sites we are surveying.

Flickr Site - Look for our Dakota War Collection here, comprising albums of photos from Dakota War sites.