Interaction

October 19, 2005

How the North American West is one: Multidisciplinary pioneers explore what makes this land unique

There's the Wild West and then there's the West before it was spun, the West as it has been created, imagined, transformed, revered and destroyed. That's the West that occupies the historians who in 2002 established the Center for the Study of the North American West.

Note the name: This is a hefty and transnational West, one that includes Canada west of Ontario, northern Mexico and all of the United States west of the Mississippi.

Stanford's history, notes deputy director Margaret O'Mara, is inextricably bound up with that of the West. At the same time, Stanford's approach to social and policy problems is one that recognizes few borders. Pollution, fish and sprawl, to name three pertinent issues, do not stop at state boundaries. Fish don't even stop at national boundaries.

Nor, obviously, are these problems specific to one discipline. The center has a "deliberate policy bent," says O'Mara, whose own research focuses on Silicon Valley, not a far cry from cowboys. But she and the two founders and co-directors of the center, David Kennedy and Richard White, are interested in having the center be a bridge between academics and professionals of very different sorts.

"The thing about interdisciplinary work is that it's hard," O'Mara says. "There are several different languages being spoken, which adds several layers of preparation to a conference. If you don't do that preparation, everyone's hovering five feet off the ground and no one relates."

David Kennedy, co-director of the center.

"Interdisciplinarity on steroids" is how Kennedy puts it.

So conferences are deliberately small and by invitation only. If things work out as they should, they're launching pads for further research. "We're trying to unite academics, legislators, policymakers and activists," White says, adding that the center's core will always be academic.

"We hope these conferences will become our trademark," Kennedy says. "Stanford ought to be the premier place for the study of this region." Given Stanford's own history, "we can do this differently and better" than other universities. "It's incumbent upon us to draw on our strength. Anyone with any sort of interest in the region should know that this is the go-to place."

As an example, the center sponsored a conference in February 2005 on how the press reports on the West, as a result of which the staff is hoping to establish short-term fellowships for journalists (http://west.stanford.edu/events/starting_west/conference_report.html).

Though it began operations three years ago, a secure future was not in place until last year, when L. W. "Bill" Lane, the former publisher of Sunset magazine, donated $5 million to endow the center, which was matched by $4 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Margaret O'Mara, deputy director of the center

"That grant launched the center into new possibilities," O'Mara says. Perhaps it's because historians typically are underfunded, and therefore naturally frugal, but the fact is that they get a lot of bang for their buck, she says. "We're good stewards of our money."

With it, the center has organized conferences, paid for course development and funded undergraduate interns and postdoctoral fellows. Four interns spent last summer in Yellowstone National Park working on anthropological, ethnographic and archival projects, and Kennedy says he hopes the program will be expanded to embrace more students and more national parks.

If the center is to become the "go-to place" for scholars and professionals interested in the West, as Kennedy envisions, then it needs to be the repository of a great deal of data. To that end, the center's leaders are holding conversations with experts on campus and off about what sort of databases the university has or needs, how they would be organized and to what purpose. Nowhere else is there a place where social scientists, environmentalists, journalists, historians and demographers, all working on Western themes, can come together to study and converse, and such a place is essential, Kennedy says.

The first courses funded by the center were a political science class and a photography course. Offerings in 2005-06 include a graduate seminar co-taught by White, Buzz Thompson and Karen Seto about San Francisco Bay. Thompson is director of the Stanford Institute for the Environment and a professor at the Law School, and Seto is an assistant professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Students will undertake projects as part of research teams that must represent various disciplines, White explains. "These projects won't be interdisciplinary because students come from different fields, but rather because the problems themselves are interdisciplinary," he says.

The center also invites outside speakers. One such guest last spring was Christopher Morris from the University of Texas-Arlington. A fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center last year, Morris was writing a book called A Big Muddy River Runs Through It, a study of flood control projects on the lower Mississippi River. The shape of the book, one assumes, underwent changes this fall. But what does that have to do with the West? one might ask. Look at a map. Advocates of the so-called hydrological solution essentially argued that the rocks of Montana end up in New Orleans, making flood control a vast regional issue. (They did not prevail; the Army Corps of Engineers fought for the construction of levees and won.)

Looking ahead, this year's conference will be on "Forestry and the West," a subject both international and interdisciplinary. Industry, the environment, native peoples, economics and demography are among the matters sure to be on the agenda.

And further ahead, the center will collaborate with the Cantor Center for Visual Arts when the museum hosts a traveling reprise of photographer Richard Avedon's historic 1979 exhibit, In the American West, organized by the original host museum, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Cantor curator Hilarie Faberman, who was at the 1979 show and still remembers it as a "real eye-opener," says she looks forward to working with Kennedy and his colleagues to get students involved with the exhibit through classes, special projects or perhaps even in the show's installation. The show will be at the Cantor Center in 2007.

Considering the vast range of themes that can comfortably find a home at the center, it is logical to ask how the West is one. The only U.S. region with an arguably clear identity, forged in military defeat, is the South, Kennedy says. The West is a harder one to pin down, which does not mean that the distinctiveness does not exist. When the center first opened, he outlined what he called six "drivers" that lend the region identity: technological ingenuity, economic cupidity, political timidity, jurisdictional complexity, demographic fluidity and climatological aridity. All those things are surely present elsewhere, but not simultaneously. A good definition of the West "is up for argument," he says, but no one doubts there is indeed something distinctive about this part of the world.

The center today is housed in the History Department simply because it was established by historians. Though happy where they are, O'Mara says, at some point they'd like to move to a place that is more obviously a crossroads for different disciplines—perhaps in the environment and energy building at the future Science and Engineering Quad. Thompson says he'd be happy to have them at the Institute for the Environment.

"It seems like half the campus has interests in common with the center," curator Faberman observes in discussing the Avedon collaboration. Wherever the center ends up, the building manager better have a lot of space reserved.