Revisited Frontiers: The Bakken, the Plains, Potential Futures, and Real Pasts

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2016-01-01
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Braun, Sebastian
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Braun, Sebastian
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American Indian Studies

The American Indian Studies Program (AISP) is the oldest ethnic studies program at Iowa State University and currently boasts an enrollment of over 500 students, and the active participation of 8 academic departments. Since 1972, this cross-disciplinary program has offered students opportunities to learn more about the rich cultural heritage of American Indians, their historical relationship to each other and to other societies, their role and influence in contemporary American society, and their legal and political status.

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Anthropology

The Department of Anthropology seeks to teach students what it means to be human by examining the four sub-disciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. This prepares students for work in academia, research, or with government agencies, development organizations, museums, or private businesses and corporations.

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The Department of Anthropology was formed in 1991 as a result of the division of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

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1991-present

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Abstract

During the Bakken oil boom beginning in 2008, people from all over the United States would once again flock to North Dakota, lured by economic possibilities. In this boom, however, images of monotonous doom have had no place. In the curious historical frame of post-terror insecurities and anger, of rising, if reluctant, acknowledgment that climate change has real consequences, of post-Iraq realizations that it might not be possible to truly control oil abroad, and of living through an economic depression that wiped away jobs (yet left wealth intact), messages about the Bakken have been very clear. The oil boom, while a temporary inconvenience, has helped North Dakota stay out of economic trouble, has brought a population increase, has revitalized the state, and has put the state on the map.

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This chapter is from The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota, edited by William Caraher and Kyle Conway. Grand Forks, ND: The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2016.

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