In this episode, award-winning writer and historian Dr. Megan Kate Nelson joins us to talk about why certain stories and icons depicting outdated ideas of the American frontier are so persistent in popular culture today despite having been widely critiqued within academia; what kinds of stories might replace such depictions; and why we should care about more honestly accounting for the diverse cast of historical figures whose interwoven lives profoundly shaped the nineteenth-century West.

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, is at once able bring alive the distinctiveness of Blackfeet identity, culture, and what it means to belong to the land, while simultaneously evoking deeper truths at the heart of the human condition. Our conversation covers this dance between the particular and the universal, how language brings landscape into being, storytelling as an aesthetic object, the relationship between oral Blackfeet tradition and written narratives, and the role of art in transcending the self.

In this short introductory episode, host Daniel Grant explains why we titled the podcast Wrinkles in the Map, and what you can expect to hear in future episodes.