Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Rural museums: harnessing the power of place to confront silences and revitalize communities(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Moore, Sabre Addington; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Alex Harmon and Robert RydellIn the United States, 43 percent of all museums are in rural towns; in Montana, rural towns account for 56.5 percent of museums. Contemporary research has neglected museums based in rural communities. While scholarship on libraries and education in rural communities thrives, there is a gap in research on rural museums. This dissertation acknowledges that gap. It explores how rural museums, like the Carter County Museum in Ekalaka, Montana, can employ the Rural Social Space Model to identify and confront the usual silences about the land and its settlement and explore the ways that power is exercised in the practices of place. Using this framework, this dissertation draws connections between the museum and the areas of environment, social well-being, and economic development, which produce rural social space and contribute to community vitality. This strategy recognizes the value of a physical place, its unique and varied histories, and the diversity of people within and connected to that place, both past and present. Rural communities have distinctive histories embedded within the culture and historical context of a broader region. Rural museums foster the experience of these histories as meaningful and personal, nurturing identity and connection to local places. As such, museums play a vital role in rural community life and provide tools to address equity challenges facing rural places. These museums regularly engage in civic work and can leverage their positions as community congregant spaces and trusted institutions to further civic action, including fostering deliberate discussion, offering volunteer opportunities, hosting public meetings, and engaging visitors in exhibits that explore the connection of past history to present action.Item Exploratory research of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel acting as an indigenous place-based pedagogical instrument for learning sky-earth relationships, skywatching fundamentals, and celestial mechanics(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2014) Merriot, Ivy T. Fisher-Herriges; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Sara MastThis study explored the ability of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel to act as a pedagogical instrument for learning sky-earth relationships. The Big Horn Medicine Wheel is one of six large stone wheels in the northern plains that show astronomical potential. It is a National Historic Landmark and Sacred Site, created before all known histories--oral and written. Forty years ago, John Eddy and Jack Robinson proposed the first stellar alignments at the Wheel. My own study between 2009 and 2014 concluded that the Wheel's placement, its "Place," reveals extensive symmetry with celestial mechanics and offers pedagogy for learning skywatching fundamentals. My study combined the methods of Native Science and Western science. I collected oral histories, compared images of the Wheel taken by various photographers over 100 years, and tracked stars and the Sun through summer and fall seasons for five years using the naked eye, binoculars, transits, GPS, and a Meade Cassegrain 8" electronic telescope. I sought Native ceremony to prepare for the immersion of my senses in place-based cognition while allowing my intelligence to learn from "inert" materials such as stars, mountains, and stones. My results showed the Wheel accurately mirrors the sky using embedded stones on the ground to correspond to the major north polar stars over the Earth's 24,000 precessional cycle. The Wheel is perfectly situated on the shoulder of Medicine Mountain to make use of the dip in the northern mountainous horizon to cradle the precessional north polar stars as they roll through their millennia cycles, creating a stellar circle in the sky above the Wheel's stone circle on earth. I found the latitude of the Wheel is a "sweet spot" for detecting small angular changes in heliacal stars over time and for the nightly, yearly, and 5000-year circular movement of its zenith star Capella, which also holds a symmetry with the northern landscape. And I found the twenty-eight segments of the Wheel correspond to stellar grid systems based on asterisms. I make no conclusion about the builder's purpose, only about the possible pedagogical uses of the symmetry of the Wheel in its contextual Place.