The Environmental Center (BUEC)
The Bucknell University Environmental Center (BUEC) supports faculty, staff, and students and is dedicated to environmental and nature-related learning, teaching, scholarship, service, and action at local, regional, national, and international levels.
Susquehanna added to historic water-trail
On the bank of the Chesapeake Bay on May 16 U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar designated the Susquehanna and several other smaller rivers as national historic connector trails to the Chesapeake's historic water-trail network, culminating five years of work by a Bucknell University-led team involving undergraduate researchers. The Susquehanna trail will be part of the first, and longest, system of historic water trails (or "blueways") overseen by the National Park Service.
In attendance were delegations from Bucknell and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, partners together in the project linked by Sid Jamieson of Bucknell, a Haudenosaunee chief and former coach of the university's men's lacrosse team and of the Iroquois National Lacrosse Team.
The new national designation recognizes the importance of the Susquehanna River, including the stretch adjoining the Bucknell campus, in the early history of America, and particularly as a central corridor for interactions between Native American and Euroamerican cultures.
"This designation marks an important moment in the history of the Susquehanna River and the communities that have lived along its banks for thousands of years," said Professor of German and Humanities Katherine Faull, whose research led the effort at Bucknell, which was coordinated by the Nature and Human Communities Initiative of the Environmental Center. "Rather than being America's forgotten river, the Susquehanna will now take its place as America's mother river, the location of human history and cultural contact."
Faull is translating the diaries of early European inhabitants of the river, detailing their interactions with Native Americans. She also has developed a kayaking tour of the North Branch of the river this summer, associated with the new trail and focusing on eighteenth-century relations between Moravian Christians and Native American communities on the corridor.
In addition, Bucknell's involvement in the historic trail project has spawned three new courses and a multimedia book series, involving a dozen Bucknell faculty, and research projects involving four more undergraduates this summer.
Work on the trail at Bucknell also involved collaboration with researchers at Bloomsburg University and SUNY University of Buffalo, and Native American communities in Pennsylvania and New York, in mapping the river's early history and its historic landscapes.
Prof. Faull's work on a National Endowment for the Humanities funded project on eighteenth-century Moravian Christian diaries from a community at the Confluence of the West and North branches formed a central part of the Bucknell research, along with GIS research led by Bucknell student Emily Bitely '11. The GIS work compared John Smith's early seventeenth-century map of the river to current geography and historic American Indian sites.
Bucknell students in the initial project also included A. Joseph McMullen, Emily Anderson, Jenny Stevens and Molly Clay. Other faculty and staff involved in the trail effort have included Library and Information Technology GIS coordinator Janine Glathar, Professor of Geography Ben Marsh, and Associate Professor of English Alf Siewers.
Bucknell's involvement with the historic trail project is coordinated by the Nature and Human Communities Initiative (NHCI), which focuses on humanities and social science approaches to the Susquehanna Valley's natural and human environments. In tandem with the trail project, NHCI is also developing with the Bucknell University Press a multimedia book series, Stories of the Susquehanna Valley, co-edited by Faull and Siewers.
"This is a unique learning and research opportunity in which students and faculty are able to participate in efforts to examine the connection between story-telling and environmental conservation on the Susquehanna River," said Siewers, who was founding faculty coordinator of NHCI and who received a Scadden Fellowship from Bucknell to work on the literary history of the river in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Bucknell alumnus Skip Wieder provided key leadership in forging a partnerships between the university and environmental partners including the Conservation Fund, the Chesapeake Conservancy, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, and the Susquehanna Greenway Partnership, all of which have been involved in the trail's development.
In the fall, Siewers and Faull will teach a new Integrated Perspectives course, "The Susquehanna Country," which will use the new historic trail corridor as a focus. It follows their teaching of two courses last year as part of the "Bucknell on the Susquehanna" program, which also involved the trail project. In addition, Siewers noted that the trail would form part of the curriculum for the Bucknell Environmental Residential College this fall, in which he will be a senior fellow.
Other faculty, such as Associate Geography Professor Duane Griffin, who also attended the designation ceremony, are involved in the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley series. Griffin is leading a team of seven scientists who are planning a volume and accompanying online materials on the natural history of the Susquehanna.
Through the NHCI, Faull and Siewers will continue working this summer with students on developing interpretive materials for the historic corridor, including work on digital mapping of the river's early history. The summer work is being done in conjunction with Bucknell's Library and Information Technology Department and is funded by the Program for Undergraduate Research and by an environmental education grant to Bucknell from the Mellon Foundation.
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