On Tuesday, September 21, 2021, at 6 pm, Bryce Tellmann will present as part of the STEAM Café series. This free presentation will take place at Hay Camp Brewing Company in downtown Rapid City (601 Kansas City St.) and will also be available to watch via livestream on Zoom. The talk will also be posted to the SD Mines YouTube channel and the SD Mines Facebook page after the event.

If you ask someone from South Dakota what region of the country they hail from, you can expect any number of answers: “the Midwest”; “the Black Hills”; “West River”; “the Great Plains”; “the Northern Plains”. Regions are notoriously difficult to define, but the ideas and stories we form about a region affect the lives of people who live there, especially when it comes to how communities approach environmental, economic, and social challenges. Dr. Bryce Tellmann, instructor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at South Dakota Mines, will discuss how our regional ideas of the Great Plains have changed over the past two centuries, what those ideas mean for communities in the present, and how new regional ideas could help us meet the challenges of the future.