Up-Coming Events
Jamie Skillen
Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, Calvin College
The Gift of Good Land: Ecosystem Management and the Crisis of Scientific and Political Authority
Friday, September 25, 1:30 p.m.
Science Building 010
Patricia O'Connell Killen
Professor of Religion, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA
Backwater, Bellwether, Barometer? — Personal Spirituality, Organized Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest
Monday, November 16, 3:30 p.m.
Commons Annex Lecture Hall
What are the consequences for faith communities and public life in a region where most people pursue their spiritual journeys outside the doors of church, synagogue, temple, or mosque, and always have? How do faith communities sustain themselves, relate to their theological heritages, and bring their moral visions to bear on public issues when, together, they make up a minority of the population? What constitutes public presence in a region where adults who no longer identify with any religious tradition make up a group twice the size of the largest Christian denomination? This is the Pacific Northwest, a region where history, demographics, and geography have generated a distinctive individual and institutional religious ethos. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities that the Pacific Northwest’s religious characteristics have presented to faith communities and considers what the region’s religious style might portend for religion in the U.S. into the mid-21st century.
Co-sponsored by the Mellema Program, the Byker Chair, the Henry Institute, and the History department.
William Katerberg
"Apocalyptic Visions and Movements in the American West Since World War II"
This lecture likely will be in the spring semester.
Recent Events
Being Caribou
In February 2009, the Canadian wildlife biologist and park warden Karsten Heuer showed his documentary film Being Caribou and gave a 
lecture on his work on wildlife preservation. In 1998 and 1999, Heuer walked and skied from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to Canada's Yukon Territory to publicize a proposal for a 1,900 mile long system of wildlife corridors and reserves (the Y2Y Initiative).
In 2003, he and Leanne Allison spent several months following the Porcupine caribou herd from the Yukon to their endangered calving grounds in the disputed ANWR region of Alaska. This became the basis for a book and film, Being Caribou. Heuer gave a lecture entitled “Necessary Journeys: What is Wilderness and Why Should We Care?” The lecture was co-sponsored by the Mellema Program, C.E.A.P., the Biology department, and the Philosophy department.
God's Country
In April 2009, Darren Dochuk, an assistant professor of history at Purdue University, gave a lecture entitled, “God's Country: The Conservative Politics of Faith, Place, and Region in the Twentieth-Century American West.” The event was co-sponsored by the History department and the Mellema program.
The Burning Season
In February 2008, the Mellema Program helped organize an event for the Calvin Academy for Lifelong Learning. Biology professor Randy Van Dragt spoke in the Noontime series on “The Burning Season: How Wildfire Shaped the American Landscape.”
Finding Their Own Dance
In April 2008, co-sponsored with the HPERDS department, professor Ellen Van’t Hof presented her documentary film, Finding Their Own 
Dance: Reawakening the Alaskan Alutiiq Arts, for which she had received Mellema Program funding. The film was produced by Rob Prince, who teaches in the Communication Arts and Sciences program.
The Mellema Program and the Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies (GGES) department co-sponsored a public lecture in April 2008 entitled “Who Owns the West?” by Jamie Skillen, now a professor in the GGES department. The lecture examined conflicts over property rights in the West in the twentieth century.
Previous events
February 2007: “Opus Cactus.” This performance by the dance-illusionist troupe MOMIX, co-sponsored with the Artists Series, celebrated the beauty of the Sonoran desert in Arizona with light and music, classical dance, gymnastics, and ballet. MOMIX has performed around the world.
March 2007: “Cybernetic Frontiers, Ecotopias, and Visions of Apocalypse: The American West in Science Fiction and Film,” a public lecture by William Katerberg.
February and March 2006: “Picturing Faith: Religious America in Government Photography, 1935-1943,” a co-sponsored exhibit incorporated significant coverage of the American West and related events at the Center Art Gallery at Calvin College. It included a screening of the classic film The Grapes of Wrath and a lecture by Colleen McDannell of the University of Utah.
Spring 2006: Series of two public lectures on Mexican and Mexican-American laborers in California—“Cesar Chavez’s Protestant Allies: The California Migrant Ministry and the Farm Worker’s Movement, 1962-1975” by Ron Wells of the Calvin History Department and “Negotiating Work and Family in California’s Imperial Valley: Listening to the Voices of Mexican American Women” by Barbara Wells of the Sociology Department at Maryville College in Tennessee.
Spring 2005: Slide based lecture “Wild West, Lost West: The Art of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell” by art historian Brian Dippie of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
September 2004: Two-day residency by Ensemble Español, including “Tales of Spain,” a program for children from undeserved areas or in Spanish immersion programs; “Spain in America” for an audience of 697 (one-fourth students); educational activities for Calvin students; and workshops on Flamenco and folkloric dance.
February 2004: In connection with Black History Month, the Mellema Program and Multicultural Affairs sponsored a lecture and historical reenactment by John Bell on the Buffalo Soldiers—African American cavalry and infantry units that served in the American West from the 1860s to the 1940s.
October 2003: “The View from the Big House: Nuns and Prisoners in the American West,” a public lecture by Anne Butler of the history department of Utah State University and editor of the Western Historical Quarterly
