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“Geology with a soul:” New OMSI exhibit highlights Indigenous storytelling and geology
(ictnews.org)
Lyric Aquino
Underscore Native News + Report for America
Indigenous stories are more than myths — they’re lessons informed by traditional knowledge and historical accounts according to research from Roger Amerman and Ellen Morris Bishop, in the newest exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Technology and Industry.
“Heads and Hearts: Seeing the Landscape Through Nez Perce Eyes” invites visitors to view history in the Pacific Northwest through a Nimiipuu, or Nez Perce, lense. Running through Feb. 16, the exhibit uses stories from Nimiipuu to explore ancient geological events, like the eruption of Mount Mazama (leading to the creation of Crater Lake), as well as ice age floods, earthquakes, and landslides.
“You have these stories that are oftentimes sort of morally and ethically important, but they’re also geologically important,” Morris Bishop, a consulting geologist for the exhibit, said.
Ethnogeologist Roger Amerman, Choctaw Nation citizen (left), and geologist Ellen Morris Bishop (right) stand in front of panels from the exhibit they consulted on “Heads & Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes.” Amerman said he hopes presenting research with Morris Bishop will inspire other to conduct ethnogeology research across the world.
(Photo by Lyric Aquino, Underscore Native News + Report for America)
For nearly two years Amerman, a Choctaw Nation citizen and ethnogeologist, and Morris Bishop, gathered legends from the Nimiipuu storytellers and used them to further understand geological events they’ve studied in Western science.
Traditional geology consists of the study of minerals and rocks and the structure of the Earth’s surface to understand its history and composition. According to Amerman, both geologists practiced ethnogeology, or the Indigenous understanding of landscape for geologic history processes and materials, during their researching process. Meaning, they used historical insights from various tribes, particularly the Nez Perce, to understand the ancient history of geological events.
Including the voices of tribal leaders and storytellers was important to Amerman and Morris Bishop. With permission, they spent time filming traditional stories from the Nez Perce for the exhibit and sharing their research with the tribe.
Nez Perce knowledge holders were taken on a trip up through Snake River and Hell’s Canyon while they shared their stories. According to Morris Bishop, for many of them it was their first time in the heart of their homeland.
“It was important to us to basically tell the story of how these people who lived here for probably 20,000 years understood their landscape, and had witnessed and understood a lot of geologic events, like earthquakes, Ice Age, floods and many landslides, and how those were captured in their stories,” she said.
A petroglyph in the “Heads & Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes” exhibit. The petroglyph depicts a good productive location to hunt bighorn sheep. (Photo by Lyric Aquino, Underscore Native News + Report for America)
In one of the stories an elder provided anecdotal evidence of historic floods coming through Hell’s Canyon around 16,000 to 14,000 years ago and what the tribe did to seek refuge during the disaster. The legend states the Nez Perce climbed to the top of Steptoe Butte and shared the area with wildlife including cougars, bears, otters and raccoons who were seeking shelter from the flood.
But for Morris-Bishop and Amerman, these details gave them important insight into how far and high floodwaters extended. While these stories, which they call “mythical truths,” incorporate both truthful and fictional elements, Morris Bishop said the stories needed characters to make them memorable to withstand time.
“You need to be able to tell people about these floods, but you need characters in a story,” she said. “So it’s better if you have the mythical old man who climbs to the top of a rock in order to fish when there’s a big flood.”
Petroglyphs sit in front of panels filled with details about the eruption of Mount Mazama, an ancient earthquake and ice age flooding from Ethnogeologist Roger Amerman, Choctaw Nation citizen, and geologist Ellen Bishop in the “Heads & Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes.” (Photo by Lyric Aquino, Underscore Native News + Report for America)
One legend that stuck with Amerman was about the creation of Crater Lake.
Over 7,700 years ago Mount Mazama erupted and coated the Pacific Northwest in white-hued ash. Indigenous coastal tribes in the area witnessed the eruption and surrounding tribes who didn’t, felt the long-lasting effects.
During their research, Ammerman said a storyteller described the tribe being completely inundated with volcanic ash for days or perhaps months which affected the plants and their day to day lives. The ash from the volcanic winter was then collected and used as decoration in the hair of Nez Perce leaders to signify status and power.
Morris Bishop said details from the Klamath tribe’s recounting of the eruption of Mount Mazama provided details that well-known geologist Charlie Bacon had no evidence of. In the Klamath tribe’s story, there was an earthquake before the eruption. But in original research of Crater Lake there was no evidence of an earthquake before eruption. However, once a LIDAR machine, which uses lasers to create highly accurate 3D maps and models of surfaces, was used, a fault scarp North of Crater Lake was found dating back to around the time of the eruption indicating that an earthquake did take place.
White volcanic ash from the 6,000 year-old eruption of Mt. Mazama in Western Oregon. (Photo by Lyric Aquino, Underscore Native News + Report for America) Credit: Brooke Morgan, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum, sits at her desk at the museum in Springfield, Illinois on Aug. 18, 2023. Illinois officials and Native Americans whose ancestors called the state home hope a new state law will speed the recovery and reburial of their ancestors’ remains that were unearthed over the past two centuries. (Photo by Melissa Winder, AP)
As ethnogeology continues to make its way through the science community, Morris Bishop hopes to take the exhibit to other museums including the Museum of the American Indian.
Amerman said these mythical truths are “geology with a soul” and restore humanity to ancient Indigenous peoples. He encourages current geologists and upcoming ones to look at Indigenous knowledge as science and use ethnogeology to further research.
“It just gives our Native people our humanity. We’re the only ones who were here for over 17,000 years,” he said. “We have something to share and it can help you too.”
“Heads and Hearts: Seeing the Landscape through Nez Perce Eyes” will be open at OMSI through February 16 during regular operating hours, and is included with usual museum admission.
The post “Geology with a soul:” New OMSI exhibit highlights Indigenous storytelling and geology appeared first on ICT.
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In 1843, Congress gave Samuel Morse $30,000 to try to send a telegram from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Rather than bury the transmission wires underground, where technical issues would be hard to identify, the inventor of Morse code strung them along wooden poles and trees. When the system was completed about a year later, the first transmitted message read: “What hath God wrought?”
This was the beginning of the modern electrical grid, and although demand for electricity has increased exponentially since then, the system for distributing electricity remains remarkably similar to its initial, 19th century version, especially the utility poles. Trees have to meet stringent standards to become a utility pole, remaining free of knots, scars, swelling, or contact with the ground, but poles are still vulnerable to extreme weather — prone to electrical fires, wildfires, and frigid temperatures.
As the country grapples with skyrocketing power demand, extreme weather events now spur contentious debates about what kinds of energy work best. Conservatives blamed the California heat wave blackouts in 2020 on renewable energy, and climate advocates blamed the freeze in Texas in 2021 on the state’s reliance on natural gas, with each side claiming that its resources are more reliable. Winter Storm Fern barreled across the country this week, resurrecting concerns over the grid in Texas, where the state has added ample solar batteries, and in New England, which lost access to hydropower from Canada.
So far, power plants across the country have held up just fine, whether running on renewables or fossil fuels. But the storm revealed another vulnerability in the country’s aging power grid — the wires and poles that carry electricity from house to house.
“That last mile of the grid is extremely vulnerable,” said Costa Samaras, the director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The equipment’s old, or the poles themselves are old, and they can break under extreme events. Those types of boring infrastructure investments are really critical to ensuring that we have reliability and resilience under extreme events.”
In most of the country, this infrastructure “is becoming one of the main drivers of electricity cost increases,” said Michelle Soloman, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation, a clean energy think tank. The bill has come due on much of the grid, Soloman explained. There’s currently a transformer shortage in the United States, and the Trump administration’s tariffs has made replacing infrastructure significantly more expensive.
“When we think about how to reduce electricity costs for consumers, certainly making sure that we’re finding ways to reduce the cost of those components is really important,” Soloman said.
The biggest damage done by Winter Storm Fern was to a series of power lines owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, a federal power provider established under the New Deal in the 1930s. The storm toppled more than two dozen transmission lines that feed power to smaller utilities across Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana, and iced over some of the TVA’s other infrastructure. That left those smaller utilities without the energy they needed to keep the lights on. As of Wednesday afternoon, at least 300,000 customers in those three states still lacked power, according to the website PowerOutage.us.
Meanwhile, the TVA’s power plants made it through without disruption. The authority weatherized its main coal and gas plants after the catastrophic Winter Storm Elliott in 2022, which caused the first rolling blackouts in the TVA’s history and cost the authority $170 million. This time around, the generation plants all stayed online despite record levels of power demand.
The worst-affected utility during this week’s winter storm has been Entergy, which serves most of Louisiana along with parts of Texas and Mississippi. Winter Storm Fern knocked out power for more than 171,000 customers at its peak, and took out hundreds of pieces of infrastructure — the utility estimates that at least 30 transmission lines, 860 poles, and 60 substations went out of service.
Entergy is used to getting knocked around by extreme weather. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, Entergy lost more than 30,000 poles. Its main transmission tower carrying power into New Orleans collapsed in 150-mile-per-hour winds, cutting off power deliveries to the Crescent City. Not all this damage was inevitable: Entergy’s critics pointed out that nearby Florida had spent billions to harden its grid against storms with stronger poles and underground power lines. This allowed the Sunshine State to restore power much more quickly after similar hurricanes.
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The smaller utilities that cut power during Winter Storm Fern often don’t have the resources to pursue such repairs. Power poles only get replaced every 50 years or so, and replacing a pole network can cost millions of dollars. It’s this repair work, rather than the need to serve new data centers, that explains why power prices have risen over recent years. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the “primary driver of increased electricity-sector costs in recent years has been distribution and transmission expenditures — often devoted to refurbishment or replacement of existing infrastructure.” By far the greatest cost increase was in California, where utilities have had to spend billions of dollars to harden their grids against wildfires.
Even when utilities do invest in grid resilience, some storms can still break through. More than 30,000 customers of the North East Mississippi Electric Power Association lost power during the peak of the outage brought on by Winter Storm Fern, and the utility had only restored power to 5,000 customers as of Tuesday morning. The electric co-op spends about $2 million a year to remove trees and other vegetation around its power lines, according to a spokesperson, but the storm outpaced those efforts.
“When large trees — some more than 30 feet tall — fall due to extreme ice loading, there is limited ability to prevent damage entirely,” said spokesperson Sarah Brooke Bishop. “We continually evaluate opportunities to strengthen and improve system resilience, but events of this magnitude will still result in significant impacts.”
Changing the material of the poles could help mitigate damage. A standard wood pole is pressure-treated to protect against fungi, humidity, and insects — but in extreme conditions, there’s only so much you can do to prevent wood from rotting. The first fiberglass composite poles were installed in Hawaii in the 1960s, to withstand high humidity and wind speeds. Composite poles installed in Mexico and Grand Bahama have survived hurricane force winds intact, and are an increasingly appealing choice for utility companies, looking to protect customers from the vagaries of extreme weather.
The upfront costs of installing these fiberglass poles are substantial though. Composite poles cost roughly $5,000 before installation costs — compared to roughly $1,000 for a wooden pole — but they require less upkeep and are cheaper in the long run. Repurposing old wind turbine blades could lower the cost, although the wind industry’s expansion under the Trump administration looks uncertain.
The fastest and easiest way to improve reliability, Solomon said, would be by incentivizing local battery storage. “By strategically placing batteries at certain spots on the grid where you might otherwise need to do an upgrade,” she explained, utilities could avoid some of the long-standing outages brought on by downed power lines. Homeowners could be compensated for purchasing their own batteries and allowing some of that energy to flow back to the grid in times of crisis.
Ultimately, there’s no way around the fact that “our distribution system requires generation reinvestment,” Samaras said. Burying lines underground, building smarter controls to identify problems underground, and creating a strong network of distributed energy resources will all be required to deal with the growing threat of extreme weather.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The winter storm exposed the grid’s real weakness: Lots of old poles on Jan 28, 2026.
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