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Crow student handmakes hundreds of faux elk teeth for dress
When Tanya Plainfeather-Gardner approached Trey Hill, her ceramics professor at the University of Montana, about creating 500 porcelain elk tooth replicas for an elk-tooth dress, he was cautiously optimistic.
Making teeth sounded like something they could do, but 500 was a lot to make. Plainfeather-Gardner had never done anything like this before, and Hill estimated the project would take her at least the entire semester. She told him that even if she couldn’t make 500 teeth in time for graduation, she’d use whatever she had for the dress. That way, the project would still be a success, even if she fell short of her target.
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That wasn’t necessary. Plainfeather-Gardner hit her goal in one weekend.
“I started molding, and I was like, ‘Trey, I have 500,'” Plainfeather-Gardner recalled, laughing. “And he’s like, ‘Oh, you weren’t kidding, huh?'”
She didn’t stop there. Over the course of her final semester of college, Plainfeather-Gardner, who is Crow, handmade about 1,500 porcelain elk teeth, 900 of which were used to create an elk-tooth dress.
— Alexia Partouche, alexia.partouche@missoulian.com
‘Pristine example’: Woman’s Ninemile property a conservation education haven
A proponent of conservation and education, 92-year-old Betty Thisted is an advocate for the importance of both.
The former Frenchtown high school biology teacher owns 622 acres in the Ninemile Valley and Lolo National Forest area. The land is covered by several conservation easements and has been in the Thisted family since 1938.
“Well, I’m a teacher. You never quit teaching,” Thisted said during a recent school field trip at her property. “So what I want to do is use all of this land that I own. It’s not huge, but it’s significant for its own purposes.”
Over the years, the land has become a field trip area for students of all ages to explore and learn more about the importance of conservation and agriculture in the valley.
The newest group to explore the area was a group of sixth to eighth graders participating in the STEEM Collaborative program through the Montana Natural History Center. The group of middle schoolers took a bus up to the area on June 20.
— Abigail Landwehr, abigail.landwehr@missoulian.com
Clark Fork River cleanup to enter new phase this fall
BUTTE — Complexities bedevil Superfund cleanup of the Clark Fork River. In some ways, as the work has progressed, the challenges have become thicker than a thriving stand of riparian willows.
Money is tight, for one thing. That means more of the contaminated soils and tailings from historic mining and smelting upstream will be left in place.
The primary state agencies leading the cleanup — the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the Natural Resource Damage Program — have learned from the sections remediated to date that wholesale removal of soils and vegetation isn’t always the best course.
One wag called that method the “Walmart parking lot approach.” It removed undercut banks, willows, water birch and other habitat important to brown trout and other wildlife. The population of brown trout in the upper, remediated reaches of the Clark Fork River has plummeted, even as water quality has improved.
Now, to preserve habitat for fish and other wildlife and provide a source of seeds for ongoing revegetation, the agencies strive to preserve healthy stands of metals-tolerant riparian vegetation whenever possible.
But that adjustment carries its own complexities. If you opt to leave vegetation rooted in contaminated tailings and the river channel shifts, as river channels do, the pollution could be re-entrained.
“It definitely is a cost-benefits analysis,” said Jessica Banaszak, a project manager for DEQ.
— Duncan Adams, duncan.adams@mtstandard.com
University of Montana researcher admits to federal fraud
A man doing research at the University of Montana admitted to falsifying documents related to a federal investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.
The defendant, Braxton A. Norwood, 43, from Marburg, Germany, pleaded guilty on June 27 to falsification of records in a federal investigation, according to court filings and a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 30 in front of U.S. District Judge Dana L. Christensen. Norwood faces a maximum possible penalty of 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and at least three years of supervised release.
Norwood was the owner and CEO of Expesicor LLC, which conducted neurological disorder research at UM’s campus in Missoula. The company received federal dollars from the National Institutes of Health (an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).
Norwood’s position directed projects for federal research grants given to Expesicor.
— Zoe Buchli, zoe.buchli@missoulian.com
