Student researchers map North Dakota’s pandemics
Year of work on North Dakota Digital Atlas examined contagions past and present
The COVID-19 death toll in Grand Forks County is stark: 77 people, as of May 19. The sadness and loss in that number will be remembered for decades to come.
But suppose the toll kept rising, and in a matter of days or weeks, not months: One hundred deaths. Two hundred. Three hundred.
Five hundred.
What then?
What then is that in percentage terms, 500 COVID-19 deaths in Grand Forks County in 2020-21 still would not match the toll of the 1893 typhoid fever outbreak in Grand Forks, which killed fully 1 percent of the city’s population at that time.
There are some 69,400 people in Grand Forks County, the most recent Census figures suggest. So, if the equivalent of the 1893 outbreak were to happen in the county today, it would leave nearly 700 people dead.
That’s a sample of the information and insight to be gleaned from UND’s North Dakota Digital Atlas, a project in which this year’s students tried to turn pandemic lemons into lemonade. They did this by spending the year mapping, describing and illuminating North Dakota’s long relationship with pandemics – and not just COVID-19.
In a year where lost connections have been lamented, the fall and spring semester groups for Arts & Sciences 499: Interdisciplinary Practicum have bolstered their connections to the Peace Garden State through research, interviews, maps and oral histories.
The result, parts of which are already published on the Digital Atlas website, is a collection representing North Dakota’s pandemics past and present – from typhoid to COVID-19.
A dozen or so projects carried out by these students at UND’s College of Arts & Sciences are the latest additions to a now long-running project – an online representation of North Dakota’s geography and history researched and written by students enrolled in A&S 499.
As North Dakota celebrated 125 years of statehood in 2014, faculty at the College of Arts & Sciences initiated the North Dakota Digital Atlas project. In 2018, UND’s Homecoming Week marked the public launch of the site.
Brad Rundquist, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, has been with the project for the majority of its seven-year history and leads the semester-long course in partnership with UND alum Mike Jacobs, columnist and former publisher and editor of the Grand Forks Herald.
“I always say that Brad Rundquist is the ‘Atlas’ part and I’m the ‘North Dakota’ part,” Jacobs told UND Today. “In my long career, I’ve accumulated a lot of what I guess you’d call ‘trivial knowledge’ about the state.”
Jacobs’ “trivial knowledge,” essentially the guiding force for each course’s themes and class time discussions, inspires students’ research pursuits every semester. This year’s theme tackled a timely topic: “Contagion and Change in the Northern Plains.”
Pandemics and education
“In the fall semester, students basically hijacked the class and turned their attention specifically to schools and public education,” said Jacobs, with a laugh, reflecting on the past year of atlas work. “A lot of synchronous projects came out of that.”
As Rundquist described it, the course started with readings and discussions related to past pandemics and epidemics that swept through North Dakota. As the group drew contemporary parallels to smallpox and flu outbreaks, students were drawn to how COVID-19 impacted people’s – particularly students’ and teachers’ – lives through the past year.
The result was a semester of Digital Atlas contributions focused on pandemic implications at all levels of education. Rundquist and Jacobs pivoted along with that interest to invite guest speakers who could help guide students’ ideas for projects, including Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s superintendent of public instruction.
“One way that the pandemic changed things for this course was that we were able to bring in not only more guest speakers, but we were able to connect with people all over the country via Zoom,” Rundquist said. In addition to more “local” sources such as Baesler and people at UND, Rundquist was able to connect with academics and authors of texts used to guide the class.
‘Springboard’ to understanding North Dakota
As a different group arrived in the spring section of A&S 499, the instructors soon realized that everyone came into the course with different ideas and perspectives for projects. The resulting activity, with individualized projects and research efforts, was nearly a 180-degree shift from the previous semester.
For his own project, Travis West, a recent UND arrival originally from Kentucky, took an interest in the spread of typhoid after hearing about it in class from Jacobs.
“As I was looking for classes during the fall, I got connected with Dr. Rundquist and I thought the course was a great way to learn about the state,” West said. “When I move somewhere, I really like to integrate with whatever’s going on, and learning this piece of the state’s history has been a way to springboard myself into understanding North Dakota.”
A self-described “map person,” West pored over hundreds of newspapers and articles, along with census data, from 1880 to 1912 looking for reported deaths related to the water-borne illness endemic to the nation’s western expansion. Once his project is published, visitors of the North Dakota Digital Atlas will be able to see the numbers of reported typhoid cases and deaths across the state in map form.
“Typhoid hit Grand Forks harder than anywhere else in the state,” said West, referring to an 1893 incident where the people of Crookston, Minn., after confirming two or three typhoid cases, dumped their contaminated water supply into the Red Lake River. Soon, more than 10 percent of Grand Forks’ population ended up with typhoid fever – around 800 cases.
As mentioned, the resulting deaths totaled 1 percent of the city’s population at the time.
Within a year of the outbreak, Grand Forks went through a state-of-the-art overhaul of its water filtration systems – installing what otherwise hadn’t been seen west of New York. Once 20th century systems made their way to cities and towns statewide, typhoid was essentially eradicated.
“I recommend this class to anyone coming from out-of-state,” West remarked. “It’s stressful in the sense that you don’t know anything about the state at first, but it kicks you into gear to learn some really cool stuff.
“I think it’s good to have that kind of background, like now I know more about Grand Forks’ history, and how getting a new water filtration system changed the dynamic of the town. Having all the other pieces of background gifted to you in the process is really useful and what I liked the most about it.”
Documenting history as it happens
It turns out, in the case of senior Kylee Danks, that the course presents just as much value to people who have known places like Grand Forks all their lives – or who at least thought they did.
Danks is a Grand Forks native and a painter majoring in communication and visual arts. She enrolled in A&S 499 because she loved the idea of conducting her own project and connecting her work with her passions.
“As a visual arts major, I was really interested in how artists have been affected by the pandemic, specifically in the Grand Forks region,” Danks told UND Today. Her work ultimately paralleled that of the fall semester students, in that she presented the Digital Atlas with an oral history of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Only vaguely familiar with local artists at the outset, Danks worked with her faculty advisor, Teaching Assistant Professor Nicole Derenne, to find people to interview and showcase on the website.
Eventually, 10 Grand Forks artists will have written profiles, video interviews and examples of their artwork posted to the atlas, compiled by Danks.
“Having worked with students in this class for a number of semesters, I was really interested in Kylee’s project because of how the precedent of using Zoom to connect with people made a lot of this possible,” said Derenne, a faculty member in the Department of Art & Design. “Kylee ended up doing a great job in following through with her idea and making all of the information accessible and easy to understand.”
Danks said she ended up talking to a fair amount of art educators, and learning about what it has been like to teach art remotely. She also interviewed Matt Anderson, director of education at the North Dakota Museum of Art located on campus. Her perspective on arts in the region will never be the same, and for the better, Danks said.
“I’m excited to have met all of these cool people, and those connections have opened up this whole new community that I didn’t know was here.
“Of the artists I spoke to, I think most of them could agree that this period is definitely going to produce interesting and unique artwork,” Danks said. “I’m really thankful that I got to talk about that and document it.”
