Restorying the West is a project that gathers stories from Wyomingites throughout the state. In 2024, the University of Wyoming received a grant from the Mellon Foundation. The grant awarded $850,000 to the Department of English to carry out the project. The effort is set to continue until 2027. UW Professor Nancy Small sat down with Wyoming Public Radio’s Isabelle Hunt to discuss what Restorying the West has accomplished in its first year.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Nancy Small: Restorying the West is a pretty, radically public-facing project. It's grounded in the idea that there is great work to be done outside in communities and that the ways that we make knowledge shouldn't be kept in silos inside a university, but instead should come through interacting with others and making knowledge together.
Isabelle Hunt: Why is it important that Wyoming be storied from the inside rather than the outside?
NS: From the inside, folks know a lot about each other, about small towns, about rural life, about community. But from the outside, it kind of gets that stereotype of the Yellowstone television series, which makes me roll my eyes.
But then there's also a very different simultaneous Wyoming of people who are kind and form community and will go out of their way for each other. Some of them have other kinds of hobbies and activities that they do.
We're way more interesting and varied than we get storied from the outside. Don't put your story on us, let us tell our own stories.
IH: Why collect stories as opposed to data or artwork, etc.?
NS: So I'm gonna be a little bit cheeky and say that data and artwork and really lots of things around us are telling stories. So, as humans, one of our most fundamental commons across all human cultures, things that we do, is we use stories to make sense of the world. The stories can be through science, the stories can be through art. So stories are all around us in both verbal and textual and material things.
IH: I'm wondering about the process. Obviously, this process is not done, it's gonna be a couple more years, but already it seems like a great undertaking.
NS: There's so much work that goes into the project that you don't see when you just see the lovely stories that are shared there.
So last year in our first year of the three-year project, it was a really great learning experience, in terms of being a kind of representative of our doctoral program, and trying to pursue public and community partnerships.
We had one with the Cheyenne Frontier Days Museum of the Old West. We had another partnership with the Wyoming Wool and Sheep Festival. And then we just had a booth. As folks were walking around the festival, they would just come in and sit with us for a story.
What we do in the process is someone comes into the story gathering session and we sit with them. Sometimes they bring something or they bring a story they know they want to share. If they're like, “What's this project? I don't know what's going on.” I say, “Well, tell me a little about yourself.” The actual process of gathering stories is not formal and rigid and like uncomfortable. It's literally kind of hanging out together on the spur of the moment and seeing what happens.
We consider the stories themselves as gifts. We also have a gift agreement, so we can honor what the teller is gifting us in the ways that they want us to honor those gifts. It's way more reciprocal and respectful and reverent of the story and the storyteller.
We're not looking for only certain kinds of folks from Wyoming. We're open to who is Wyoming and we don't have an answer to that. Everyone that participates is an answer to that.
IH: Can you recall a particular story that struck you or is particularly impactful and why?
NS: We met a gentleman in Buffalo named Mitch, and he shared with us the story of how he learned to become a shepherd in Star Valley.
Mitch Black: And by the time that job was getting over, they were talking about needing somebody to go to the mountains with the sheep. And that was right down my alley, cause I had spent all my life in the mountains, before that.
NS: It was just him and the dog and the sheep out in the field. There was no one else with them, and he said something crossways and the dog left for two days.
And he learned a new kind of humility about working with a herding dog.
I got the chance to sit down with Karen Hostetler, who is the owner of Mountain Meadow Wool, also in Buffalo, Wyoming.
She shared the story about how she came to own one of the only fleece to garment wool mills in the entire country. One day, she went out and just got like a dirty old fleece that had just been shaved off a sheep and gradually over time, built this amazing woolen mill.
Karen Hostetler: The mill was always in my heart and I didn’t even know it, from way back when I was just a kid, washing wool in my backyard.
IH: This project is set to be developed until 2027. What plans does restoring the West have for the future?
NS: We have three years to really do our best to make it around the state and do these partnerships and host events and do these story gathering activities. So last year, we were in the kind of southeast quadrant of the state. Year two, we're trying for kind of the northern third of the states. And then year three, we’ll be coming down the west side and the southern part of the state.
We'll start looking for those partnerships where we can have some story gathering activities across that northern part of the state and then start advertising them.
IH: Restoring the West has been put on the website. You've gotten this project out. I'm wondering, in the future, how you hope that the project will be received?
NS: My modest hope is that sharing these stories back to Wyoming can inspire community conversation about who we are and how we see ourselves. We can't change the Hollywood version of how Wyoming gets narrated.
But when I learn about people in my community that I didn't know about as friends and neighbors, it gives me a chance to reposition myself in terms of who belongs.
I really just want the project to inspire feelings of community and open up doors for conversation and listening.
