Soaring mountains, rambling plains – China’s frontiers look a great deal like Montana. Yet these vast, peaceful landscapes and their native peoples, the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols, are in the news every day with reports of protests, violence, and now even talk of “genocide.” This presentation will explain how, over the past century, the relationship between China and its frontier peoples has been defined by a series of “broken promises” as the state has repeatedly first expanded cultural freedoms, autonomy, and economic development only to then trade these for crackdowns, assimilation, and poverty. We will learn about the central role of ethnically non-Chinese peoples in the creation of modern China and how the contradiction in that relationship continues to play out today.

The stunning orange and black monarch butterfly journeys through Montana on a multi-generational, several thousand-mile-long annual migration. When do they arrive? In what numbers? How do they use nectar and larval food sources in the Bitterroot Valley? These are just some of the questions the Bitterroot Monarch Project hopes to answer. Monarchs were recorded in the Bitterroot Valley in both 2019 and 2020, even though recent counts have recorded the population at less than 1% of its historical size. Join us to learn all about monarch ecology in the western United States, their awe-inspiring migration, the threats to their populations, and what you can do to help.