photo by: Nick Krug

Bond Love, Haskell Indian Nations University professor of English, recently accepted a Heartland Emmy for his writing on Boomtown, a historical documentary on the city of Tulsa, Okla. Love is pictured on Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 at Haskell.

Bond Love doesn’t consider himself in famed documentary film maker Ken Burns’ league, but they do share award hardware.

Love was presented last month with an Emmy for his collaboration on a documentary on the history of Tulsa, Okla., “Boomtown: An American Journey.” The film aired last year on the Tulsa public broadcasting station, he said.

In the interest of full disclosure, Love’s award was a regional Emmy, although the trophies he and his producer Russ Kirkpatrick were presented last month in Denver were identical to those Burns has collected for such work as “The Civil War” and “Baseball.”

“I didn’t know until recently they had regional categories in addition to the national Hollywood thing,” the Haskell English professor said. “It was a Heartland Emmy, which is basically the lower Midwest.”

Bond, who was working as an educational consultant and tutor in Tulsa, wrote the script for the film Kirkpatrick produced with the sponsorship of the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. The film covered Tulsa’s history from its settlement by members of the Muscogee Creek Tribe, who were forced to relocate in 1836 from their native Alabama. It continues through the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s, the oil boom that followed at the turn of the century and the diversification of the economy that started in the 1980s.

photo by: Nick Krug

Bond Love, Haskell Indian Nations University professor of English, recently accepted a Heartland Emmy for his writing on Boomtown, a historical documentary on the city of Tulsa, Okla. Love is pictured on Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 at Haskell.

“It was essentially a film designed to show different aspects of the city’s history, some positive and some negative,” Love said. “It all grew out of a short promotional film we made for the Tulsa Historical Society. We had to cut so much material, we thought it would be nice if we could make a longer documentary.”

The historical society thought so, too. What followed was about a year’s worth of work on his part, Love said. The creative process started with the writing of a number of scripts, which would be modified to build a coherent story line. After interviews and visual elements were added to the film, he would edit the script again to cut some lines or move portions to different places.

“It wasn’t new to me,” he said. “I had never edited a script before, but I taught academic writing at universities, so I had a lot of experience working with students on how to improve their work. It felt new but familiar at the same time.”

Burns was a source of inspiration, particularly in his use of historic images to drive narrative, Love said. Historical documentary filmmakers can struggle to find images for films, or secure the rights to use them if found. That was not a problem for this film as the filmmakers had full access to the historical society’s extensive collection.

“Just within the photography collection, we have 70,000 cataloged images and 100,000 with the uncataloged images,” said Ian Swart, archivist of the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.

Swart said Kirkpatrick and Love would present outlines of the documentary, and he would then look for materials on the events and people mentioned. The historical society’s collection is rich enough that he could usually provide enough material for options, he said. ?Love said the archives were an invaluable source for documenting one of the negative aspects explored in the film and, indeed, one of the darkest incidents in American race relations: the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.

After tensions grew from a never fully explained incident between a young African American man and a white female elevator operator, armed whites attacked the prosperous Greenwood community in Tulsa, then known as the Black Wall Street, where they met armed resistance. Before the end of the carnage, which included firebombing the neighborhood from the air, as many as 35 square blocks were burned and an estimated 300 people, mostly African Americans, were dead, although there was never a full accounting of casualties.

“It was important because the Race Riot, until recent times, hadn’t been discussed or talked about much,” Love said. “We were able to get photographs that were really tragic and heart-wrenching.”

Swart said the photos used in the documentary of the Race Riot have rarely been seen.

“There are photos you see all the time that were made into picture postcards, as terrible as that seems,” he said. “We do have a lot of unique one-of-a-kind snapshots. We have a pretty good collection given us by the American Red Cross, who came in to spearhead relief efforts. Office personnel kept good scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and photos.”

Tulsa history moved on from that 95-year-old stain, and Love said the documentary concludes on a positive note.

“One of the things Tulsa is known for is the tradition of philanthropy,” he said. “The tradition started in the oil boom of giving back to the community. The expectation of the community of companies coming to the city is they have a responsibility to expand cultural and educational opportunities. So we were able to end on that upbeat note.”

Love said he hoped the award would open more opportunities to work on documentaries.

“I would love to do more,” he said. “Lawrence? If someone hired me, I would love to do that. Since I moved to Lawrence about a year ago, I’ve learned part of its history. It’s quite a compelling history, as well.”

A DVD of “Boomtown: An American Journey” is available through the Tulsa Historical Society and it can be downloaded by searching its name online.