On Second Thought, Sense of Place 1

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

winter 10

on

[the SENSE of place issue]

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North Dakota’s very own call-in philosophy radio show, WHY? explores what it means to be human in the world today. Join Jack Russell Weinstein and his guests as they examine topics ranging from the nature of beauty, to the meaning of justice, to what it means to be a North Dakotan. Call in with your own questions and ideas the second Sunday of every month at 5 p.m. CST on Prairie Public Radio, or send in a question in advance via our website: www.whyradioshow.org.

Brought to you by the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life and Prairie Public Radio.

The Institute for Philosophy in Public Life is funded through a partnership between UND College of Arts & Sciences and the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Calendar: February 14: “Ideology and Curriculum: 25 years of a discussion” Guest: Michael Apple Professor Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, discusses the role politics plays in the classroom. Specifically, the ways in which political commitments influence the development of curriculum and lesson plans.

March 14:

“Eric Sevareid and the Philosophy of Journalism” Guest: Clay Jenkinson Clay Jenkinson, Director of the Dakota Institute and host of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, looks at the role North Dakota native Eric Sevareid has played in the creation of modern journalism and the profession never realized.

April 11:

“The Profession of Philosophy” Guest: Brian Leiter Brian Leiter, Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and gatekeeper of philosophy’s official unofficial graduate rankings “The Philosophical Gourmet,” looks at the future of philosophy as a discipline, its place in the modern world, and the tensions involved in being a philosopher today.

May 9:

“Empathy, the Constitution, and Sexual Orientation” Guest: Martha Nussbaum Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, discusses her new book on justice and homosexuality, and elaborates on a career-long interest in the way the liberal-arts help contribute to a just society.

features [contents] SENSE OF PLACE SECTION 4

Your Sense of Place is Your Sixth Sense

By Jay Basquiat

10 A Dakota Woman’s Perspective

By Cynthia Lindquist Mala

14 Refusing Nostalgia: On Geographical Flight and Cultural Amnesia

By Debra Marquart

Cover illustration: Memory Forest by Jonathan Twingley© www.twingley.com

20 Still Fighting for My Place

By Sam Larson

24 North Dakota Realized

By Kevin Toboso and Mark Puppe

30 The Place of Memory

By Larry Woiwode

36 The Land, or the Landscape?

By Corey Seymour

POETIC LANDSCAPE SECTION 40 Read on White

By Rick Watson

42 Karloff in Dakota

By Jamieson Ridenhour

PLAIN THINKING 44

A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains

By Clay S. Jenkinson

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty, Editor Tami Carmichael, Line Editor To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

www.ndhumanities.org

An Alien Landscape and a Plum Tree

The literature of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the poetry of John Keats are the humanities at their best. Inside these writings we find the questions that should nag at our hearts and minds, but that we don’t really find time to meditate on inside of our daily routine. As I began to contemplate the sense of place issue of On Second Thought I was immediately drawn to these two works, though there are many others equally suitable to the task. During the first winter thaw in North Dakota, I drove out to my favorite place, Double Ditch historical site. Located twenty miles outside of the state capital, Double Ditch was once (1490-1875) the site of the Mandan Indian earth lodge village. Named for the visible fortification ditches, the site overlooks the Missouri River. The earth lodges are long gone and the ditches blend in with the landscape so well that Double Ditch isn’t really a tourist attraction. That is exactly why I like this place so much. I have never run across another accidental visitor there. It is a place with a history and a heart-clenching landscape that seems to center me when I need it most. Not to mention that it is the perfect place on earth to watch a meteor shower at night. On this particular January day, I pulled a tarp and a blanket out of the back of my truck and spread them out on top of the snow in the protected enclave of the innermost ditch and read Keats and Dostoevsky for hours in the balmy 40 degree weather. Here is what I found: You know how snow glistens at night, and there’s a new moon…and you feel as if you’re not on earth. The Russian beauty Grushenka uttered these words to Dimitri in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov just moments after they became engaged and just moments before he is arrested on the suspicion that he murdered his father in a jealous rage. Of course, Grushenka knew nothing of the crime, but she did know something about geographic flight. She fled from a disgraced reputation after a torrid love affair five years previously and was making plans for another flight that very night; Dimitri had promised to whisk her away to the ends of the earth. In both instances, she was driven to leave behind not only her old village, but her old self. With each move she became a new Grushenka. From a skinny, meek and preyed-upon teenager, to a voluptuous, calculating and manipulative woman, she believed with her next move she would leave behind her deceit and become a lady of honest virtue, who earns her livelihood by working the land. I want to scrape the earth with my hands. She wanted to unearth the new Grushenka from the soil of undiscovered country as if she were resurrecting herself from an unmarked grave.

That is what sense of place is essentially: the link between location and personal identity.

There is no inherent moral/political feature in any landscape. The sense of any place is buried in the soil or concrete or sea, in the same way that Grushenka’s character resides beneath the untilled earth. The land is a readymade stage where the drama of human life unfolds. The setting influences the shape of the story, but the plot is completely invented. Indeed, the plot often calls for stage modification: the leveling of a mountain, the damming of a river, or the bombing of a cityscape.

Place matters because identity matters. Grushenka was awed by the idea of inhabiting

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note from the executive director a completely foreign landscape for the very reason that it represented unbounded potential. If by some wrinkle in time and space she were truly to relocate from nineteenth century Russia to a planet in another solar system she would be a tabula rasa, a clean slate. She could become someone as unknown to herself as the new world she has discovered. The ground zero of her identity, the here that makes everything else the there, would be unanchored. Such a jump would result in the here colliding so forcibly with the there that her internal orientation would implode. She would then be free in the most radical sense to mark and be marked by this new space. A place without culture, or with a completely unknown culture, is an alien landscape.

The potential to radically remake the self, the lure of geographic flight, invariably intersects with the potential to leave an eternal mark on the landscape, the lure of cultural rootedness.

Dying of tuberculosis in his early twenties, John Keats seemed to view death as an alien landscape and he agonized over his fleeting indentation on the mortal terrain he was about to abandon. His name is not engraved on his tombstone; instead, he requested that he be buried forever underneath the epitaph, “Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water.” Though in his darkest moments the human sphere he occupied became a place where to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs, he longed to leave in it an enduring cultural marker. In some of the most breathtaking use of the English language, Ode to a Nightingale, he imagines that his poetry will become as deathless as the song of the darkling bird.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

Keats penned these lines sitting under a plum tree in the early morning hours on London’s Hamstead Heath after listening for hours to the song of the nightingale.

Each year tens of thousands of people sojourn to this place where a little piece of truth and beauty was born of a dying poet and the requiem of the light-wingèd Dryad of the trees.

Keats sunk deep into a place with the realization that the alien – the mystery- was here all along. The human soul is an alien landscape – that is why we are all unknown to ourselves in some crucial way. That is why we all instinctively ask ourselves, “Who am I?,” at the most critical junctures in our lives. The question is unavoidable, and yet agonizing. We all truly want to unearth some authentic self that is as sure and stable as a statue excavated from ancient ruins. In this sense, Keats is no different from Grushenka. What is different is how they each navigated their search through a sense of place.

In one of the last chapters of his book, Dostoyevsky references the Roman playwright Terence (190 – 159 B.C.), “I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.”

This line could well be the living epitaph of Grushenka.

She ached for a new world that would make her authentic and fled from one place to another never seeming to find what she sought.

Keats wanted time to struggle with himself, with the world, with the culture he claimed. He knew that what he and Grushenka were both looking for was buried in the landscape waiting to be created. However, he knew something Grushenka did not; he knew that the human soul is far more unknown to us than an alien planet. In the end, he found what Grushenka was looking for underneath a plum tree not so very far away.

Brenna Daugherty Executive Director

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Your Sense of Place is Your Sixth Sense

By Jay Basquiat

In the spirit of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, gibed as the greatest armchair geographer since he never left his hometown while authoritatively musing on geographical matters, let’s take a journey using our geographical imaginations.

Under the guise of pheasant hunting, we stop along the western edge of a promising tree row on P.L.O.T.S. land (Private Land Open to Sportsmen) near a small western North Dakota town. Pushing northeast we walk the tree row, ending at the remains of an old stone house and a barn foundation. Closer inspection reveals craftsmanship and industry: the stone structure is local sandstone stacked and mortared with a mix of mud, straw, and sand. A bit of the fireplace remains, and the mind conjures warmth, the smell of stew, wet woolen mittens drying. The eastern orientation of the farmstead overlooks a small valley with a water source, a world of exploration for the children that probably lived here and perfect for grazing sheep or cattle. The land still shows signs of grazing.

These folks are gone now as is their sense of this place, but a new feature imposes its place here: just across the valley to the east is a giant coal mine.

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At journey’s end I ask you, “What is your sense of this place?” What feeling or perception or feature will you privilege in your account? This is a complicated place and therefore a complicated question: this is rural North Dakota; the land is connected to a public program (PLOTS); we hunted here; some other people lived their lives here, crafting a home and a living from the land; someone still uses this land for cattle grazing; coal industry uses this place; time moves each perception through the unknown past reimagined in the mind’s eye through the ever elusive present on into an open, uncertain future. You and I, though seeing roughly the same features, perceive this place through different lenses of our individual history, awareness, and experiences. All this in just one place!

Our geographic journey yields some good data for the consideration of what a place is. In the field of human or cultural geography, the concept of place may be defined as a center of meaning for people at any scale. Though helpful, our understanding might be further aided by the consideration of five words as they relate to the nature of place: places are 1) constructed, 2) changing, 3) complexes, 4) contested, and 5) constitutive. Unpacking these features of place will help us understand the nature of our geographical being: how we form places and a sense of place and how places form us.

First, places are constructions with both material and nonmaterial dimensions. Observing material qualities and lived practices yields some idea of a place. The smell of manure, the sight of a rotary milker and people wearing muck boots, the sounds of a herd of holsteins or jerseys pressing at the gate are all good indicators that the place is a working dairy farm. A place is more than a sum of its material qualities, however. The mind creates an attendant sense of the place, weaving sensory perception, experience, and language into the rich tapestry of memory and knowing, or as Wendell Berry so eloquently puts it, “the intimacy the mind makes with the place that awakens it.” This mental construction acts as a bridge between the material and nonmaterial dimensions to form a sense of place. This concept is inherited from a clumsy translation of the Latin term genius loci. In classical times genius loci referred to the guardian divinity of a place, but from the 18th century on it refers to the influence of a place. This transition is well described by

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the influential landscape writer J.B. Jackson who identified the genius loci of a place as an attraction which gives people a sense of well-being and desire to return.

This is also the locus of activity for memory and imagined places that may or may not relate to material realities.

Nostalgia and romanticism may lead us to remember ourselves to a place that no longer exists or never did exist. In his novel Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck looks forward to his encounter with Fargo, ND, a place he has idealized since discovering that he could fold a map of the United States in half and Fargo would be right on the crease. With an imagination fired by weather reports of Fargo as the coldest in winter, the hottest in summer, and the dustiest year round, Steinbeck passes through town on a mild day in autumn, sticking to the main road, and thus finding that no feature of the place matched that of his imagination. Sitting by the river in Mapleton, ND, reflecting on this shock, Steinbeck finds his sense of the place surprisingly undisturbed. He happily notes that “in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.” Places are constructions of both material and nonmaterial dimensions.

Second, places continually change.

North Dakota is changing. The sense of this place as an agrarian or even agribusiness culture is yielding to energy development. Traffic on Highway 83/State Street in Bismarck includes vehicles from Texas, West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, and more, all carrying roughnecks, wind tower assembly crews, pipeline workers, and welders to Stanley, Baldwin or Minot. Archeological survey crews walk private land looking for remnants of past land dwellers, often just ahead of or clearing the way for a new transmission line or pipeline. The internet real estate sites are full of houses for sale in small towns, luring prospective buyers with “Affordable home, perfect for hunters!” Scattered across the state are remnants of homesteads, buildings weather-worn and collapsing.

Replacing the lived space of the homestead are new developments: Country Meadows or Prairie Skies Estates evoke a sense of country living while giving inhabitants a brand new home closer to urban comforts.

Some see this changing landscape through a lens of nostalgia and loss, sensing an irrevocable change in a

place and way of life they either lived, long for, or conjured in their mind’s eye. Others view through the lens of achievement, progress, efficiency.

Despite our feelings, change is nothing new. The great inland sea once covering this plain gave way to migrations of people who became native to this place. These natives gave way to sodbusters and the railroad which in turn yielded to GPS farming and an interstate highway system. And so goes the temporal dimension of place: each wave of change creates conditions for new constructions of places, places where people live their lives, places that will change again and again. Human beings always attempt the solidification and codification of that which is most important to them, but each attempt to hold back the tides of change results in the same elusiveness, like trying to hold water in a clenched fist. Places change; our only real intervention is to be thoughtful and intentional about how the place might change.

Third, places are complexes of meaning and relation on multiple scales. A particular place is internally complex because many people live in, use, or perceive a particular place. Because no two people have the same sense of place, sense of a place may be symphonic or cacophonous and probably both. At the same time, even the smallest, seemingly most isolated places are inescapably related to all other places. Consider the Roosevelt map of the United States, 1912: this cartoonish map features the United States, rotated right and thus running vertically on the page; superimposed on the map is the side view of Theodore Roosevelt’s head (North Dakota literally has the left ear of the former president; Texas, his nose; and Florida, his chin). While sipping tea imported from China, a resident of Milton, ND, could view this map and learn that her home is implicated in the processes of nation-building. The scale of multiple relations between places is always at work in every place, making individual places inextricable complexes of meaning.

Fourth, places are fields of contestation. In the demarcation of a particular place, lines (literal or virtual) create

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boundaries allowing us to distinguish who or what is or is not a part of that particular place. Boundaries are sites of ongoing production and reification because new people, new ways of doing things, or new ideas threaten a trespass of boundaries; defenses are marshaled and a contestation for rights of inclusion or exclusion ensues.

This practice, so central to the nature of place, invites moral scrutiny. For example, the reservation system for American Indians accomplishes far more than defining territory. These boundaries have moral significance relative to conditions of poverty, violence, and availability of opportunity in these places. The boundaries carry the history of colonial conquest, genocide, and oppression. The local sentiment of residents in the towns that border these reservations is often one of wariness: women should not go alone to reservations, white people should not travel through reservations at night, and so forth. The geographical boundary thus becomes functional in reifying racism.

Changing just this one aspect of the sense of this particular place will require contestation, a meeting at the place where the line was drawn at the start, and an invocation of moral imagination to interrogate our practices of inclusion and exclusion relative to boundaries. Places are always constantly produced and reproduced and thus sites of ongoing contestation.

Finally, spaces, places, and people are mutually constitutive. The space-place relation must be acknowledged as more than the blank space of physical geography awaiting the inscription of meaning as a place. Physical geography exerts a force that is reciprocal as well as limiting. Physical spaces limit what places can become and even what places are possible. Human beings, in other words, do not just get to make a place whatever they want it to be. Prairies do not present the same possibilities as tropical rain forests.

Residents of Bottineau, ND, do not find orange trees growing wild in their backyards. Space is not an empty void waiting to be filled: as a term referring to natural conditions such as topography and cosmology, space limits the possibilities of our place-making.

At the same time, space is constitutive of our sense of place. On the surface, North Dakota seems to be one of those geographical regions that people either love or hate. Lovers read the land as full, rich, expansive, textured, open. Haters experience the land as empty, barren, godforsaken, boring. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle: the internal reading of this land as a sense of place is an interplay with the outer physical terrain where moments of intimacy and familiarity form links to attraction and allure while combining with moments crafted in the gap of alienation and fearfulness. The love for the vast plain quickly turns to sheer terror if one is stranded in a whiteout blizzard on a lonely stretch of highway at night. This space-place produces people wild to escape, some who never leave, and those who run like the dickens only to return.

At journey’s end I again pose the question, “What is your sense of place?” Wendell Berry mused, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Indeed, our lives are lived answers to this question. We are geographical beings, busily constructing places, trying to learn our place, longing for the experience of other places. Our lives are shaped by the places we find ourselves, and we in turn shape the places where we live.

Recognizing this reciprocal relation and the many features of place-making might help us live more intentionally as “placed persons”: embracing our responsibility for the places we construct, asking “how” when facing change, realizing the global relation present in the complex of every place, and enacting a moral vision wise enough to discern which contests of inclusion/exclusion serve life and well-being from those that do not.

Jay Basquiat is an agrarian and organic farmer in Mandan, ND. He operates a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) venture called Baskets of Plenty and teaches philosophy at Bismarck State College, hopefully serving love– and practice–of wisdom on the northern plains.

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As excerpted in the Summer issue of On Second Thought “Savages and Scoundrels tells a deeply saddening American story, detailing the long history of the European take-over and unscrupulous exploitation of Native American homelands.

Let’s hope that this exceptionally meaningful and useful account finds a responsive audience among the citizens who deal with tribal, religious and ethic complexities and conflicts anywhere around the world.”

—William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky “This is a powerful story composed of careful scholarship, great adventure, and compassion. It is written like the wind, a macroscopic overview of manifest destiny with a vibrant cast of thousands. It is one of the best books I have ever read about our national tragedy.”

—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War 14 illus. $26.00

Paul VanDevelder is a prolific journalist and author of the widely praised Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

For more information about the author and his book, visit elbowoodscafe.com

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Go to www.ndhumanities.org for more information.

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A Dakota Woman’s

Perspective

By Cynthia Lindquist Mala Ta’sunka Wicahpi Winyan... Star Horse Woman

During a three-year stint as a political appointee in Washington, DC, my respite was coming home to North Dakota as often as possible. Home to the quiet beauty of the flat open prairie; home to the magnificent black night sky and brilliant stars, and if lucky, home to a viewing of the Northern Lights dancing in the cold winter to come.

As a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow, Cynthia Lindquist Mala earned a PhD in educational leadership at the University of North Dakota, May 2006. She began responsibilities as President of Cankdeska Cikana (Little Hoop) Community College in October 2003, which serves the Spirit Lake Dakota community and her home reservation.

Granted, many friends and colleagues out East could not understand the ‘draw’ for me – the need to come home. You really have to live in North Dakota to appreciate its wonders as well as its frustrations.

Where else in the world can you see nature’s geometric patterns from the air with the distinct east/west and north/south perimeters? Or view the morning sun coming up on one horizon while the moon sits on the opposite horizon with nothing in between but the wonders of nature?

As a Native North Dakotan raised in St. Michael, ND, and during my teens in Grand Forks, ND, I love the open and flat prairies. I get claustrophobic when I stay for long periods in spaces with woods and trees or mountains…it’s like I can’t get my sense of direction.

What draws me in?

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I know what to expect and that it can be very unexpected. The four distinct seasons reflect our relationship with Unci Maka…Mother Earth…and is also symbolic of the life cycles of birth, adolescence, adulthood, and elder status. As life and the seasons are cyclical, the planets, sun and moon, are round and reflect the circle of life. North Dakota’s landscape and culture distinctly showcase these elements in marvelous ways.

It is always about relationships and understanding those relationships…being respectful – and prepared.

I like that I find Juneberries or chokecherries when the season is ripe. I like that I can drive west and see significant diversity in the North Dakota terrain such as the painted canyon or wooded hills rolling toward the prairie or the many rivers and lakes that provide abundance.

The diverse landscape of the State, the seasons, the animals, geography – all tell stories of the beauty of the Plains. There is great variety within the State and yet so much similarity. The geography and weather force us to have an understanding that generally comes from the life experiences that ultimately informs a culture. Those experiences teach us to be respectful. In that process, we learn about ourselves and our resilience. Living in North Dakota

forces us to have a strong sense of self because it is the only way we survive. North Dakota’s landscape represents the

‘awe’ of existence for me – beauty, harshness, bounty, famine, mystery and familiarity.

One cannot truly ‘own’ anything, and in particular, land. This is an indigenous concept and value, and though we are very contemporary people today, the concept is still integral to who we are and how we view ourselves within the bigger scheme of life. As the cliché goes, when you die you can’t take it with you.

A universal truth as a Dakota person is that human beings are to be a partner of the land and landscape – one of many beings supposedly living in harmony, in unison to survive and to thrive.

Western academics can certainly differentiate the

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natural from the socially constructed and this is done in many ways…i.e., review the climate change literature that speaks to man’s wasteful nature in contributing to the decline of Mother Earth, or the many artificial products that pollute the earth and our bodies.

North Dakota is a place where anyone and everyone should live! There is so much to learn and to grow from in being a Native North Dakotan. The quiet should inspire, or perhaps force us to think creative thoughts for the writer, new possibilities for the researcher or innovator, and peaceful introspection for those who don’t like crowds or being crowded.

I describe my time in Washington, DC, as a wonderful learning experience and networking opportunity, but also as a place of ‘concrete, crime, and cars’ and though there is a great beauty on the East Coast, I need the open prairies, clean air, and quiet of my homeland to feel whole and complete. It is a nurturing element and reinforces my sense of place in so many ways.

I believe that xenophobia, the fear of strangers, was once rampant in North Dakota, but as the population ages, so to do antiquated beliefs and misunderstandings. There are still remnants of this lingering in the State but it has shifted more to the dynamics of haves/have nots and the economy.

This shift will continue as the young adults depart for greener pastures and the energy boom on the Western side of the State drives the inevitable economics of change.

Hopefully technology is helping us to learn and experience more broadly and to have a better global sense of the world and in turn our world of North Dakota.

Though there are defined boundaries/ borders, I do not believe in them. We are free to travel and go about our business or affairs wherever that may take us. But my view is from a very different perspective and related to the concept of ownership.

For me, sense of place means belonging somewhere… fitting in with a group or place. Though my ancestors were nomads, they traveled the Great Plains and knew where the best camp sites were located. They traveled and followed the buffalo nation. They were very resourceful and ingenious in their use of the bounty of the plains.

It was (is) a relationship-based connection that thrives via respectful understanding. Our resilience as Dakota people is rooted in the values of that understanding – our interconnectedness to all.

As a Dakota woman – and especially now as a ‘baby’ elder – I’ve come to understand it is about relationships – very personal relationships. My sense of place is about my relationship with my family, with my co-workers and colleagues, and my friends. It is about values and understanding those values as a female human being and that I ‘fit’ somewhere within the big picture. There is an interconnection that is limitless and timeless. It is constant and ongoing. Our role as human beings is respectful behavior that reflects our understanding of roles, that my actions and interactions impact the natural environment. I am not alone and never will be for I am part of the universe.

I think North Dakota is a great unknown, relative to ‘sense of place,’ and that some prefer it to be kept that way.

As a Dakota woman (winyan) I understand that the word Dakota means friend or ally and is derived from the term wodakota. Wodakota means to be in harmony or balance.

In North Dakota we are friends and many times survive our winters due to friendships created during a time of crisis. When I think of the word ally, as North Dakotans we tend to stick together and ‘ally’ ourselves due to mutual understandings of our environment. I am not so sure about being in harmony or balance as this implies so many meanings – with nature, the universe, or with each other as human beings, or with the animal nations – but we do well overall though there is always room for improvement relative to stewardship of the land, as well as with each other.

I do not know if the non-Indian settlers or officials understood the indigenous meaning when they named this place the great Dakota Territory, but how ironic and appropriate for our State to be “North Dakota” for it can be translated as “friends of the North” which implies a very strong, and good sense of place.

Mitakuye Oyasin…All my relations.

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Refusing Nostalgia: On Geographical Flight and Cultural Amnesia

By Debra Marquart

As a child, I was a map gazer. I’d set my small finger down in Alsace, in that blessed valley of castles, church spires, vineyards, and rolling fields of sunflowers between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine river, then I’d tramp my fingers like a small scissors eastward through Germany. I’d touch down on the shore of the Danube and trace its long artery, the eastern route my ancestors took in 1803 to reach Odessa on the Black Sea. I longed to feel under my fingertips the slow progress of the overland caravan, the teams of oxen, the pots and pans, the crying babies—a 1,900 mile journey—just to reach the acres of unbroken steppe land near the Black Sea that had been offered to my ancestors by Czar Alexander I. Odessa! Just the name conjured images. I was growing up in North Dakota, in a small town named Napoleon, which was near a bigger city named Bismarck (equally evocative names), but Odessa sounded to me like destination number one, conjuring images of poor Odysseus trying and not trying to make it home from the Trojan Wars. And the Black Sea, which was nothing like the Red Sea or the Dead Sea, but black, meaning the unknown, possibly danger. I admired the mettle of my ancestors. They had walked through the Black Forest to get to the Black Sea. They made homes for themselves in the villages they created in South Russia in 1803, surviving the trauma of flight and exile from their original homeland in Western Europe, and they lived in those villages near the Black Sea as an ethnic minority for almost three generations. The promises they were given by the Czar— freedom from taxation, freedom from military service, the freedom to keep their own language, religions, and schools—held for about eighty years.

When some of those promises were withdrawn and young men from the villages were forcibly conscripted, my great-grandparents and their young children fled Russia and immigrated to America between the years 1886 and 1911. Answering the invitation for free land through the Homestead Act, they repeated the pattern of flight, exile, and resettlement in the Dakota Territory. This ethnic group, now sprinkled through much of the central United States, is called the Germansfrom-Russia. The migrations that mark my ethnic group are preserved in their

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hyphenations, but the fact of their arrival in America was never codified in language. We never became the “Germans-from-Russia Americans,” for example. Some stories are too complicated to tell.

As a young girl, growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in North Dakota, I was only vaguely aware of this ethnic history, but even the whiff of trauma and uprootedness was glamorous, especially against the everyday sameness of our hemmedin farming enclave. Although Napoleon was a small Midwestern town, it often felt eerily like an 18th century European village that just happened to have televisions and automobiles. My grandfather made sausage and rhubarb wine in the basement. In the root cellar were rows of gleaming jars full of pickles and beets. Chores had to be done, and animals needed tending. My father’s idea of a family outing was to pile all of us in the car on Sunday evenings and drive us around to look at the crops.

In this village of my hometown, rotund old men sat around on park benches gossiping with each other in German, and whiskery grandmothers endlessly baked and canned and sewed and gardened. There was a lot of church-going and polka-dancing. The older people spoke an archaic dialect of German, mixed with a broken English. In the local cafes, along with roast beef dinners or hamburgers and French fries, on the menus were choices like knephla soup, sauerkraut, and fleischkuekle.

When I would ask my grandma Geist about the village in South Russia where my grandfather had emigrated from (one had to address all questions to Grandma Geist, because Grandpa Geist was notoriously quiet), Grandma would say, “We all came from the same place.” Hardly the stuff of legends. I wanted the story of flight—the village he had left as a young boy under cover of darkness, the stale bread passed between many hands, the stony fields traversed in the middle of the night. I wanted the story of arrival—the storm-filled ocean passage, the train ride slicing across the North American continent, the first sight of the muddy streets of Eureka, the trading post town in Dakota Territory where our people purchased carts and oxen to transport themselves to their remote land claims yet farther in the north.

Instead, at gatherings where my grandparents would sit around and play cards with other couples they had known since youth, my grandmother might tell a joke in English, and then turn to Grandpa and say the punch line to him, in German. All the old people would laugh and rock in their seats. When I protested—for I didn’t know German, we were encouraged to learn only English—my grandmother would insist that it was only funny in German. “There’s no way to say it, in English,” she would explain.

Some small detour of meaning had occurred, something lost between the tongue and the brain. Even then, I felt myself cut loose on the ice floe of English—all the fun and forbidden stuff was happening in another language. But now that they are all long gone, I realize that it was they who were drifting away on the ice floe of German. Now I am left behind, a fully vested American, stranded without them on the mainland of English.

They had little of the backward glance in them, my maternal grandparents. I would go so far as to say they refused nostalgia. The word “nostalgia,” has its origins in Greek words, but not in Greek culture. Cobbled together from two Greek roots—nostos (meaning “return” or sometimes “journey”) and algeo (meaning “pain,” “sickness,” or “sorrowful”), the term “nostalgia,” was coined in 1688 by the Swiss Doctor, Johanes Hofer, to describe the “sad mood originating from the desire to return to native land.” In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym reports that Hofer first documented this phenomenon in various people displaced in the seventeenth century—“freedomloving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad.” Dr. Hofer observed that this new illness caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present, resulting in the “longing for the native land to become their single-minded obsession.”

The patients’ symptoms included a “lifeless and haggard countenance,” an “indifference toward everything,” and “a confusion between past and present, real and imaginary events.”

According to Boym, Swiss scientists found that the simplest sensual cues of home such as the tune of folk melodies of

I wanted the story of flight—the village he had left as a young boy under cover of darkness, the stale bread passed between many hands, the stony fields traversed in the middle of the night.

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Alpine valleys were likely to trigger a “debilitating nostalgic reaction in Swiss soldiers.” Military superiors were forced to prohibit the soldiers from playing, singing, or even whistling native tunes. Later cures for bouts of nostalgia were more radical. Boym reports that in 1733 when the Russian army was stricken by nostalgia just as it ventured into Germany, the commanding officers announced that the “first to fall sick [with nostalgia] would be buried alive,” a practice which seemed to have an immediate palliative effect on the sufferer.

In the case of all my greatgrandparents and my two grandfathers, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. as young boys, I could theorize that the hardship of emigration and the privation they experienced after arrival was enough to shake the nostalgic impulse right out of them.

But that remains a theory, because I have no records about the quality of their lives—no letter collections, no journals, no family stories. In the absence of information and into that negative space, it’s difficult to formulate a theory. Perhaps the silence speaks for itself.

When I go to the state archives for historical information about the early days of European settlement, I find that archival records do exist. Primary among them are the 1930s WPA (Works Progress Administration) records that employed writers to travel around counties in North Dakota and interview the remaining immigrant generation. A WPA interview form was utilized that asked general questions about family data (names/birthdates), date and year of passage, name of ship, cost of ticket, etc. A general prompt at the end of the interview form invited the interviewee to

provide supplemental information in various categories such as “political events” (county seat fights, party caucuses, vigilanties), “social events” (weddings, dances, games), “industries” (trapping, soap-making, picking buffalo bones), as well as a “miscellaneous” category that included “frost, hail, drought, cyclones, hoppers, blizzards, prairie fires, epidemics, Indian scares, claim jumpers, and etc.”

The extensiveness and specificity of this final category leads one to assume there was a great deal of miscellaneous trouble to be found in the early days of the region. But what’s even more striking about the WPA interview documents is the fact that while the interviews with Irish, English, German, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants are often full of lively detail, the interviews with the German-Russian immigrants tend to be shorter and filled with cursory details. One WPA worker jots a field observation at the end of a report: “I can get very little information from this couple. When I ask them what they do in their leisure time, they reply they have no leisure time. … I can only assume they believe me to be an insurance salesman.”

All the WPA interviewees were invited to include a supplemental narrative relaying additional anecdotes about early pioneer life. These were appended to the back of the formal WPA interview report. Perhaps it goes without saying that most of the German-Russian interviews do not include additional material. By contrast, one loquacious interviewee, Peter Borr, who lists Michigan, Holland, and The Netherlands as the origin points of his family’s multiple migrations, also includes a forty-eight page “Pioneer History.”

The most stunning section of the document, however, features an eight-page report titled “North Dakota Sudden Deaths,” in which Mr. Borr has taken it upon himself to note the details of 207 sudden or unusual deaths, such as the following, all of which occurred in the region between the years of 1886 and 1936.

1886: 1888: 1891: 1888: 1896: 1889: 1898: 1913: 1927: 1929: 1929: 1923: 1918: 1924: 1920:

John Robinson shot by Carlson near Apple Creek.

Bollinger kills self out of fear of arrest for not paying debts.

James Findley shoots wife, then self to death near Winchester.

Grens frozen to death east of Mound City.

Young man killed by lightning while cultivating corn near Gackle.

C. Hanson shoots his head off near Hull.

Mrs. Reynolds found dead in shallow pond, shortly after Mr. Reynolds was found shot through the heart, lying on a log at Omio.

L. Tinholt mysteriously disappears at his opera house, while it burns.

Son of Mitchell dragged to death by pony nine miles north of Herreid.

J.J. Fenelon shoots self at Pollock.

Becthold shot dead at Mobridge.

Three children freeze to death under sleigh as they returned from school in storm.

Jack Bickle dies from Dr. Till’s treatments.

M. Bickle crushed under wagon at Artas.

C. Vorlander shoots self on daughter’s grave at Eureka.

Just this sampling of the death entries, simply stated in one-line summaries, reveals the violence, hardship, and trauma of the early days. Although my greatgrandparents were immigrants and my grandparents were children and young adults during these years, none of these stories were told or remembered by the time I was growing up near or around the very place where these tragedies 17

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occurred. In fact, you wouldn’t have had a clue that the older people of these towns had known and lived through harsh times. As I read these

reports, I understand that they were engaged in a profound and willful act of silencing, an immaculate execution of cultural amnesia.

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regions, to the mind of immigrants were part of the undifferentiated void, something that called out to be shaped and molded to our needs.

Eliade theorizes that when our ancestors performed rites of cultivation such as plowing, seeding, and finally inhabiting a piece of land, they saw themselves as “cosmicizing” it and making it sacred by matching its physical shape to the cosmic model or ideal that existed if only in their imaginations. According to Eliade, people who settled unbroken land for cultivation believed themselves to be performing something akin to an act of creation. Like God, they were doing elemental things—separating the light from the dark, the earth from the sky, the land from the ocean. They were making order from chaos.

Instead of dwelling on the dead and the past, it seems they turned their attentions forward to us, their grandchildren, and outward, to the land itself. “Never let the land go out of the family.” This is a caution I heard often and always growing up. As the owners of the center farm, the original homestead, my family has become the caretaker of a legacy that’s important, if only conceptually, to cousins and uncles and aunts who live in places far and wide.

At that moment, according to Eliade, no matter how difficult the work, they felt their lives take on a greater resonance. Their actions connected them to ancient, ongoing patterns and through these gestures they felt their connection to a chain of being that stretched back far beyond themselves to known and unknown ancestors.

But what makes a piece of land go solid under your feet? How to explain this nostalgia for land that overtakes otherwise pragmatic people? “Archaic man saw settled land as sacred and the wilderness as profane,” Mircea Eliade observed in The Myth of the Eternal Return. Wilderness or uncultivated

This fusion of home and land in the minds of those who remain is often expressed in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! People are fleeting and ephemeral, she observes, but the land holds the future. “How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years?” Cather writes. “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it, are the people who own it—for a little while.”

Family land, by association, becomes the locus, the site that records the sacrifices and successes of our ancestors. All the details of the people and the hardships become conflated across centuries, folded in, tucked away and eventually forgotten by succeeding generations. After that general forgetting is complete, only the fact of the land remains, a geographical reminder connecting us to all those who came before.

And so as I try to approach describing it, the ache for that place I was born to

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and these people I was bound to—whole generational waves of family members who have disappeared from my view—the ache only increases even as the image fades. And so I realize that I am the one who suffers most acutely from nostalgia, not only from the loss of that feeling of belonging that they created for me as a child, but also from regret that the illusion of home they presented felt so solid and claustrophobic to me as a child that all I could do was bristle against it, then engineer my escape, sealing my separation from the people and place that now as an adult I am compelled to haunt in my imagination, returning again and again.

Perhaps this is just the natural condition of aging and loss. My grandparents had the doubly-complex dilemma of having a past that was not only figuratively a foreign country—the natural foreign country that all childhoods are when we glance back at them from the far distance of our later years—but also a past that was literally a foreign country, one about which they did not seem to have memory or language to share with us.

And so I experience nostalgia for them in multiple layers—ache for my own foreign country of childhood and ache for all the foreign countries of their unique history that disappeared unarticulated on my grandparents’ foreign tongues.

Now I spend my time searching through old newspapers, written in languages I do not know, through letter collections and archives in quiet library aisles. I visit graveyards, nursing homes. I smile at old people I see in the street, hoping they will tell me something about the old days. I have an obsessive habit of scanning the faces of modern-day refugees I see in news reports on CNN, hoping to get a glimpse of the familiar, a long lost grandparent.

Most of the time it’s sad and lonely work, this reclamation of the past, and then sometimes you get lucky. A few years ago, I visited older relatives and asked them questions about the old days. Usually my questions were met with the same silences and suspicions as the WPA workers likely faced when they traveled around for the interview project in the 1930s.

as if to make it undetectable to the eyes of the government censor. This second layer, the milk letter, recounted the horrors of life under Communism.

It begged for money and detailed reports of mass starvation and farm collectivization in my great-grandfather’s home village. The milk letter told of grave robbing, church stripping, and of sons and fathers herded up and taken either to servitude in the Russian military or to forced labor camps in Siberia.

My older cousin, Tony, remembers my great-grandfather sitting on a stool in front of the north window of our farmhouse, a stream of tears flowing down his otherwise stoic face, as he held the shaking letter up to the sunlight to illuminate the lines written in milk. A few years later, Tony recalls, in the early 1930s, the letters stopped coming and all talk of Russia ceased.

I grew up in that farmhouse in the 1960s.

I sat at that north window, most often scanning the highway for the bus or the carload of friends that was coming to take me for some adventure in town. One road led to another, all of them away. But I’m ready now to take up my spot at that window, to hold everything up to the fiercest light, to report the invisible layers of stories I find hidden there.

Then one day, during a very ordinary conversation at my older cousin, Tony’s, kitchen table, he began to tell me about the milk letters he remembered that had come for my great-grandfather from the brothers and sisters he had left behind in the Black Sea villages when they fled.

Tony was only a boy at the time, but he remembered that the letters from Russia were written in two layers, the first of which was visible to the eye, penned in ink or pencil, reporting mundane news from the village (births, natural deaths, weddings). Well into the 1920s, my great-grandfather received these letters from those he had left behind in Russia. By then, he was a prosperous North Dakota landowner, but the news from Russia only grew more troubling.

The second layer of the letter, Tony said—invisible and written in milk between the ink lines—was blown dry on the breath of the worried author

Debra Marquart is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. Her North Dakota memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was awarded the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award and received a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation.

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My Pla

Still Fighting for

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ace Sam Larson currently resides in Fargo, ND, and is pursuing graduate studies at North Dakota State University.

She spends much of her time traveling and volunteering with national and community service initiatives.

By Sam Larson

Why? Why do I stay? I get that question a lot.

It comes from every angle, everywhere. East Coast. West Coast. Gulf Coast. Even people from my generation that still call North Dakota home question it. What makes me feel such an attachment to this place? I question that myself sometimes.

In fact, I have questioned it… A lot.

Editor John Irby of the Bismarck Tribune published a story this past June titled, “North Dakota’s Primary Export: Young People,” talking about the cold hard facts of outmigration problems we face. He brings up some of the same stuff I talked about as a student at UND five years ago in a class, captivatingly called Populations. As aboutto-graduate college students, we discussed what makes us go and what makes us stay.

It’s all very surface. Just as Editor Irby mentions, some of the reasons he dug up in an article by USA Today included “the weather, isolation, landscape, and ‘the inability to find a date on a Saturday night’…especially in small towns.”

Most of that, I can agree with. However, with more and more hi-speed internet access coming out to our countryside comrades, perhaps some of those lonely weekends can now be filled with sites like horseandcountrysingles.com, which promises to “Unite equestrian singles and country lovers from all over the world!” My family has actually looked into some of these for my oldest brother, a 33-year-old bachelor who hasn’t spent much time off the farm. With the average age of marriage for men being 27 in this country (and 28 in North Dakota, to my surprise), he’s considered a serious cause for concern. Everyone seems to be seeking out female companionship for him. My aunt, who manages all of the apartments in my old hometown, honestly interviews every young semi-attractive woman that comes her way, asking if she has “a boyfriend or anything.” My other brother and his wife have tried to set him up, pleading with him to take this friend or that friend out on a date, claiming that they just want another couple to go out with! My grandmother scopes out the newspaper every Monday morning, hoping to find a new nurse or teacher that’s moved to town. If the gal has a job, great. If she’s single, even better (those types of things are published in some of our fine, local newspapers). The final analysis generally ends with a conspiratorial whisper over coffee with my Gram-mama, “And she’s cute enough, too.”

All I have to say is at least my brother is still here, keeping our farm intact, watching all the ESPN and History Channel he wants, and making good money. And, he’s more than cute enough, too.

But, it has been his choice to stay, despite the slim pickens (as my dad would say). It’s kind of a matter of sacrifice. There’s a good side and a bad side to almost everything, including the staying or going debate experienced by a lot of “kids” my age (with the median age in North Dakota being 38.8, it seems like nearly everyone under 40 is still called a kid in this state).

I know my brother is waiting for the right girl. He has high standards. Given his love for country music, Bud Light, trucks, and worn out, comfy t-shirts that still fit him from high school, I’m sure he’s not going to find the woman he wants in any big city girl.

But that’s where most of us country girls go – straight to Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle –

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anywhere but here. We get out. Take flight.

I grew up on a farm that ran up to 2000 head of cattle at a time, surrounded by more than 3000 acres of farmland and pasture, and I barely lifted a finger besides shifting the riding lawnmower into high speed and pushing play on my walkman, riding full blast to The Beatles. (If you are from North Dakota, especially a farm, you may already be calling me lazy, and if so, just bare with me through this explanation).

I wasn’t a crazy little helper girl, even though I desperately wanted to be. In a way, our farm was too big with too many hired men for my parents to feel comfortable letting me run around with the rest of the crew. But a big piece of me developed because such a long part of my life was spent growing up on the open prairies, hearing the stories of my father and his ancestors, time and time again. Fights at the county fair, old silent videos of all the good old boys branding cattle, the time my dad started the grain elevator on fire, and the time my dad started a truck on fire, and the time he saw a bobcat in our shelterbelt while he was shooting birds with his Red Ryder (with Christmas coming, I just have to say, he never shot his eye out).

It’s about the country culture that I was brought up in as the world was changing, and as North Dakota was switching from a state of rural people to dying towns. I was a little girl raised in a very nostalgic era, brought up on a farm, a man’s world, and set free from that with very strong, determined, country bird wings.

When I think of my own personal upbringing, I look back on battling the snowdrifted roads on my way to school each morning. Eating burgers from a cow recently butchered in town that had come straight from our farm. Riding a fourwheeler to a place where nothing and no one else could ever find me. Driving a pickup before I could see over the steering wheel. Bouncing along while the boys and men chased cows. Smelling the branding barn. Watching the fields grow, my father’s pride of planting completely straight rows, and then imagining God’s finger touch our land as the guys combined everything down, returning it to the ground.

I used to ride along with my dad in the fall before I got to be old enough to go to school. When I’d fall asleep, he’d send me home with mom when she brought lunch out around 4:00. My nephew, now almost 5, rides with my mom to the fields when she takes lunch out to the boys, just like I used to.

Mom recently told me that Carter started calling the country sausage, mayo, and white bread concoction she whips up “Combine Sandwiches.” He hates meat, but he loves those things. It’s the feeling. The culture.

Today, my love for natural things in life is often mistaken as some kind of new age, contemporary hippiehood rooted in

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mystery since I’m from such a conservative place. A friend from L.A. once asked me, “How did such a hippie come out of North Dakota?” Looking back on that question, and in all reality, it’s just a simple lifestyle, brought from being raised on a farm, in North Dakota, in the middle of nowhere, without any real access to anything except wide open spaces and my own imagination. I believe isolation and solitude have a certain, unique affect on our development.

It creates an appreciation and ability to observe beauty in almost everything. For the record, I am not a hippie. I am a descendant of true blue country folk. (My grandmother, the matriarch, was raised in some backcountry hills just outside of Nashville, TN. I don’t know the exact details, but I’m pretty sure they seldom wore shoes and there was some kind of chicken farming going on. Now that’s country.

In North Dakota, nearly every woman is or has been a country girl. If we weren’t raised on a farm, chances are, our parents were. Maybe I’m one of the few that’s still here. Still fighting for my place. Even though it’s not back with the boys, finding seeds to sow.

I do know my story. I know where I am. 46.89°N. 96.79°W. Fargo, ND. For now. I’ve almost left more times than I can count, starting at age 14, when I realized students in Madison, WI, could actually take theatre classes in high school. I was an arteest, you see, all my life. My sister 10 years my senior had recently moved to Mad-town (one country girl down) and upon my first visit, I fell in love with it instantly. It was new and fresh and different and it had cute, little trendy shops. The capitol building looked like the same one I’d seen in pictures of that big one in D.C. It was the hippest, trendiest place this North Dakota native had ever seen. My sister offered to be my new guardian if I wanted to move there, and all weekend, I imagined myself walking through the halls of this enormous building that looked like the schools I’d only seen on TV, with their gothic revival architecture and sprawling, green-lawned campuses. It was an easy visual defeat to my high school, built of brick in the 1970’s, with laminated flooring and two long hallways that formed a boring L shape, always smelling of floor cleaner.

As my mom and I headed back up 94 following that venture the euphoria of moving away once and for all held strong.

Until we hit the Minnesota border. Then home was just one state away, and I got to thinking, I’d probably have no chance of making the basketball team in Madison. Or the volleyball team. Or the track team. Or student council. Or homecoming court. Or anything else I was able to do back home. If I left North Dakota, who would I be?

So, I stayed, and that thought stayed with me. Through high school, I continued to ponder, and I figured I’d definitely be

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ready to be on the out path once I turned 18. For sure. For certain. Definitely. That’s college. And everyone has a chance to move away then. It’d be my choice. Finally.

The chains ended up clasping down two weeks after I turned seventeen. It was a car accident. A mistake. A tragedy.

Whatever you choose to call it. Perhaps, it was my moment of calling. Awakening. That start of an ongoing sense of freefalling.

That happened going on ten years ago. That’s what I keep thinking. To someone who is twenty-five-years-old, that feels like a long time, yet no time all at once. Perhaps you know the intersection on Highway 15, or if not, you may know one just like it. Perhaps you even know the story, or again, one just like it. It was the summer before my senior year of high school was about to start. July 15, 2001. That date always gives me chills, and puts an ache in my chest where a scar now stands, always reminding me of the two people who lost their lives at my blinded befalling.

One of the two was a deeply loved woman, mother of three, adorer of her grandchildren, who was making her weekly Sunday afternoon trip to see her husband at a local nursing home. She never saw it coming.

The other was a deeply loved friend, sitting beside me, watching the clock as I took us nonstop through a very obvious STOP sign, hoping to be not too late to her niece’s birthday party, which we were running fashionably late for, as usual.

A screech. A stop. A “Sam” gasped out loud. Then silence.

That is what has kept me here. That moment, and every single one since, has been in either the front or back of my mind, in every decision I have made. Until recently. Until now. After years of counseling. And breathing. And uncertainty. And Whys? Although I’ve always wanted to, this is one of the first times I’ve shared even a small part of this part of my story beyond a small, hushed, not-really-knowing-what-to-say crowd.

I’ve been making a living here, trying to make the life for myself I’ve always imagined, between the borders of a place that doesn’t necessarily have all the opportunity I’d be able to potentially dive deep into somewhere else. But still, I stay. I stay. Just in case… Always on guard. I stay because I have learned to cherish and love all that life has to offer here. All that never goes away. The ghosts of our past that haunt us and yet make us whole. Complete. They often ground us with deep roots, soaked with some kind of unfortunate love.

I want to make it better here. I appreciate and laugh in love with the small group of good sports that can survive the weather and the floods and the grudge. But I know my experience and

the secret sense of community that lies across this state. It’s been eight years for me since then. I went to college at UND because I wanted to stay close to home, to help, to fix what I had done. That’s what I meant by “just in case.” Just in case I found a way.

Nothing came quick. I started to beat my head against an imaginary wall, wishing something would break for me.

Wanting to make all the pain of their families disappear.

Wanting to start something big. To heal a community. All while they were the ones who were trying to help heal me.

That’s North Dakota. And nobody forgets it.

When I graduated from college, that’s when I thought I could go. Get out. I thought I could’ve made something happen by then. For sure. “I had four long years to make this right,” I thought. But still, I felt like I’d gotten nowhere.

My last semester I spent studying abroad in Norway. It made me miss North Dakota more than ever. I learned a lot about the benefits of being part of a collective, supportive community there. That’s what I saw there too. It reminded me of home. It reminded me of my hometown, and all the support I received after my accident. It made me want to stay.

To help communities. To make things right. Again, I thought I could.

I went to Fargo then, after graduating, in 2005. Now, it’s 2009.

I still can’t see any huge things that I’ve done. But there are little things. Little changes I’ve contributed to through lasting friendships and working to serve my community. I keep telling myself, it’s all in the little steps, and I’ve had a lot of them. And all the rest has come up from the roots that hold me here.

That’s just a part of life.

I’ve been finding my place. Just like everyone else. When things have gotten tough, I’ve wanted to run. Biologists call this the “fight-or-flight response,” and I go through it almost monthly. When I hit a wall, or face a challenge here in North Dakota, whether it be the “weather, isolation, landscape, or the inability to find a date on Saturday night,” I only know to do what I’ve always done. I just do what I know.

I fight.

Whenever I feel the need to justify someone else’s actions, I always take a minute to think about their past before looking them in the eyes, closing my mind to any other path or possibility, and asking “Why?” I just wonder if the same goes when they look in the mirror. All the kids that go. And what that feels like.

Flight.

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North Dakota Realized

By Kevin Tobosa

North Dakota Realized is a photographic and multimedia exploration of the state’s vitality. My goal is to travel the state, photographing the people and places of North Dakota, looking for the quality that makes North Dakota unique. The success stories. Photography helps me understand a place unlike any other media. The process of seeking images to represent an idea or in this case, a place, is a very deliberate and considered act and is precisely why I chose to formalize the task. It forces me to slow down, look, listen and live in the moment. It gives me a voice to start a dialogue with the people in the western, northern, southern, and eastern parts of the state. Our website, www.northdakotarealized.com is a place in itself where the project will be documented and where anyone is welcome to come and engage in a conversation with us. With the interactive nature of the social web, we can start an ongoing dialogue like never before.

North Dakota is an elemental place – our natural resources a source of power and life. The landscape is varied and unique, our people wholly honest and industrious. Yet, in my opinion, North Dakota remains one of our nation’s most underserved states when it comes to in-depth representation of the economics, the land, the people. Photographs depicting the vastness of our state, haunting scenes of abandoned farmsteads and lifeless rural towns, monopolize the image of North Dakota in the national media. North Dakota Realized is about turning the lens toward the growth and vitality of a state on the verge of becoming a national leader in domestic energy, agricultural technology, and quality of life, despite our harsh northern winters and migration of our youth from small towns to urban centers.

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Above left: Wild horses of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. ©Tobosa Creative Group Above right: North Dakota Musician Tom Peckscamp performing live on Nighttime Live with Jason Spiess on KFGO 790.©Tobosa Creative Group

Adding to the uniqueness of this project is the social media strategy which allows the project to be experienced as it happens. The website journals the project from the preliminary stages through completion – perhaps even beyond.

Social media tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and the blog, allow communities to not only comment on, but influence the project and provide valuable local knowledge.

I do not know what it means to have deep roots in a place. My childhood friends still ride their bicycles up and down the streets of my mind, play ball in the open lots, and hide in all the small places only kids know about. I was born in Washington state and, with my father working for the railroad, I grew up on the move; to wherever the job took us. A recent road trip found me back in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I visited the neighborhood where I once lived. It was my first time back since I left, had I been taken there blindfolded, I would not have recognized the street that at one time defined the boundaries of my universe.

We transferred to Minot in 1987. By this time, I was in Junior High School and I understood that this too was just another place I’d pass through. In ’89 we moved to Fargo and with the exception of my brief stint in the military and working for a newspaper in Helena, Montana, I remain in North Dakota. It’s difficult to say if I chose North Dakota or if North Dakota chose me, but I have never lived anyplace else as long. What atavistic forces conspired to bring 25

[sense of place section] me from the shores of the Pacific Ocean to the Plains of the Midwest, just a hundred miles from Aneta where my great-great-grandparents from Gran, Norway, homesteaded in 1889? Is there within me an ancestral calling attached to the land?

I now watch my own children riding their bicycles up and down our street, exploring the world within the boundaries my wife and I define for them. I wonder how different their relationship with places will be if they grow up with deep roots. How different will their relationship with North Dakota be than mine? Will they firmly plant their roots right here in North Dakota or will they pursue their dreams beyond our borders? These questions will be answered in time and I’m certainly in no hurry to find out.

Until then though, I have an immediate desire to wander a bit, exploring life within the boundaries that make us all North Dakotans.

I’m just starting off on this journey and I’m not exactly sure where it will take me. Perhaps I’m sending myself on a fool’s errand – a modern Quixotic adventure but instead of traveling under horse power fighting windmills with a spear, I’m traveling the state under Jeep power while taking photos of wind turbines with a camera. Of course, I believe in the value of the project but ultimately it is up to the people of and interested in the state of North Dakota to decide if it is valuable to them. What do you think? I’d love to begin a conversation.

By Mark Puppe

We know creativity, industry, and culture thrive in North Dakota but also recognize how incomplete and inaccurate information causes the state to be underestimated, unnoticed, and even belittled. North Dakota has its flaws, but as a lifelong resident who has lived throughout the state, I reject the common notion that North Dakota is simply a barren and blizzard-prone place north of South Dakota. Further, and because you’re reading On Second Thought, I bet you know there’s more than snow here, too.

North Dakota offers far more than what population statistics, weather reports, generic postcards, and photo books of abandoned farmsteads cause many people to believe. Much of what distinguishes North Dakota is intangible and never truly experienced by those who view or capture those photos portraying the state as only isolated and cold. Negative perceptions of North Dakota even abound among its own.

Nonetheless, people believe what they see, and enlightening them to the state’s intangible assets requires more than a brochure telling them to discover the spirit or that this is a good place to raise children. Instead, people need an experience potent enough to trump the preconceived. North Dakota Realized delivers the images and means to effectively introduce North Dakota for what it is and the people as who they really are.

Fargo media artist and professional photographer Kevin Tobosa and I launched North Dakota Realized as a statewide, multimedia journey to discover and capture unique photo opportunities that reveal the underlying identity of the North Dakota people. This venture searches for what is now largely unknown, but those who follow and participate in the project will determine its path and focus.

Kevin and I have different roles and reasons for executing the project, but share the same mission and are determined to persue it with passion. His media talents and expertise capture, format, and post the photos, video, audio, and online networks available at the project hub, www.northdakotarealized. com. Kevin recruited me to identify contacts and feature opportunities; cultivate, engage, grow, and retain our audience; and expand the project’s public presence. Our duties inevitably overlap, but the differences give us a powerful, yet balanced chemistry.

Part of the work I do through my communication consulting company involves helping clients draft and write resumes. From the very beginning, I realized that the Midwestern modesty of which so many North Dakotans are proud actually represents a disappointing tendency for them to sell themselves 26

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Above: Dakota Poet, Christine Hoper grew up in northwestern Minnesota before moving out to Beulah. She now resides in Fargo. ŠTobosa Creative Group Below: Shearing School Coordinator, Christopher Schauer of the NDSU Hettinger Research Extension Center skirts the fleece on the wool table. ŠTobosa Creative Group

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Mark

Kevin

www.northdakotarealized.com Mark Puppe creates, engages, and evaluates communication strategies as a consultant and writer at Master Manuscripts. He graduated from NDSU and UND and has lived in Bismarck, Cavalier, Dickinson, Fargo, and Grand Forks.

Kevin Tobosa is a Fargo-based photographer and integrated marketing consultant. In addition to the North Dakota Realized project, he is the Owner/Creative Director of Tobosa Creative Group, which creates and promotes brands through design, photography, and social media.

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Snowshoeing near Kindred, ND. ©Tobosa Creative Group

short. Cracking that modesty is prerequisite to making them confident applicants, but compares to removing lug nuts with pliers.

For whatever reason, they’re programmed to renounce praise and almost dislike success. It takes energy, diplomacy, and patience from me to convince them that they need not feel guilty for sharing their achievements, taking in pride their talents, or recognizing unique projects as an invaluable way to distinguish their resumes from others’.

The same can be said for North Dakota’s people at large. They’re humble, honorable, hardworking people who silently and selflessly contribute to their communities, but need a third party to reveal how those attributes, activities, and principles make them resourceful and praiseworthy. North Dakota Realized is that third party.

Over the next year and probably beyond, Kevin and I will travel the state using multiple media strategies and resources as to seek, showcase, and celebrate noteworthy characteristics about North Dakota that would otherwise go unknown. Our web site, online social networks, personal and email correspondence, and especially Kevin’s photography, provide an interactive forum for residents, natives, and nonresidents to meet, understand, and appreciate each other.

For me, North Dakota Realized functions as a dynamic, experiential resume that enlightens a limitless audience to how this state and its people are typically underestimated and overlooked, but constantly performing beyond expectation and without any expectation of title or premium pay.

North Dakota Realized finds and features things that provide every audience an honest introduction to North Dakota, its people, and culture, rather than what outside sources already perceive them to be.

It’s an admittedly an abstract objective, but pursuing it will be educational and inspiring for anyone who’s ever heard of North Dakota and everyone we’re fortunate enough to bring along. We invite you to hop on at www.northdakotarealized.com.

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The Place of Memory

By Larry Woiwode

According to Russian-American novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, “Memory is imagination.” The idea is that memory is our line to a lived life. Memory not only triggers a warning of what’s on the stove before it starts burning (on the simplest level), but without memory there is no coherence to the course of daily existence, no past or present, no method to sort or retrieve any fragment of knowledge, and no way to gauge our acts against the history or wisdom present in tradition.

So memory is indeed imagination, as Nabokov says. A creative or factual thought cannot rise from blankness; it comes from the storehouse of memory. Memory is as necessary to us as language. Actually, memory is the source of language, whether we think of it in those terms or not – and usually functions best if we don’t.

In a further step, it’s through the aid of place that memory asserts its central role. I don’t merely mean the kind of moment, common to a person my age, that occurs when I go downstairs and can’t remember why I’m in the 30

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basement, so I go back upstairs and there, in that place, in the stilled geography of its external arrangement, Aha! I remember why it was I ended up in the basement.

That’s true at the simplest level, with this addition: remove place and memory will fade, story spiral away, communication lapse, and everybody slip for good into the incoherent blankness of a basement moment. If we test our earliest memories, for instance, we notice they’re never abstract and seldom related to language. Instead they’re pictures, stilled or cinematic, fixed in the context of an exact place.

Memory also pinpoints the senseless continuum of time, placing an event last week or this morning at breakfast or our date for tonight. In a longer, interlinked chain of time, memory is the source of history, and we realize sequence is necessary in order to arrange external events in what is called a narrative. Narrative relates events to our collective memory, and its ordering assures the permanence of memory. And permanence – whether it’s experienced as place of rest or the still point of the turning world or the point of balance to a wobbling pivot – is a spiritual state.

Since the 1970s I’ve been asked to give talks or contribute essays on the “importance of place in writing,” and I feel, if not a specialist on the topic, a kind of inside informer – albeit a minor one, to adopt McMurtry’s Law. In the 1970s, Larry McMurtry, the novelist from Texas, began wearing in his Washington, D.C., bookstore a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Writer.” (I assume he discarded it when he won the Pulitzer Prize.) The T-shirt summed up for him the metropolitan and often academic view of those who write about a region of the countryside that isn’t as popular or well known as Chicago or New York, even Minneapolis.

Perhaps it is the sentimentality of local writing that has caused an academic reaction. For instance, a professor from the East asked to interview me and in preparation sent a sheaf of questions, and I’ll mention only two; these topped his list, and I quote them exactly: 1) What sorts of things sustain a writer, or any artist, in what many people see as the isolated geography of N.D.; and 2) Do you think that the undervaluation of your work may be a function of geography, or place?

The answer to the first, what sustains an artist, is easy: food. And whether it’s true or not, I appreciate the term undervaluation. Wouldn’t everybody like to hear, “Hey, you’re undervalued!” So in one sector of the literary network that extends from New York City outward, it appears that if you are not from there, or a similar literary capital, your work will suffer, due to the “function of geography.”

This view ignores the habitations and settings, indeed, the tradition found in Steinbeck and Hemingway and Faulkner, Willa Cather and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few, and carried forward in writers as diverse as Jane Smiley and Marilynne Robinson and Tom McGuane. But another side exists, as illustrated by John Updike, this dialogue from Pigeon Feathers: 31

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“Elsie, I KNOW, I know from my education, the earth is nothing but chemicals. It’s the only damn thing I got out of four years of college, so don’t tell me it’s not true.”

“George, if you’d just walk out on the farm you’d know it’s not true. The land has a SOUL.” “Soil, has, no, soul,” he said, enunciating stiffly, as if to a very stupid class.

I got a sense of the cumulative effect of this attitude when I was teaching at an Eastern University and the subject of farming came up and was met with joking derision by the class, so I asked them where they thought they got their food. “The deli,” somebody said, not intending to be funny. “So where does the deli get it?” I asked.

“Warehouses,” another said, and that was as far as their knowledge of this essential to their lives extended.

D. H. Lawrence wrote, “When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche.” Lawrence was a novelist and outcast from Britain who settled in New Mexico, a region where one of the most advanced indigenous cultures once reigned: [America] is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men ... until the white men give up their absolute whiteness ... Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American soil will appear.

This resonates through the American experience across most of the last century up until now. And I suspect it isn’t until one gives up his or her absolute whiteness (if one is white) that one begins to feel at home in the place called America, just as every immigrant who comes to America gives up a cultural and national identity. This giving up or giving over is known as “deracination” - a bleeding away of originality until hardly more than a husk remains. The more immigrants gave up or presently give up, the more “American” they tend to feel, and this deracination gives a clue about America as a place. Without an original identity our minds can be flooded by the lowest common denominator - the gabby chatter about violence and toxic negative events called the evening news.

Underneath all of this, like the soil itself, another tradition exists, starting with the Greek poet Homer. Once the Trojan War is settled all the travels of Homer’s hero Odysseus tend toward his wife, Penelope. In the tradition of early history their marriage “was part of a complex practical circumstance involving, in addition to husband and wife, their family, both descendants and forebears, their household, their community, and the sources of all these lives in memory and tradition, in the countryside, and in the earth.” The comment is from Wendell Berry, and the proof of the view is that when Odysseus finally returns to his home in Ithaca, his father is tending an orchard, his wife weaving, his son back from the sea.

Homer saw fulfillment in the domestic life at home, and the later author of Beowulf wove into his hero’s travels and exploits meditations on place. The Icelander Snorri Sturluson composed local sagas and myths and instructed others how to keep them local in his Prose Edda.

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Down the line we have pastoral poets, beginning with Chaucer, and pastoral playwrights, as seen in Shakespeare, and pastoral writing from Virgil and Ovid on down, that is, writing set in a rural area, since pastor means shepherd - the Biblical identity of a pastor as overseer of a “flock.” In America a group of Southerners, the Agrarians, came up with this view in the 1930s: “It is the character of a seasoned provincial [or rural] life that it is realistic, or successfully adapted to its natural environment, and that as a consequence it is stable, or hereditable.”

It can be passed on, inherited; a sequential, generational bond.

The thousands of immigrants who left the geophysical beauty of Norway, where a seasoned provincial life was established, and settled in the Midwest or Great Plains, have left more Scandinavian descendants than now reside in Sweden and Norway. What a scattering and gathering of place!

For a generation or two, none of them wished to speak their native language (and often forbade their children to) so they could undergo the deracination that seems the essence of American identity. A symptom of the deracination is the denial of the urban dwellers to see country people, tillers of the soil, as necessary to their existence; and the reluctance of anybody under twenty-one to read and enter the dimensional entity of another individual “Because you can find it on the Internet.”

Yet another aspect of place is the idea of the country mouse and the city rat. Those divisions tell us how the two species organize their homes; mice in local family units, usually in nests, rats in loosely related metropolitan gaggles. A Herald Tribune article noted that residents of Chicago’s ritzy North Shore registered 17,000 complaints about rats between May and August - which is nothing compared to New York, the newspaper reported, where an estimated 70 million rats reside. Approximately 17 million human beings live in New York, so that puts the status at four to one.

This isn’t to set the country above the city, and reminds me of a story about a gentle elderly man living alone in New York City, with none of his family near, no friends to keep him company, who adopts a mystical relationship with a mouse that visits his apartment. The sense of reconciliation conveyed by that image, a man in the anonymous city communing with a mouse expresses the kind of unity between city and country that it would be healthy for America to achieve.

In the history of American writing certain narrators leave the country for the city, but we see also the opposite. In his retreat to Walden, Thoreau may seem the first writer to head for the woods. But Washington Irving left New York City for the Catskills; Fenimore Cooper was the first European American to explore the forest as it existed for a vanishing Native population; and the concern for a lost relationship to the land has passed to Wendell Berry and North Dakota’s Louise Erdrich, among others.

Place resides in the writer. Whatever captures his or her attention is the direction the writing takes. The “where” of a story and the incidents in it (set in the prism of time) become the story’s place. To see it another way, a character must have an exterior ambience, earth or concrete to walk on, or a room or a house that a particular person inhabits as no other would. That is “place” in fiction.

There is no place in the world a writer can’t inhabit with words, once the imaginative grip of memory, as it establishes its residence in metaphor, sets a flag on a particular inner geography.

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The real place of the writer is metaphor, inside the network of words that isn’t life itself or quite like life but that can instill in another the illusion, as it was for the writer, that here is life indeed. Metaphor is the location of any writer when the writer is at work - his or her resting place. There is no place in the world a writer can’t inhabit with words, once the imaginative grip of memory, as it establishes its residence in metaphor, sets a flag on a particular inner geography. As American writing becomes increasingly personal, even solipsistic, as indeed it has, William Gass says that “No one quite believes in any inner spirit but his own.” This is an effect of the deracination in America; only “I” exist.

Each person seeks his or her individual identity, with no reference to any structure or tradition or immigrant heritage or any index but oneself. Cell phones and video games, led by television, displace the presence of people. This is a harrowing experience for many in America, and it is why young people strike out in such inexplicable, unprecedented, often violent ways. They are living the epitome of their inheritance, the blank page, with no local story to hold them to a place with a fruitful end.

[North Dakotans] hold pristine memory of place. And if they cherish the earth and the diverse populations on it with the reverence of mutual regard, then a new kind of communication could be forged...

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Besides a distancing mistrust in young people, I sense a yearning unrest - a desire for their spirits to be appeased, perhaps. One of the more articulate, Daphne Merkin, wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve been trying to lose my religion for years now, but it refuses to go away ... You’d think it would be easy, particularly in a city like New York, where no one cares whether or not you believe in God; even my friends who would be hard put to explain why, other than by alluding knowingly to Pascal’s wager, in which the odds favor the believer. But as the world becomes a more bewildering place almost by the week, I find myself longing for what I thought I’d never long for again: a sense of community in the midst of the impersonal vastness, a tribe to call my own.”

Merkin is on the track, I believe, of a promising trend. I see places of the spirit no person has explored, entire landscapes that miss the scrutiny of the most rigorous analysts - although writing has taught psychiatry that the psyche and dislocations in it, such as the Oedipal conflict, exist - and I believe that American writing stands at the threshold of being able to speak about its semi-appeased ghosts and the habitations of spirituality as at no other time. North Dakotans are best poised for this. They hold pristine memories of place. And if they cherish the earth and the diverse populations on it with the reverence of mutual regard, then a new kind of communication could be forged for generations after us who wish to hear about the places we have inhabited and that inhabit us. This will happen when we’re led from the impersonal vastness of the present to consider our neighbor (whoever that might be) in this place where we’re situated in the ideal setting for telling stories of our love for the land and its people in terms previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

Six of Larry Woiwode’s dozen books have been selected as “notable books of the year” by the New York Times. His essays have appeared in Esquire, Partisan Review, etc., and are included in Best Spritual and Best Christian Writing volumes.

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The Land, or the Landscape?

By Corey Seymour

Corey Seymour graduated from high school in New Rockford, ND, and studied literature at Georgetown University. He’s since worked in New York City as a writer and editor for various magazines including Rolling Stone, Men’s Vogue, and Men’s Journal, where he currently serves as articles editor. Seymour is also the co-author, with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, of Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson.

One spring day at the beginning of our junior-high biology class at New Rockford Central, our teacher announced an impromptu field trip. We marched the few blocks down to the James River and the adjacent city park, then received our marching orders: Measure off a one-foot by one-foot square of ground, then spend a full hour examining it with as much precision as we could muster. At first it seemed like a joke—this lawn we were to dissect was merely the carpeting beneath our feet as we barbequed, played volleyball, watched fireworks on July 4; it was land to be trampled over and ignored as we headed to the pool, the tennis courts, the river.

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Our somewhat shocking discovery, of course, was that each plot was wildly different and harbored a self-contained world in miniature: Some teemed with strange organisms which, when literally put under the microscope, looked like space aliens; other patches, seemingly thriving from a bird’s-eye point of view (the bird, in this case, being us), were revealed, on close inspection, to be knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s—or at least Mother Nature’s—door, filled with rotting roots and the desiccated shells of long-gone insects.

Instantly, pride-of-place battles sprung up among our class: One person’s square foot was better than the others because it had more plant varieties; another’s because it contained a centipede or a large beetle which, in the shift of perspective and scale, became the T. Rex of our Lilliputian world. Then we packed up our microscopes and magnifying glasses and trowels and walked back to school.

A decade or so later I was living in the East Village of downtown Manhattan, eking out a spare existence as an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone. Our offices were twenty stories above the shopping spectacle of Fifth Avenue and looked out upon Central Park, a square mile of green in the middle of the asphalt, concrete, glass and steel city. During lunchtimes and on weekends, Central Park was now my plot to explore; in the intervening evenings I acquainted myself with a concrete-and-steel, whiskey-and-soda, straight-no-chaser part of the city about equal in size. And while I wouldn’t classify what I was doing as hard science, per se, there was a certain quality of anthropology to my meanderings.

I met a great number of people for whom a living, breathing representation of North Dakota was only now standing in front of them for the first time—in most of these cases, this was the only time in their lives the words “North” and “Dakota” were ever uttered together in their presence. What these people all wanted to know about my home plot, though, was exactly the same: Essentially, “Whatcha got?” They’d even run down the list of possibilities for me: “Mount Rushmore, right? No? The Black Hills?”

Uh, no. “That big biker rally—where is it. . . Sturgis, North Dakota, right! Finally, desperate to lob me an alley-oop pass (though the game had long been decided), “Mountains? You must have some mountains.” Thwarted by the dearth of natural spectacles, they’d make a tactical retreat, looking for beetles and centipedes: “Well, who’s from North Dakota?” I tried, reader, I tried—but whatever increasingly animated combination of Peggy Lee, Eric Sevareid, Lawrence Welk and Phil Jackson that I could summon just didn’t seem to cut enough mustard. By this point, my audience was deflating in front of my eyes.

I’ve now lived in New York City for 20 years—one year longer than the time I spent growing up in North Dakota. The realization of this scale-tipping earlier this year filled me with a profound unease. I finally gave in a few years ago and got myself a New York state driver’s license, though if I had my druthers there would be an asterisk on it somewhere stating: “Still considers himself citizen of North Dakota.” Call it a holdover from my biology class, but I still hold fast to the notion that a life which allows you to walk on or, even better, dig in dirt occasionally is intrinsically better than one which doesn’t. The idea of identifying primarily with a place in which you haven’t lived for a couple decades, though, is an odd one.

The prevailing concept is that tenure on the land is the true measure of devotion to it. But what to make of two friends of mine, sisters from a farm family of several generations, who as we were about to graduate high school in the mid-1980s had yet to travel outside our medium-sized county? Should we call lack this of opportunity or curiosity, or just loving the one you’re with? I’d vote for a scoop of each, and would only add that these friends were among the most pleasant, intelligent, loyal and, at the risk of sounding redundant, grounded people I knew. As our country’s collective notions of individual patriotism continue to be labeled, exploited, divided and attacked, though, it’s only a small stretch to envision the sisters being vilified as isolationists—patriots to their county, but infidels to the state. Then again, thankfully, vilification has never been a growth industry in North Dakota.

The so-called American Dream, articulated fully, is wrought with contradictions. Two conflicting tautologies form the twin poles of our ethos: One says to always be yourself; the other that you can be whatever you want to be. Extrapolated to social and physical spaces, are we then to both love our country, our state, our counties, towns, schools, homes, families and friends as they are, while also striving to transform them, improve them, change them and challenge them? Is being rooted in a place the same as being satisfied with it? With being smug about it, competitive? Resigned to it, or merely comfortable?

If stay-put-ness was the end-all-be-all of being true to your geographical school, though, what then to say of our ancestors, each one of who, at some decisive moment, uprooted themselves from the place they called home to make a new one elsewhere?

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Unless we were all borne of long lines of doomsayers, it’s fair to assume they each thought they were bettering themselves and their family fortunes. The modern version of this legacy of somebodydone-someplace-wrong has been rebranded as “brain drain”; the old-fashioned version was known variously as lighting out for the territories, seeking one’s fortune, Going West Young Man, or, in modern parlance, trying to better yourself.

In my first year in New York, I was surprised to learn from a Rolling Stone colleague that her grandfather hailed from North Dakota. He’d made his way from the Old World to New York with a plan to work his way across the country one job at a time: When he had money, he traveled; when he had none, he got a job and planted himself for a few years. I’ve often wondered what in God’s name compelled him to stop where he did: Was North Dakota better than any vaguely formed dream of California or Oregon or wherever he’d originally planned, or did he just get worn out, or perhaps simply took a shine to the landscape, or the people? Did he enjoy the weather, or did he put the “settle” in “settler”?

Is being rooted in a place the same as being satisfied with it?

I left North Dakota and headed the other direction for one ill-defined reason: Because the sons of some family friends had gone East to college and come back to their farm on breaks having become more interesting people. In my more fatuous moments, I sometimes wish I wasn’t the sort of person who sought out “interesting experiences.” The problem, of course, is that you may find more of them than you wished. Listening to someone complain about this, though, is the been-there, done-that version of having a billionaire tell you that money isn’t everything. It’s absurd.

Almost as absurd is the experience of returning to my hometown now, as I’ve been doing lately for as long as I can as often as possible, despite having no family still living there. (The town is both small and intimate enough that people I haven’t seen in a decade or so stop me in the store or on the street and ask, with both suspicion and good cheer, what I’m doing there.) Returning to a favorite place isn’t the same as living there. It’s an ecstatic distillation of memory amidst the rediscovery of people and places that resonate in my memory: My mother’s best friend from childhood; the rough patch of land on the outskirts of town that my best friend Jim and I “discovered” and named ourselves (“The Found”); the railroad depot that sat a few hundred yards outside my bedroom window to where, at the sound of a distant whistle, I’d sprint to watch passing trains roll through (the building has been long gone and, I’d assumed, demolished; on a drive through the countryside during my most recent visit, though, I was startled to find it relocated to a game farm with deer, elk, antelope and a few bears); and, of course, the house I grew up in, ground zero of one’s sense of place.

The distinction between “house” and “home” in this case is somewhat akin to that between “landscape” and “land.” Settlers didn’t spend long days working the landscape. Like a house, it’s something you take in from an outside perspective. You can render judgments about its suitability for this or that, its being pleasing or not to the eye. I’m half a tourist now when I return, so I’ll have to call what I gaze out at through the window on trips back to North Dakota a familiar landscape. It’s still much the same as when I simply called it “land,” though my house—my former home—has fallen into disrepair. Aside from a deeply impractical wish to buy the place back just to fix it up, though, it evokes more feeling in me now than it ever did.

What we’re really looking for upon returning somewhere we once knew well is a place that we still remember in its shapes and contours, its signposts, clouds, snowstorms, temperatures and smells, and a person or two who remembers us—though not because of feats of derring-do, or idiocy, or grace, or good humor. I think it’s about proving something elemental to ourselves: We existed then, and still do so now. Psychologists say that one of the fundamental needs of our psyche is a narrative that we can use to explain the events of our days and our years to ourselves in a manner that makes sense. This narrative is: I was here once. This used to be my plot of land. And if I can’t be rooted in it, I’ll settle for being rooted to it.

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[poetic landscape section]

Read on White

By Rick Watson

There was a strange tone in the poet’s voice As he recited one of his lines.

It seemed a new meaning speared into him As he stood, recited those words to a few of us In a room that was much too large.

It was as if he suddenly sensed the place, The thousands of miles of North Dakota Winter white surrounding the overheated room.

He spoke the line he’d written about another place, Years before: “the white snow of the page,” he said.

He stood there, surprised by the true little metaphor, Surprised at how far he’d come away From Ireland’s green and wet epiphanies.

I wish he were back here today.

The seeming blank page is upon the prairie again.

I walk in the pasture It appears so empty and hard, But it is soft as the white sheets that wrap a dream.

I sink down in the snow, and I see: The cattail, red-brown fur on sticks in the slough; The bright, red crab apples frozen on branches, The bronze-red of the limbs of a leafless tree, The yellow/red war paint spread on the feathers Of the small birds standing guard in the tree.

Then I step in the buck brush.

Suddenly the sky is filled with wings; The blue-headed pheasant cocks; Their thundering strokes, their bright brushing wings Dazzle the canvas of the silent, solid sky.

The sweet, cold season explodes and cracks From under the long brush strokes of blended white and grey.

Colors splash on the ancient frame of earth and sky.

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Because democracy demands thoughtful and informed citizens.

The North Dakota Humanities Council is an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, founded by the federal government on the premise that, “An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present and a better view of the future.� Simply put, a nation that does not know why it exists, or what it stands for, cannot long be expected to flourish. In this vein, the NDHC uses the tools of history, literature, philosophy, ethics, and archeology to understand and enhance American culture.

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[poetic landscape section]

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[poetic landscape section]

Karloff in Dakota

By Jamieson Ridenhour

You can’t help but wonder about Boris Karloff spending that year in Minot, North Dakota.

All the biographies mention it, a cold and early footnote, the truest example of hard times you could imagine. They murmur it like a prison sentence, a gypsy curse written in whispers and sprinkled with intensifiers: “He even spent a year in Minot, North Dakota.” Granted, in 1915 Minot still looked frontier, flatline level, a dusty cluster of houses huddled like hobos on the prairie, a lonely Grinchless Who-ville.

Two hours south of the Portal where Boris first touched the United States, the travelling players settled in, poverty struck and interminably stuck, piecing together script after script in a mad scientist frenzy. Desperate to entertain the plains.

Did he have time to feel the cold stunting sting of the Dakota windscape? Were 106 shows in half as many weeks enough to regret the brusque hustle of itinerant acting, of a thirdrate company in a third-floor theatre? One floor above the bank, two above the hardware store, seven and a half actors playing twenty roles in The Fortune Hunter. That year the half-actor was a Minot housewife playing part-time, but five years earlier it had been the man himself—still Billy Pratt and acting at half-talent. When your salary drops while the curtain’s still up, it’s hard to believe you’ve chosen wisely. While shopping for suits—five dollars’ worth chosen from the cleaners’ unclaimed— did he second-guess the self-creation, the forged résumé, the fictions of parts never played?

When the exhaustion overwhelmed they would skip Act II, just aim for the climax and head for the hotel, stumbling through the snowy streets in the too-early dark. After his evening soda at the café across the street, before he fried his dinner egg on the back of an iron, did he look out across the prairie and see, fitfully lit by the borealis, his heavy-footed fate inching inexorably closer? Kicking up dust, scarred like the plains, cold and unlovable, arms spread wide for a welcoming embrace?

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[plain thinking]

A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains

By Clay S. Jenkinson

I’m fascinated by the idea of “spirit of place” and have written a whole book trying to define it and figure out if I have it, if we North Dakotans have it. But for all of that I am not really sure what it is. It might be useful to begin by differentiating two types of “spirit of place.”

Spirit of place is either something that emanates from the land and into the people who inhabit or visit it; or it is an attitude held by people towards a place.

In other words, either the place permeates people with meaning or identity; or people invest a place with meaning because of their historical or personal association with it. When these two types of spirit of place come together, a very powerful sense of resonance occurs.

An example of a place on the Great Plains that has spirit of place is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the plains of Montana. I know a dozen people who have visited the site over the years who swear there is something eerie going on there that cannot be explained rationally. They say they can “feel” something—the battle, the ghosts, an energy in the grass, a kind of karma. My mother (who is not given to the metaphysical) says there is a barely perceptible “sitz sitz sis sis sitz,” she literally hears when she is there, coming from the wind in the grass, and that this unaccountable sibilance means something. I know a disillusioned history professor who says that anyone who happens upon the site and walks around will inevitably “feel” something heightened there. I know a rational preacher who is skeptical of the Apostles Creed, but who was visibly moved by the spirit in the grass when he visited the battlefield for the first time. He had been reading about the battle for many years. “Words, words . . . words,” says Hamlet.

Now whether there is really any intrinsic spirit of place at the Little Bighorn battlefield or just meaning we have invested in it because of the amazing terrible thing that happened there on June 25, 1876, is an interesting question.

My mother swears that anyone who ventured onto the ridge, someone looking for a K-Mart or a place to have a quiet picnic, but with no understanding of what transpired there 134 years ago, would experience some sort of soul’s heightening. Others, a little less certainly, are inclined to agree.

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[plain thinking]

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[plain thinking] A more common example is a family’s home place.

My family has one in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. My grandparents Dick and Rhoda Straus lived there for forty years. It was a small rolling hills farm of about 85 acres, a third of it pasture, and the rest cropland.

They milked cows—just sixteen of them, each with a name like Bess or Whitey or Pal—and at times they raised chickens and pigs, and a half dozen steers for the meat market. We no longer own the farm.

That’s a long story interesting only to us. But I make the pilgrimage to the home place at least once a year. When I am there I invariably go into the barn to kick around among the stalls. I can remember which stanchion belonged to which Holstein or Guernsey. I climb up into the hayloft and scramble around a little among what’s left of disintegrating hay bales. I always walk the whole perimeter of the farm. I make my annual check of Grandma’s rhubarb plants out along the lilac trees west of the house and as I sit in the grass next to Grandma’s big garden I loosen my grip on my mind so that the memories and associations can run free. I deplore, mostly on behalf of my mother, the way they (I have lost track of the tenants’ names) have “let the place go,” particularly the large brick flower planters that flank the front door. As I walk about on the warm earth of the old family farm, I feel sad and glad and recharged with memory. I feel closer to my roots. I ache for what has been lost: in my life, in my family, in the lifeway of the upper plains, in rural life, in America. And then I get in my car and drive away.

Spirit of place, then, is the value added of a site that cannot be measured in economic terms. It is related to the physical, but its significance is metaphysical— or perhaps the physical and metaphysical mated in a kind of irresistible minuet. Ask any person to describe the place most important of all the places on earth.

For one, it is a beach on Santorini. For another, it is a coffee shop in Seattle. For a third, it is a calm bay at the base of a calving glacier in the panhandle of Alaska. For most, it is home, or the old home place.

Everyone is from somewhere.

But what does that somewhere have to do with anything?

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Everyone is from somewhere. But what does that somewhere have to do with anything? We live at a time in human history when place matters less than it ever has before. Almost any American community with a population of more than 5000 has a Dairy Queen, a Pizza Hut, perhaps a Hardees.

Any place with more than 25,000 people has an Applebee’s and a Wal-Mart. The American people are fond of national and international chain stores and restaurants. There is some sort of a population trigger effect that determines who has access to what plateau of amenities—in shopping, in dining, in lodging. Communities measure themselves—they use the term “quality of life”—by how high up the

hierarchy of chain store placement they have risen.

Thanks to satellite and cable television, virtually every American watches the same television programs. The same sitcoms entertain folks on the Navaho Indian Reservation and Boston, Massachusetts. We drive the same cars and fill them at the same gas stations, which are laid out identically in San Diego, California, and Anchorage, Alaska. Almost all commercial buildings in America are climate controlled. Almost all cars are air-conditioned. People walk out of their homes not into nature but into their garages, depart by way of automatic garage door openers, drive to a paved and developed precinct (to shop, dine, work, recreate, or work out), then return home at the end of the excursion, close the garage door behind them, and enter their houses, where they spend the great majority of their discretionary time watching the homogenous television programming of America or sitting in front of a computer terminal.

Our lives are mediated and abstracted and deracinated as never before. In some sense it doesn’t really matter any longer whether you live in Minot, North Dakota, or Minden, Nevada; in Austin, Texas, or Alexandria, Virginia. Our experiences are essentially played out in fabricated arenas that could literally be anywhere—anywhere in America and to a certain extent anywhere on earth. If 100 years ago our

[plain thinking]

great grandparents were so deeply rooted in place that their lives were constricted, constrained, confined, claustrophobic, and profoundly provincial, we, 100 years later, live in a manner that is almost entirely detached from place. Americans, de Tocqueville said, are the most restless people on earth. In the 21st century, even when we don’t migrate from place to place, we have added rootlessness to restlessness.

It could easily be said that, as the 21st century begins, we live in the geography of Nowhere. That which could be anywhere—Best Buy, Olive Garden, Sam’s Club—is also nowhere.

It would be interesting to know how much time per day, per week, and per year the average North Dakotan now spends outside. How many hours per year does a North Dakotan spend off pavement? And of the time spent outside, how much of it truly signifies North Dakota qua North Dakota, and not a fabricated and domesticated enclave of Kentucky bluegrass lawn that could just as easily encircle a house in Albuquerque, Connecticut, or Georgia? How many days per year do any of us spend in a manner that could be said to resonate with the land, the history, or the spirit of the Great Plains (as opposed to the land-history-spirit of North Carolina or the florescent geography of Nowhere)?

We all acknowledge the general way in which place shapes character, of course. Put someone who grew up in Mississippi and someone who grew up in New Hampshire on the same stage in Chicago and everyone will know the difference, at least the moment these representatives open their mouths and begin to talk. Both are Americans. Both drink soda, both order Dominos Pizza, both watch American Idol. They share lives as consumers. But (in descending order) they will almost certainly exhibit differences in accent, to a certain extent in diction, in the way they dress, in body language and style; and they are likely to have quite different political outlooks. Now pluck them out of the artificial environment of Chicago and put them back in their home states, back into their natural habitats, surrounded by their own folk, and their state and regional identies are likely to be more pronounced, at times much more pronounced. People regain their default accents and Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart” when they go home, and they are more comfortable there to express their full personality and identity without inhibition.

We all acknowledge that there is a Texas type, a California type, a Long Island type, a Minnesota type. But is there a North Dakota type?

If a North Dakotan moves to Philadelphia, Miami, or Detroit, does anyone say, “There is something about you. Are you by any chance from North Dakota?” Almost all of us are very clearly Americans. Many of us exhibit some sort of regional identity. It might be possible, from accent and idiosyncrasies of phraseology, for a stranger to “locate” a North Dakotan as Midwestern, to place the North Dakotan somewhere in the region between Wisconsin and Idaho, North Dakota and Kansas, but it would be quixotic to argue that the landscape and the social 47

[plain thinking] structure of North Dakota stamp a distinctive identity on the people who grow up here.

State identity is interesting, and it is worth reflecting on how difficult it is to distinguish North Dakotans from the inhabitants of a number of states of the same region; but it is much more interesting to explore the spirit of place that is available to North Dakotans, but not inevitable, the spirit of place that is not part of the automatic software that virtually every North Dakotan runs by virtue of growing up in this region of the country, but rather something that people have to make a conscious choice to embrace if they wish to understand it or exemplify it. In other words, spirit of place is a choice, a journey, and a quest, not merely a birthright.

I’m going to make an effort to define some of the elements of a North Dakota spirit of place, knowing that such a definition depends on the eye of the beholder. One of the principal truths of life is that the lens you wear determines what you see. If you wear the lens of economic development as you gaze at North Dakota, you see beneath the surface of the land to the coal, oil, and natural gas fields that beckon in the basement of the state. If you wear the lens of tourism, you see the Lewis and Clark trail, and Fort Mandan; Custer’s route first to the Black Hills (1874) and then his last journey to the Montana line and on to the Little Big Horn (1876); Theodore Roosevelt engaged in comic-hectic self-fashioning in the Dakota badlands; water skiing and sport fishing on Lake Sakakawea and Metigoshe. If you wear a Jeffersonian lens, you see family farms diffused across the landscape, coop grain elevators, virtuous democratic villages.

Where you stand depends upon where you sit, and what you see depends entirely on which lens you choose to wear. Spirit of place is mostly a lens we acquire because we want not just to occupy land but to inhabit it. Robert Frost had it right at JFK’s Inaugural:

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[plain thinking] The land was ours before we were the land’s. .

Something we were withholding made us weak.

Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Anglo-Americans are not good at surrender.

American Indians, on the other hand, were experts at surrender, and until we learn to surrender a little to their cultural style, we probably cannot really come to terms with the spirit of place of the Great Plains.

If North Dakota has a spirit of place, some or all of the following elements must play a role: Open space with some sort of statistical minimum of human infrastructure appliquéd on it. A landscape vast and treeless rolling out to the vanishing

point in every direction. Wind—breeze and blast, zephyr and shrieking madcap appalling windsweep, to ruin your picnic and shatter your family reunion. Flat or gently rolling country suddenly giving way, without warning, to broken country, coulees, badlands, jumble. Giants of the Earth skies in which humans are reduced to antlike proportions against impossibly large backdrops in which the land is huge but the sky is huger. Buttes rising out of the land like shoebox reminders of the level of the land a million years ago, grassy remnants plopped down in the middle of nowhere, which the combined erosive forces of wind and water somehow left behind when they swept everything else into the Gulf of Mexico. The never far from the surface understanding that a very different people lived here and not very long ago, a people who wore very different lenses from ours, whose civilization we did everything in our power to sweep away, but whose spiritual signature on the landscape we still see and feel, and whose lingering presence challenges us right to the core from time to time even now. A sense of the temporariness of human habitations, a kind of joyfully anxious feeling that the wind might just sweep all that we have built away if we don’t keep battening it down. A respect for the unbelievably hard lives of the pioneers who proved up here a hundred plus years ago, laying down crops and crude shelters against the sub-Arctic cold in the most improbable landscape of America, whose lives are more authentically captured by Rachel Calof than by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The sense that there is nothing whatsoever standing between you and God, the Great Spirit, the Manitou, Allah, or the moons of Jupiter, and that there is no one to wrestle with the Angel of Death but you. An awareness of how few people can or want to live here, and how strange it is to choose to live away from the clusters of population and comfort of amenities when, in fact, you could choose to live anywhere. Storms: thunderstorms, windstorms, snowstorms, hailstorms, blizzards. A constant looking to the sky for trouble and for answers.

Not everyone will see spirit of place in North Dakota in quite this way. There are cultural elements, too, such as white wooden Lutheran churches out in the middle of nowhere with their steeples pointing up into the middle of nowhere, bars and hot dishes and white cakes in aluminum pans, brilliantly red and brilliantly green combines inching their way through wheat fields, sunflowers lined up in perfect Nuremburg rectilinearity as far as the eye can see.

Fleishkeuchle in one café, borscht in another.

I want to draw a distinction between two types of North Dakotans (or Montanans, Oregonians, etc.). This distinction begins with the understanding that everyone lives somewhere. Everyone is from somewhere. If you grow a young person in North Dakota and then transplant her to, say, Seattle or Denver, in what ways does she remain a distinctive North Dakotan? She may like to identify herself as a North Dakotan. She may feel deep loyalty to 49

[plain thinking] North Dakota. She may be able to talk about the Medora Musical or Theodore Roosevelt National Park, about the state fair or vacations on Lake Sakakawea, but in what meaningful sense is she a North Dakotan? How—on any given day—is she different, if at all, from someone who was grown in Iowa or Florida or New Jersey? What is the North Dakota in a North Dakotan? In what way, if any, does the landscape of North Dakota shape the character of its young people?

I have found in my studies of spirit of place that there are two types of North Dakotan: accidental North Dakotans and naturalized North Dakotans. In the era of Best Buy and seasonal premium sports packages on cable or satellite television, most of us are accidental North Dakotans most of the time. By accidental I mean that we live here, on the near rectangle of North Dakota with its 70,762 thousand square miles, 45,287,680 acres of land, but at any given moment on any given day we are doing something that has nothing to do with place, something we could be doing anywhere or nowhere. At any given moment we dwell in what I’m calling mediated space. Whenever we eat and shop, work and watch LCD screens, we are not out listening to the wind in the grass.

Many North Dakotans spend very little time outside.

Some North Dakotans wish they lived somewhere else, particularly young people. Most North Dakotans are happy enough to be North Dakotans, maybe even proud to be North Dakotans, but there is nothing beyond a kind of habitual state patriotism and some relatively shallow cultural matter to buttress that pride. In other words, they would have the same pride for another state if they happened to be from that state. Nor is there anything wrong with that.

Many North Dakotans like living where there is no heavy traffic, no commute, no urban labyrinth to negotiate; where life is relatively simple and straightforward; where the population is ethnically unproblematic; where the farther reaches of lifestyle choice do not trouble the general homogeneity of the population. In other words, many North Dakotans like living in North Dakota principally because that is the world they know, and the world beyond their borders sounds discomforting or menacing or just unfamiliar. They might just as well be living somewhere else, but they find no sufficient reason to reject North Dakota, and no compelling reason to choose another place instead.

The snowbird phenomenon—in which tens of thousand flee after Halloween for Phoenix or Hemet--makes perfect sense, because North Dakota has brutal long winters, and people with money, like the geese, often prefer to seek a more temperate climate during the severest quarter of the year. But love of a place, like the love of a woman or a man, requires a holism to be fully authentic. If you love North Dakota only when the winds are still, the grass is

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lush, the sun is shining, and the temperature is above 70 degrees, it may be that you do not love North Dakota, but rather the California in North Dakota. On any given day in North Dakota, the wind is blowing. On any given day, it may be uncomfortable to be outside. On any given day, a storm may blow through when you least expect it. On any given day, you venture outside only with protective gear that would seem NASA-like to a Hawaiian.

North Dakotans who make the best of it, and like this place well enough, but would be equally happy in any number of other places, who spend a minimal or at best modest amount of time out in untrammeled nature, may be said to be accidental North Dakotans. My father was such a person.

It was if, in a sense, he was stationed by a higher power in North Dakota, but if he had ever been given the chance to choose his home place, it would have been somewhere else—bustling Minnesota, at the very least. I believe that most North Dakotans are, as it were, stationed in North Dakota. Nor is there anything wrong with this, for people are also stationed in Missouri and stationed in New Mexico and stationed in Delaware. That is the standard paradigm of life in America in the 21st century. In the digital age, place is a platform rather than a home.

Naturalized North Dakotans are those who have decided to wrestle with the angel of North Dakota and find a way to accept it in all of its moods, and approve it too; to learn from it, to learn how to live in it, to learn how to be North Dakotans rather than Coloradans or Ohioans. Naturalized North Dakotans know the history of the state, the themes of the historical markers that dot the state’s highways.

They know where the trails (the Totten Trail, the Bismarck to Deadwood Trail, the Lewis and Clark Trail, the Thieves road) threaded their way across the plains landscape. They know something about the way in which Anglos, Germans, Germans from Russia, Bohemians, Finns, Norwegians, Swedes and Lebanese penetrated west from the Great Lakes and the Red River in the course of the Homestead migrations, and where the cultural epicenter of those pioneer ethnic groups now resides. They know something about cultural footprints: the cultural footprint of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Assiniboine, Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe on today’s North Dakota, the cultural footprint of Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Thomas Jefferson, George Armstrong Custer, de Mores and de Trobriand.

They know such sacred places as Writing Rock (near Crosby), the Medicine Rock (near Leith), and the Medicine Hole (near Killdeer). They know more or less where the last buffalo hunt occurred in North Dakota in 1883 and they have stood on the hill where Karl Bodmer painted his famous watercolor of Fort Union at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri Rivers. They know where Sitting Bull surrendered on July 19, 1881, and where he was assassinated on December 15, 1890 in the tragic run-up to the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

[plain thinking]

I have found in my studies of spirit of place that there are two types of North Dakotan: accidental North Dakotans and naturalized North Dakotans.

More importantly, they know where they feel most alive, where they go to refresh their spirits, where they take significant others and special guests to see what North Dakota really is what it really means.

Hunting is still very important to the adult population of North Dakota, and hunters are very often naturalized, not accidental, North Dakotans. Each fall they take the time to get out on the land, in good weather or bad, and though they are ostensibly in quest of a deer or a duck or a pheasant, it is clear that they are more essentially in quest of a living connection with the landscape of the northern Great Plains.

In fact, hunting is now the most significant spirit of place ritual of the North Dakota people. If hunting ceased to be a serious avocation, our slender hold on the soul of the Great Plains might blink out altogether, for the number of hikers, campers, cross country skiers, and wilderness sojourners is negligible compared with the hunting population. Critics of hunting are, for that reason more than any other, fundamentally misguided.

Eric Sevareid famously said that North Dakota was a blank spot at the center of the North American continent. North Dakotans tend to resent Sevareid’s characterization—merely because it is critical, because it hurts our pride—but it would be interesting to hear their defense of North Dakota culture.

Montana has a richer state literature than North Dakota. Think of James Welch, Annick Smith, Bill Kittredge, cowboy poet Paul Zarzyski, Ivan Doig, Rick Bass, Daniel Kemmis, Thomas McGuane, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs. . . . Minnesota has a richer state literature than North Dakota. Even South Dakota has a richer state literature than North Dakota: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Paul Goble, Linda Hasselstrom, Frederick Manfred, Kathleen Norris, Dan O’Brien, Sally Roesch Wagner. Why should this be? To be sure, North Dakota has produced great writers.

Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall is arguably the greatest novel by a living North Dakotan, and Louise Erdrich’s many novels, beginning with Love Medicine, are major North Dakota literature, if you wish to confine them to that category. There are other serious writers in North Dakota, too; I do not in any way mean to diminish their achievement. But the point is undeniable, that North Dakota is surrounded by states with a richer state culture than we have.

Why should this be so?

From a spirit of place perspective, North Dakota suffers from the “in between” problem. Montana has a distinct identity and personality.

Minnesota has a distinct identity and personality. South Dakota is very much like North Dakota, but it has edgier Indians with a harder, more dramatic history, and it has the Black Hills, which are to the badlands of North Dakota what the badlands of North Dakota are to, say, the Killdeer Mountains. Saskatchewan and Manitoba don’t count, because the 310 mile border, though invisible from space, may as well be a mile high and equally thick.

North Dakota is not Midwestern like Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Nor is it western like Montana and Wyoming. I think it is undeniable that Fargo and Grand Forks identify themselves with the Midwest rather than with the Great Plains. In fact, many people of the Red River Valley regard North Dakota west of, say, Casselton, Cooperstown, and Carrington, much the way the famous New Yorker cartoon portrays America west of the Hudson River. Many citizens of Fargo and Grand Forks are a little embarrassed about North Dakota. Fully a third of the North Dakota population lives east of Interstate-29, which hugs the Minnesota border. This creates a double problem for North Dakota’s spirit of place. Not only is the population congealed on the Minnesota border, leaning east not west, but it is undeniable that the cultural centers of North Dakota are in Fargo and Grand Forks, where the idea of North Dakota matters less than it does in Williston, Dickinson, Grassy Butte, Wishek, or even Bismarck or Minot. If the majority of the thinkers, philosophers, poets, sculptors, painters, musicians, novelists, etc., live in the part of the state that essentially identifies itself with Minnesota (which it is not), rather than North Dakota

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[plain thinking] (which technically, at least, it is), it cannot be expected that that significant group of cultural leaders are going to do much to help clarify and define North Dakota. Their souls are rooted elsewhere.

They are certainly not rooted in Grassy Butte or Mott. They should not be blamed for their detachment from North Dakota. They are, of course, free to pursue their cultural projects in any way that satisfies them. But it does not do North Dakota spirit of place much good.

Cultural achievement can occur in scattered places, in the music of Chuck Suchy (Mandan) or the ceramic art of Tama Smith (Beach) or Robin Reynolds (Hebron), but historically it has tended to flourish where there is a critical mass of population and prosperity.

The Renaissance requires Florence and the Elizabethan miracle requires London. The Parthenon gets built in Athens not Ithaka, and the Guggenheim winds up in New York not New Leipzig. The only zone in North Dakota where there is any real expectation of a cultural effervescence of the kind that could create a distinctive North Dakota culture is the university and population barbell of Fargo—Grand Forks. And that is the part of North Dakota that is least interested in the North Dakota project. This is a paradox as old as North Dakota history. In spite of the flat world revolution of the Internet, it grows more pronounced every year, whether we like to admit it or not.

So add up the following factors: One—the primary cultural population is edgy about North Dakota and it leans into Minnesota.

Two--the cultural exemplars in the rest of the state are so diffused geographically, so isolated, that they do not get sufficient nurturing and cross-fertilization to take on the challenge of creating an authentic North Dakota culture and they live in communities that are not fully supportive of the eccentricities of artists and the challenges of art and literature. Three—North Dakota suffers from a fundamental identity problem (in betweenness) that has had a paralytic effect on its attempt (or even its willingess) to create a distinctive culture. Four—we live in a time when Americans are more culturally homogenized and our common experiences are more mediated than at any previous moment in our history.

Five—North Dakotan spend less time out of hermetically sealed environments than ever before in their history.

The result is a dearth of serious North Dakota art and literature, in which the remarkable exceptions prove the rule; a weak sense of North Dakota identity in old people and young; a sense that there is nothing here worth preserving, fighting for, staying to protect and enlarge; a daily affirmation of Servareid’s thesis, at the same time we rage against so unfair a characterization of our cultural project; a turn toward the deracinated national homogenous culture that pays attention to North Dakota only to ridicule it; the stifling of the creative impulse in the young people who stay; disillusionment; and outmigration, not to mention the most server teenage binge drinking problem in the nation.

Here, more than in all other places, we need to cultivate spirit of place.

So if my analysis is true, what’s the remedy?

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1. We need to create a much more serious North Dakota studies curriculum in our schools. Geography, Native American studies, the varieties of prairie spirituality, and Great Plains literature need to be at the core of that new curriculum.

2. We need far more school field trips—not necessarily to museums and large auditorium presentations, but just out into the middle of nowhere, to the buttes, ridges, coulees, trade and military forts, lonely monuments to David Thompson, and above all to the Indian reservations.

3. We need to use some of our immense energy wealth, our huge and growing budget surplus, to seed young sculptors, painters, essayists, novelists, poets, etc. and NOT in our cultural capitals, which have reached a self-sustaining level of cultural activity.

4. We need to create several new Centers of Excellence in North Dakota studies, to provide them with the same sorts of start-up funds we have provided for the business entrepreneurial Centers of Excellence.

5. We need to create a range of all-expenses scholarships for young intellectuals who wish to do graduate work in North Dakota, Great Plains, and Upper Missouri studies, and provide special incentives for them to stay in North Dakota for at least a significant period of time following their academic labors.

6. North Dakotans need to write about their experiences, their family stories, their memories, their sense of the history, the identity, and the landscape of North Dakota, their vision of the future and their understanding of what is possible in North Dakota. North Dakotans of all political views, backgrounds, levels of education, professions, and general outlooks.

7. Above all, all of us need to get out into the open nature of North Dakota, to listen to the wind, to walk along the ridges, to have picnics in the middle of nowhere, to visit all the state parks and historical sites of North Dakota, to walk endlessly, to lie on our backs at night looking up at the stars and listening to the coyotes and waiting patiently for the Northern Lights.

Will this make the difference? The answer is almost certainly yes.

Anything else is the politics of indifference and decline. In my opinion nothing would be more likely to keep young people in North Dakota than to create a new sense of our identity, a new pride in what North Dakota means—geographically, culturally, historically, ideologically. Such an enterprise represents a doable and inexpensive investment in our future.

We have nothing to lose but our chain-stores.

Clay S. Jenkinson’s book Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains maps out his quest to find spirit of place in this empty northern hemisphere.

Literary London May 11-18, 2010 The tour includes a series of literary-themed walks. Visit the house Keats lived in (featured in the new film Bright Star) and then walk over Hampstead Heath and see views across London.

Follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens and see the areas of the city that inspired his greatest works.

Walk the south bank of the Thames and see Shakespeare’s old haunts – the cathedral where he worshipped and the Globe Theatre itself. Eat and drink at the George Inn, the last remaining coaching inn where Dickens, Johnson, and Shakespeare himself enjoyed a meal and a pint.

Wander through central London’s historic streets, past St. Paul’s Cathedral, Trafalgar Square (and St. Martin’s church where Handel performed), and Covent Garden Market.

Walk down Baker Street and visit 221B, the fictional address of Sherlock Holmes, and lose yourself in the twisting streets of the East End, infamous site of Jack the Ripper’s 1888 exploits.

Built into the tour are also large amounts of free time for you to plan your own excursions and see any of the thousands of sights and events available in one of the world’s great cities.

For more information call, 800-833-8787 or visit www.satromtravel.com.

atrom

Travel & Tour

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North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

www.ndhumanities.org

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Board of Directors CHAIR Joseph Jastrzembski, Minot VICE CHAIR Carole L. Kline, Fargo Najla Amundson, Fargo Barbara Andrist, Crosby Tami Carmichael, Grand Forks Frederick Baker, Bismarck Jay Basquiat, Bismarck Virginia Dambach, Fargo Eric Furuseth, Minot Kara Geiger, Mandan Eliot Glassheim, Grand Forks Kate Haugen, Fargo Janelle Masters, Mandan Jim Norris, Fargo Christopher Rausch, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Sarah Smith Warren, Program Officer The North Dakota Humanities Council is a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

— L.P. Hartley