Daryl No Heart, pictured with his wife Sharon, is helping design a Rapid City park to remember children lost at Indian boarding schools.
hands of the federal government.
We drove once through the Pine Ridge Reservation and when we went to the Wounded Knee Memorial site, all I could do was cry. My heart goes out to all Native Americans who suffered for no reason of their own.
Carolyn Kolhoff Sioux Falls, S.D.
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eating a lot of crow,” Covel remembers. “I had to stop and meditate for four or five years about the thing I didn’t get to do.” He was also going through a divorce in 2012.
In retrospect Covel sees the Matt Epic period as what brought him back to the Black Hills to live. For a storyteller, where better to be than Deadwood, built by stories as much as by brick and mortar?
Community is a word Covel uses a lot, but usually not as a reference to a geographic place. Rather, his communities are populated by people spread across any geography and linked by common interests or concerns. He heard about Rapid City families, for example, whose children struggle through the dozen or so days of Christmas break because they depend on school lunches.
With a nod to the title of his 2005 movie, The 12 Dogs of Christmas, Covel helped launch The 12 Pizzas of Christmas, a community of pizza vendors committed to helping hungry families during the holidays. It’s expanded from feeding a handful of Rapid City people to reaching 50,000 families nationally. His “seek and find” picture book, Porter the Hoarder (created with South Dakota illustrator Rebecca Swift), has been distributed to 35,000 families by the state’s Family Engagement Center in a literacy effort to get young children and adults to read and laugh together. On the other end of the spectrum, Covel is the creative force behind a campaign to get bar customers and staff to recognize when a woman’s drink has likely been spiked with drugs, putting her at risk for violence.
“In California, I’d have no idea how to get a project like that started,” Covel says. “But in South Dakota, all it takes is the right idea for how to help and the community rallies to take care of its own.”
California was kind to Sean Covel (once he figured out where the movies were made), but the storyteller feels at home in the Black Hills.
deeply attached to everything I know.
There is also a universal principle to consider: as soon as you throw something out you find a use for it. Let’s say you have an heirloom set of mayonnaise jars which your family has been collecting since Harry Truman was president. You get sick of dusting them, and the day after you toss them in the dumpster you realize they would have been perfect to organize your button collection. If I forgot what I know about the Battle of the Bulge to free up brain space for TikTok and someone later asked me to pontificate on the subject I’d hem and haw and come off sounding like a doofus. I just can’t risk it.
Long-time readers of “Seriously, Folks” know that I never stop trying to make South Dakota a better place. I don’t have any actual improvements to my name yet, but there is a surefire way I can serve in this case. I hereby vow that I will remain uninformed and ignorant about TikTok until the day I croak.
What will that accomplish? I’m glad you asked. When it comes to new technology, pop culture trends, fads, catch phrases and ideas, I am forever behind the curve. By the time I hear about something its expiration date has already passed. I fear the same thing will happen with TikTok. If I were to learn about the application, or actually use it, the word would go forth; teenagers through senior citizens, ranchers and city folk, nitwits and professors, will realize it’s geezer tech and pitch it overboard.
This is a grave responsibility. If the application that shall no longer be named does find a home in South Dakota, my embrace of it could doom the business before it gets started. I shall endeavor to keep my vow of ignorance, but if I accidentally learn something I may be forced to pretend I’m stupid. Don’t worry. I know I can pull that off.
Roger Holtzmann is a contributing editor for South Dakota Magazine. He lives in Yankton with his wife, Carolyn.
