[sense of place]
My Version of the Ghost Dance By Cecile Krimm Here in North Dakota, it’s impossible to feel you truly own the land. Knowing how it came to be in the hands of Norwegians and German settlers in the first place is part of it—a sense that what came out of the hardship of one people can’t help but come home to roost for those who replaced the natives. Learning many years ago of the Lakota ghost dancers who hoped to bring back the buffalo, I couldn’t help but wince at the futility of such an endeavor and yet, even then, I understood loving a place and a way of life so fiercely you could wish for magic to keep it intact. That’s why there’s a certain sense of payback to the spoiling of land and society in the Bakken oil field. We can look today with a shake of the head at the decimation of American bison herds in the late 1800s and see the foolhardiness of exploiting that resource nearly to extinction. How much more foolhardy are we now, risking the water and land our homesteading forefathers tamed into one of the most productive breadbaskets in the world, for gas and oil? Having owned and long ago sold any personal claim to the minerals beneath the surface of the state, I can stand proudly—if poorly—to declare I have nothing to gain from oil. As much as it hurts now to know that I stupidly sold my claim as a twenty-two-year-old “starving” for a new car, I nonetheless am just a little glad I can see this boom—the good and the bad of it—without the added influence of a padded bank account.
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