2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council
winter 17
on
[THE SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE]
1
TREASURE AND HEART When I was in the eighth grade, I had to choose a Bible verse in confirmation class that would serve as a guiding principle in my life. I chose Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Twenty-three years later, I can say I chose wisely. The desire for a full heart, not treasure, dictated both my education and career paths. This journey brought me to a good job that not only feeds my family, it feeds my soul. I spend my days creating opportunities for other people to enrich their hearts and minds with the wisdom that comes from the study of the humanities. Our goal at the North Dakota Humanities Council (NDHC) is to create a more thoughtful, informed, and just world. That is a lofty ambition, but we are not alone in our work. Every state and US territory is home to a humanities council working to achieve the same ends. Our parent organization, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), does the same work on a national scale. And while the divides in our world and our nation seem too wide to cross at times, we know the humanities exist to build bridges of understanding, compassion, dignity, hope, and respect—in short, humaneness. The humanities reveal to us the horrible depths to which we may fall, while holding above us the highest ideals for which we must strive. Life is a journey to navigate and without the humanities we have no reliable guide to follow. You must always question where your heart is.
Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND
Life is a journey to navigate and without the humanities we have no reliable guide to follow.
There have been calls lately to eliminate funding for the NEH based on budget concerns. When a nation stops investing in the study of history, philosophy, ethics, law, religion, and the arts what is the real cost? The savings to tax payers (roughly the price of a postage stamp per person) comes at the expense of the heart of our nation. Can we afford to live in a nation that has lost its humanity? I invite you to help preserve one of our nation’s greatest treasures: the National Endowment for the Humanities. To find out how, visit ndhumanities.org. Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt Executive Director
Cover photo by Amanda Crowe.
SENSE OF PLACE
2 Bringing Big Vision to a Small Place: Isabel Flath By Richard Edwards
8 Hope
By James Wolner
10 Cobwebs and Memories
By Gary Hendricks
14 Ghostlands
By Tim Ralston
16 Place in Life
By Tayo Basquiat
22 Bringing Humanities to Life Project Unpack 24 Color of Freedom
By Carol Kapaun Ratchenski
26 The Year of the Native Voter? Not Yet.
By Mark Trahant
30 In the Water
By Pamela Fisher
32 Understatement
By Betty Mills
35 I Suppose the World
By Taylor Brorby
ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council. Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor Ann Crews Melton, Guest Editor To subscribe, please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org
ndhumanities.org Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the North Dakota Humanities Council.
[sense of place]
Bird’s-eye view of Stanley, 1909
BRINGING BIG VISION TO A SMALL PLACE:
ISABEL FLATH By Richard Edwards
Eleven singers, including the three high school boys who made up the men’s section, stood in the choir loft of the little church. Isabel was putting them through their regular Wednesday-evening practice, and she treated rehearsal as something serious—you came on time, and you didn’t fool around. But she rarely criticized them, despite being an excellent and demanding musician herself, because she knew her singers’ limitations. At one point that evening someone whispered a side comment, the singers’ attentions wandered, and Isabel noted their distraction. Her face reddened and, forgetting that she was holding her 2
pince-nez, she slammed her hand down on the balustrade, smashing her glasses. The choir was first shocked and then— quietly—amused, but mainly they felt bad because they had disappointed her. Isabel recovered her composure and continued the rehearsal, and she had to endure no more distractions that evening. No one in Stanley felt good disappointing Isabel Flath. She was such an inspiring presence to most people in town, extending their horizons and raising their hopes, that she gave her community a depth and dimension often missing in small towns.
[sense of place]
She simply refused to permit obstacles to deflect her, believing she could achieve great things through determination, discipline, perseverance, and especially persistent optimism, and she held the same expectations for Stanley was a somewhat sleepy and dusty Dakota wheat town for most of its existence before the oil boom. Its 2010 population of 1,458 souls almost exactly matched its 1950 count of 1,486. I was among those causing the count to go down, having lived my first twelve years in Stanley but leaving when my parents moved away in1956. We took with us, however, memories of how we had benefited from Stanley’s most civic-minded and generous family. M.G. Flath, the town’s principal doctor from 1911 until well into the 1970s, was the family’s most prominent member, best known for delivering more than three thousand babies. Slightly less influential were Dr. Anton Flath, also a physician and sometimes county coroner, and Dr. G. Oakley Flath, one of two dentists in town. But perhaps the most remarkable of all the Flaths was Oakley’s wife, Isabel. I first got to know Isabel through our church. Built in 1928, Stanley’s graceful little Presbyterian church is admired as a gem of Tudor prairie architecture. Alas, architecture is not everything. On Sundays, while cars crowded the parking lots of Stanley’s Lutheran and Catholic churches and spilled out onto nearby streets, our church struggled to attract enough congregants to pay the minister and keep the roof repaired. One constant, though, was Isabel. She had an imposing presence, tall, with perfect posture and a naturally regal air. Her determination that we Presbyterians would have a spirited Isabel Proctor (Flath) at the time of her college graduation in 1910.
3
[sense of place]
It must have seemed to this adventurous, talented young woman that the whole world of art, music, and culture was open to her.
choir was an example of dauntless optimism so much admired by the town. Her attitude neither ignored reality—she knew the shortcomings of her talent pool—nor was of the Pollyannaish sort that seemed forced or inappropriate. She simply refused to permit obstacles to deflect her, believing she could achieve great things through determination, discipline, perseverance, and especially persistent optimism, and she held the same expectations for those of us around her. Isabel was born in 1884 on a 120-acre farm near the settlement of Bailey in north-central Iowa. She and her family moved a few years later to the nearby town of Riceville. In 1906, at a time when few girls went to college, she followed her brother Warren to Iowa State Normal School, soon to become Iowa State Teachers College and now the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls. Isabel led a wonderfully enriching and exciting college life. She played center on the girls’ basketball team, the Shakes. She participated in campus theatrical productions; in her junior year she portrayed Flora, Goddess of Flowers, in a production of M. Nataline Crumpton’s 1890 play Ceres. The following year she played one of the four court ladies in Hamlet; they “were all beautifully gowned and made a graceful picture,” according to the campus newspaper, the Normal Eyte. The review continued, “The year 1910 will long be remembered in our school for at least two events: The evolution into a college and the presentation by its students of the play of Hamlet.” Isabel also pursued a number of musical activities, including giving concerts with Warren. One Wednesday evening in March 1910, for example, the two of them performed in the nearby town of La Porte and returned to campus the next day. Isabel graduated that year with a bachelor’s degree in music and German. 4
It must have seemed to this adventurous, talented young woman that the whole world of art, music, and culture was open to her—but she needed to earn a living. In that era, even educated women faced a highly restricted choice of jobs, mostly teaching or nursing, and Isabel chose teaching. She landed her first job teaching music and English at Guttenberg, Iowa, and the following year she taught at Spring Valley, Minnesota. Isabel’s life changed when her brother Mert, a railroad engineer who had settled in eastern Montana, wrote to her and suggested, “Come out and homestead. The government is giving land away.” Isabel found the prospect irresistible, and she and college friend Helen Craft took up adjacent claims fifteen miles from Rapelje, a remote community in the Stillwater County flatlands north of Yellowstone National Park. Homesteading rules required a claimant to live on the land for three years and make certain improvements, so Mert built a shack for them right on the boundary, half on Isabel’s claim and half on Helen’s, allowing them to live together and still fulfill the requirement. To earn their livelihoods, Isabel took a teaching job in the Rapelje school, while Helen landed a post in the opposite direction. Each needed to return every evening to maintain their required residence. For the commute they got two horses from their nearest neighbor, the Molt Ranch, and while Isabel was not an experienced horsewoman, but she was effusive in her praise for Preacher and Ginger. Less friendly were the rattlesnakes; Isabel carried a .45 and killed seven during her stay. After three years, they proved up on their homesteads; Isabel owned hers for the rest of her life. She was now free to move on, and she sought a better teaching job. Stanley High School offered her a position, and in 1915 she arrived to teach music, geometry, girls’ physical education, and German, until it was banned during World War I. She also coached the girls’ basketball team. Irene (“Bird”) Edwards, my dad’s younger sister, was the star center on the team, once scoring twenty-two points in a 47–1 rout of Bowbells. For two years, Isabel’s team went undefeated, and in their 1917–1918 season they won the state championship in Minot, defeating Cooperstown 11–5. It was Stanley’s only state title for eightyone years until the 1999 Bluejays football team
[sense of place]
immense. One way or another, this was to be her future. How she viewed that future, what private doubts or demons she struggled with, she rarely showed.
Stanley’s 1917-1918 championship girls’ basketball team, coached by
broke the string. Isabel’s life changed dramatically when she married G.O. Flath in December 1919 and moved in with the rest of the Flath clan in Anton’s busy house. Scuttlebutt around town was that Isabel had really wanted M.G. rather than Oakley, but she was determined to have a Flath. In her previous life, she had followed a kind of proto-feminist path, making her own decisions, playing sports, performing music and drama, working in a profession, and beginning to accumulate assets. As a married woman, however, she was expected to conform to the era’s expectations for a more constrained life. The first sign of her change in status was the loss of her American citizenship. The Iowa farm girl, native-born to a family whose ancestors had fought in the American Revolution, was stripped of her citizenship because Oakley came from Canada; married women assumed the citizenship of their husbands. Oakley became a U.S. citizen in 1920, and Isabel regained her citizenship after a tenmonth lapse. More permanent was the loss of her career, for schoolteachers were expected to quit their jobs when they married. Isabel found herself somewhat unexpectedly marooned in a small Dakota town without a profession, deprived of the music, drama, and other cultural pastimes that she enjoyed and excelled in. The young woman who had played in Hamlet was now stuck in a true hamlet, and the loss of opportunity and ambition must have seemed
In 1924 she traveled to Minneapolis to attend a concert on the world tour of internationally renowned Polish pianist, composer, and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a performance that thrilled her. It surely reminded her of the joys of her earlier life in music and drama, and she must have realized that whatever its other rewards, Stanley would never offer an opportunity for the full expression of her talents. Perhaps this was her watershed moment, for rather than lamenting her situation, Isabel was driven to act—she decided to foster the fullest expression of the talent in Stanley. For the next six decades Isabel would be a force of nature in Stanley. To start, she organized a local MacDowell music club. She became the community’s major musical impresario, willing the town to have concerts and recitals, leading the church choir, and occasionally giving lessons, although her patience did have limits. She was adamant that all people, especially children, could make music. She was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution. With her erect bearing and cultured enunciation, her title of “Grand Worthy Matron” in Eastern Star, a Masonic auxiliary, seemed a natural appellation; she was a formidable but friendly presence whom few in town wanted to disappoint. And she had a profound impact on my family. My own first encounter with Isabel—Mrs. Flath, to me—was in summer Bible camp when I was about ten. The church organized 5
a half-day school for young children for a week each summer as a supplement to the hour-long Sunday school that we attended during the year. Isabel taught one part of it, which involved a competitive quiz. She would call out a question— Who was the Israelite king before David? What are the names of the four gospels?—and the twelve or fifteen of us kids sitting around the table would shoot up our hands if we knew the answer. I was first to answer nearly every one, putting me far in the point lead, because I had just finished reading Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible, which included short dramatizations and pictures of all the important Bible episodes. Answering was so easy that it almost felt like cheating. When Isabel asked, “Who was the innocent man upon whom God visited many terrible troubles?” My hand shot up and I answered immediately, “Job,” pronouncing it to rhyme with “Bob.” Mrs. Flath said nothing but looked a bit dismayed, and I could see I had disappointed her in some way. She corrected my pronunciation and awarded me the point, but such was her presence that I was so distraught at failing her I didn’t volunteer another answer all morning.
Richard Edwards and his childhood friend Jimmy in Stanley.
To my sister Clarice, Isabel was “a shining ray in our town, because she was just different from the rest of us. She came with a bit of culture and a bit of something else the rest of us didn’t have. There were so many things that were eye-opening to us. How to have a lovely dinner. How to have a lovely concert. She was just filled with life, a real model for us.” Clarice first encountered Isabel when she was four and Isabel taught Sunday School. The half-dozen or so children sat on little red chairs in an airless room in the church basement, and Mrs. Flath narrated stories from the Bible in full dramatic form. Her innate urge to excel, even for this small audience, made the tales of Samuel or Jonah come alive for the kids. She led them in songs, the children belting out the words to please her. Eighty years later, Clarice could still recite: Dare to be a Daniel, Dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm, Dare to make it known! The song’s lesson, imprinted so early, was one Clarice would carry with her throughout her life, especially fighting racism in northern Virginia. My mother Winnie occasionally attended a club luncheon at Isabel’s house, but mainly she found Isabel’s self-assurance and decisiveness intimidating. Isabel did not participate in morning
6
[sense of place]
coffee, a custom of local women who gathered in shifting groups of two or three to socialize and exchange news before getting on with the rest of their day. Given the town’s strong Norwegian influence, “coffee” usually also meant fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, homemade doughnuts, or other sweets. Isabel refused to participate in this custom, presumably because she viewed it as a waste of time. Some saw her attitude as haughty, and it put them off, but to most, it just became part of her mystique. Isabel had instructed everyone in town, “Do not call between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. That’s my time to rest.” She would go upstairs, take a nap, and take no calls. Such behavior was without precedent in Stanley; when the phone rang, we thought it impolite not to answer it. The grandeur of taking no calls amazed us. And whatever the truth to the gossip that she had initially wanted M.G., she obviously loved Oakley. She once told a teenaged Clarice, “Never to go bed without telling your husband you love him.” For whatever reason, Isabel approved of the Edwards family and decided that Clarice was a suitable playmate for Warren, whom she and Oakley adopted when they were in their late thirties. When invited to the Flath house, Clarice would arrive at two or three in the afternoon, and she and Warren played, sometimes taking a game from a sunroom closet stuffed with all the latest board games. Once Isabel planned an outing for the four of them to see a movie in Minot, a musical with a shallow plot contrived only to feature the singing of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. It hardly ranked with the great Paderewski concert, but Eddy and MacDonald were a step up from the restricted cultural offerings of Stanley. Clarice marveled at the elegance of the trip, from dressing up to riding in the Flath’s luxurious car to the experience of the theater itself. In high school, my sister Evelyn became Warren’s girlfriend, and she would sometimes be invited to dinner at the Flaths’. Isabel served an elegant meal, with nice table settings, good food, and lighted candles. After dinner, they would play bridge. All the Flaths, including Warren, were excellent bridge players. Evelyn was not; in our house, we played canasta, a distinctly more plebian game. Although Evelyn knew the rules of bridge, she was at sea when one of the Flaths, having bid six hearts, would lay down the cards after the first trick and say, “Okay, I have the rest of them.” Evelyn thought, “How could that be, when I’m holding an ace?” They were right, of course, but they never criticized her play, even when she
Isabel was a person who changes your life, always wanting you to reach for bigger things, believing there was another life outside the everyday life of Stanley. made a bad bid or a foolish lead. Later, after she became an excellent player herself, Evelyn realized that those evenings must have been tedious for the Flaths. Isabel, like the other Flaths in their different ways, lived a life of self-sacrificing service to the people who lived around her; without a whiff of self-promotion, her unflagging and dauntless optimism inspired others. She dared to be a Daniel. We noticed this trait directly, because her attitude seemed to say, “Those Edwards children look to be alright; I’ll shape them into something.” Patronizing as it sounds, we were grateful for her tutelage. Our parents, indifferently educated themselves, revered learning and saw Isabel’s efforts as opportunities for us and for the whole community. “Isabel was a person who changes your life,” Clarice remembered, “always wanting you to reach for bigger things, believing there was another life outside the everyday life of Stanley. In fact many years later I wrote her a letter expressing my admiration and gratitude to her and remembering that little song we sang, because it’s a good enough philosophy of life in four lines [and] you don’t need anything else. But I never sent it, which I regret.” l
RICHARD EDWARDS grew up in Stanley, North Dakota. He is currently the director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of NebraskaLincoln. Edwards received his PhD in economics from Harvard University. This article is adapted from chapter six of Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota before the Oil Boom, © 2015 by the South Dakota Historical Society Press. The article or portions thereof in any form whatsoever may not be reproduced without the expressed written approval of the 7
[sense of place]
Each frozen morning now I wake to see my own breath in front of me appearing to make a feeble run for it like a part of this old farmer that wants to flee the scene but cannot or will not at least not without her and so must blush and balk at the door awkwardly like the shy schoolboy he once used to be. And as my frigid, sting-needled fingers fumble in the ignition my mechanical companion a chain-smoking, semi-retired Chevy V-8 shrugs his old metal shoulders quietly and gives this all a halfhearted morning go first with a cough-like thud — like a dead bag of seed from a flatbed and then again and yet again until we both, almost reluctantly and somewhat regrettably, perk and putter-up into a pitter patter of rattle pistons and heart valves firing again accepting, finally the hard fact of ‘life after sleep’ and surrendering to the undeniable human duty of seeing things through to the end. But I know too that in just a few minutes and miles down the road I’ll be back in Hebron, North Dakota coffee and caffeine maneuvering and mingling my slushy bloodstream kneading and heating like a clean-burning cocktail of whisky and anti-freeze flirting its way towards my rough stubble of a heart with the seductive sweet-talk of a voluptuous youthful notion called ‘Hope’. And sure enough, even before I roll onto Main Street it happens as it seems to happen most mornings lately. Unknown whether my rusty escort and I are both ready for the final junkyard or if this is just the early dawn of our glorious restoration I crack a broad and long-overdue late-life smile just thinking and just knowing that at any given moment and at any given time I might see her again I might see her again I might see her again.
JAMES WOLNER is a resident of Hebron, North Dakota. He earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature with a minor in photojournalism from Fresno State University in California in 1990. Prior to living in North Dakota, he lived in Sweden for twenty-one years. Main Avenue, Hebron, N.D., State Historical Society of North Dakota (2012-P-035-0040)
8
[sense of place]
By James Wolner
9
C O B W E B S
memories AND
[sense of place]
She gave me a fruit jar and said we were going to catch cobwebs and imagine they were dreams and put them in my memory jar.
By Gary Hendricks
I’ve been doing some musing lately about things like words and memories, especially memories. Dean Martin even had a song in the 1950s with his recipe for memories called “Memories Are Made of This.” My aunt Dora knew about memories and dreams. I was about five years old and going to spend a full day with Dora. My folks dropped me off right after breakfast on a fall morning. (Parents were called “folks” back then, and my sisters and I were “the kids.” That’s more comfortable than parents and children. Now brothers and sisters are called “siblings,” a word that could better be used to describe piglets in the same litter rather than people. Then there’s fall—a four letter word, in my estimation, that can’t stand alone but needs to be propped up by summer on one side and winter on the other. I visualize low, cold, gray clouds spitting sleet and snow and a cold wind scattering dried up leaves across the yard.) Let’s change fall to autumn. Recall Roger Williams at the piano playing “Autumn Leaves”? I’ve never head of a song called fall leaves. Autumn spawns memories of sunny days, calm wind, colorful leaves hanging on the trees, losing their grip and fluttering to the ground, and merry little breezes now and then from everywhere and nowhere. On this particularly autumn morning, Dora found two laths. (There’s another word not heard much anymore. Back then, hundreds of laths were used in every house, tacked to the
wall and plastered over. They were about four feet long, five-sixteenths-inch thick, and an inch and a quarter wide. Dad insisted that the laths on the wall had to be level and parallel with each other with equal space between them. I said I didn’t see why that was so important, because they were going to be covered with plaster and nobody was going to see them anyway. Dad said that you always do things right whether anybody sees them or not.) Dora and I each had a lath, and she gave me a fruit jar and said we were going to catch cobwebs and imagine they were dreams and put them in my memory jar. On that day, cobwebs were drifting in the air, dancing and twisting and undulating in the wisps of breeze. (If you’re still trying to visualize undulating, undulating is to sight what yodeling is to sound.) (I don’t know why they’re called cobwebs either. I’ve shelled lots of corn and gathered up the cobs to start fire in the cookstove and I’ve never seen one spin a web. I think they’re filaments spun by spiders.) We started collecting our cobweb “dreams,” and it was harder than it sounds. Sometimes I’d reach up to catch one and the lath would create a slight air movement, and it would drift away. Dora showed me how to use the edge of the lath to move through the air rather than the flat side so they wouldn’t drift away so easily. 11
Home of Jake Hermann Sr., Liebenthal, Kansas, Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, NDSU Libraries, Fargo (110.127)
[sense of place]
Sometimes we find our dreams are just out of reach, so we just have to look for others to take their place. Even then, sometimes one would elude me and just be out of reach even if I stood on my tiptoes. Dora (she was taller than me, you know) would reach up with her lath and catch it and then hand the lath to me. I thought it should go in a jar for her but she said no, she already had a full jar and everybody needed help sometimes to catch their dreams. Now and then, a whirlwind would form out of nowhere, twisting and spinning and making a commotion through the yard until it lost control of itself, fizzled out, and scattered then, because Dora said it would take a while for the air to settle down. Dora said people are like whirlwinds sometimes. They sometimes let some little thing become a bee in their bonnet, work themselves into a frazzle, go into a tizzy, spin out of control, lose control and have a blowup, and then it takes time for things to get back to normal. (Fizzled, frazzle, and tizzy. They’re words with sizzle. They’re multidimensional. You can hear them, visualize them in your mind, and feel them. They make your tongue vibrate.) I like whirlwinds because they meant another of Dora’s cookies. I liked catching dreams but decided I liked Dora’s cookies even better. We chased the cobweb dreams and put each one we caught in my memory jar. Some we couldn’t catch as they were too high in the air or too elusive. Dora said that was just the way things are. Sometimes we find our dreams are just out of reach, so we just have to look for others to take their place. When we stopped, we had lots of dreams in my memory jar, and Dora gave me a jar to take home. My dad wondered why the heck I was saving cobwebs, but Mom and Dora just looked at each other and smiled because they knew things about dreams and memories and kids that my dad was too practical to understand. If all those dreams were going to be memories, I just hoped they wouldn’t be as tangled and twisted up in my brain as they were in the jar. 12
EPILOGUE It’s seventy years later. Dora’s gone. The folks are gone. My youth, middle age, and much of my old age are gone. The memories are still here but will disappear with me. Wait! I’ve forgotten the memory jar. It’s still here . . . on a shelf in the cellar, a pale green quart jar with a glass top held in place with a wire bail. (Nearly forgetting the memory jar. Is that like suddenly remembering the forgotten jar? I guess I just forgot to remember to remember! Now, I nearly forgot to remember the rest of this story.) I open the jar lid and peer inside. The jar is empty. The cobwebs have all disappeared into a fine layer of dust on the bottom. I’ll take a copy of this story and place it in the jar, replace the lid and bail, and put the jar on the kitchen shelf alongside my grandparent’s coffee grinder, Grandpa’s shaving mirror, the churn we used to make butter when I was a kid, and the hurricane lantern used for light when milking cows and to find new lambs and bring them into the barn during long, cold, spring nights. Someday, after I’m gone, someone will take this jar from the shelf, see the paper inside, and open it to find this story. The memories of Dora and the dreams and the lessons she taught that day will live on. l
Since 1973, GARY HENDRICKS and his wife, Laureen, have operated a biological farm near Hettinger, North Dakota, raising sheep and small grains, utilizing crop rotations, cover crops, green manure crops, and rotational grazing. Using a (w)holistic management plan, their goal is building humus and organic matter and balancing soil minerals and nutrients and soil life for a healthy, sustainable future.
“Though only five percent of the world’s population lives in the United States, it is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population... Not only does the current overpopulated, underfunded system hurt those incarcerated, it also digs deeper into the pockets of taxpaying Americans.” – Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
ideas festival
IN JUSTICE: RETHINKING AMERICA’S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM September 24, 2017
Bismarck, ND
www.gamechangernd.com
[sense of place]
GHOSTLANDS By Tim Ralston
14
TIM RALSTON grew up on a farm north of Petersburg, North Dakota. He passed away in 2010 in Bismarck, North Dakota. This poem is excerpted from Tributaries, © 2016 by Buffalo Commons Tavern, LLP
Sculpted curve and curl aglee Stilly lap white Cap silent flat shivering white Upon an endless white sea Open blank windows yaw Sucked of warmth by empty winds Heedlessly plying in and out. First the wallpaper peeled, Then the stale plaster cracked. Little beady eyes stopped but found nothing here and scurried. Blizzard beliefs silently built Until a pillow drift lies across Rusting bedsprings Of the loving bed The borning bed The snoring bed The boring bed The dying bed The laughing bed Knowing only rust Creaks one last time Abandoned meanings. Stories never again known. Forever untold, Reside, desolate. Of gentle nuzzle And mumbling kiss Rousing to walk crying babies by hissing gaslight Warmly looking out a frost flowered window At an ice cracking dawn And shivering within. Of last beers piled on a table While Thor and Les argued and fought Over and over slurring the same And swearing at the same Angry and yelling at the lonely The stillness... When they go back to being bachelor neighbors
Fred Heidinger farm, near Kulm, North Dakota, Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, NDSU Libraries, Fargo (110.116)
The crackling main timbers part And fire falls down through. The dirt is filled in With grass planted atop. (In accordance with the old man’s will. The last of 5 generations in the same home, his way of saying “No more.”) Silent solitary gravestones attend Wallowing in unmown hay Far from their urban descendants. The rural folk have died away;
Strong souls passed.
15
[sense of place]
16
[sense of place]
I am going too fast. The trail of hardened hoof prints jogs left. My front tire spins in the dog day air and plunges into the gully. My bike bucks me over the handlebars. Helmet and right shoulder smash into the earth and instinctually I roll, sending myself over the edge, tumbling like a wind-whipped weed. Fingers fanned like claws loosen scabs of pancaked clay, woody stems, and tufts of grass. The air turns dusty, fills my mouth, tastes like sage and minerals and blood. A thicket of juniper catches me near the bottom. The impact drives the wind from my lungs. I should be still, take stock. Adrenaline and pride force me into a sitting position. No searing pain. Trickles of blood make small rivulets through the dust glued by sweat on my legs and arms. I’ve bitten my tongue. My shirt at the right shoulder is tattered, exposing gashed skin cauterized with trail grit. I pick until the blood is free to run and cleanse; I flick the bloodied sediment to the ground. I am scuffed, humbled, but not broken.
By Tayo Basquiat
17
[sense of place]
How is a ”place” different from a ”space”? At what point does a space become a place?
I am a six-year-old on his first horseback trail ride. When my “Whoa, horsey, whoa!” fails to impress horsey as he trods downhill, I bounce down his neck and into the middle of some brush. Mom and the sound of her screaming my name reach me at nearly the same time, grasping for me as I struggle to free myself from the bush’s clutches. I don’t cry until later at the motel, when I see the hole torn in the vest I bought with my saved birthday money in a souvenir shop in Medora. The fabric on the front is supposed to look like deer hide, and a fake coon’s tail is fastened on either side. The back is green felt adorned with an Indian headdress painted in neon colors. I’d somehow managed not to impale myself on the plastic bowie knife or the wooden tomahawk I’d secured in my belt loops. At the time, I didn’t think about anything other than getting back on that horse, and that’s what I did, caught up in something I wouldn’t be able to articulate until much later in life. But it starts on that trip, at my first glimpse of the North Dakota badlands at the Painted Canyon rest stop, a sight that launches a frenzy of nonstop jabbering and proposals. “I could climb that one and you could pick me up on the other side,” I say, selecting the highest, gnarliest points in the landscape as we round each highway bend before the descent into Medora. “Those hills are a lot bigger than they seem,” Dad says. And Mom: “You’d get bit by all the rattlesnakes.” “I’ll catch one with my bare hands and make it my friend.” I conjure a vision of it riding in the basket of my purple bike with the white banana seat. “Get off me! You’re on my side of the line,” one sister protests as I press to the window from my prison in the middle of the backseat between two older sisters. The thought of getting loose in the badlands makes me a fidget-bucket. Mom tries to distract me with the suggestion to look for buffalo and wild horses, more oxygen to the fire.
18
[sense of place]
And as I squirm and hop with excitement in the queue area for that trail ride into the most mesmerizing place I’ve ever seen—better than my favorite television show, Grizzly Adams, filled with more possibility than the small woods around the river near my hometown in northeastern North Dakota’s flat squares of farmland—I imagine the moment when I will finally charge up one of the hills, just like Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders had done at the musical the previous night. The place wouldn’t let me have it quite that way though. It enticed me with possibility, kicked me in the teeth, and then taught me I could get back up again. ––––––––––––––––––––––– I push myself upright to begin the climb back to the trail, where I find my bike firmly lodged by its pedals in the little ravine. It looks almost as if I parked it there. I read my story in the track of the knobby tires, the broken twigs and leaf litter, the bald slope where the broom of my body swept rock and soil to the bottomlands. Left a mark on each other we have, this place and I, and a deep one at that. ––––––––––––––––––––––– This awareness about places dawned slowly. I paid no attention to the idea of place until graduate school in my late twenties. In a class on human geography, the professor’s introductory lecture was basically a series of questions intended to guide our work for the semester. How is a “place” different from a “space”? At what point does a space become a place? What kinds of practices shape places? How do they change? How do places shape people? At first confused by the academic obsession with something seemingly so banal, a creative assignment the second week of the semester awakened my imagination and understanding: map the complexities of a place for a specific point in time, moving through as many conceptual categories as possible. Living in Berkeley, California, at the time, I chose a place in North Dakota, feeling lonesome or nostalgic, I suppose. I called Dad to pinpoint the coordinates, tough given his directions contained no road names or numbers: “Go about four or five miles north, then maybe another mile west until you get to a farmyard, then turn north again.” Such are the recipes and routes of rural America. Like Russian nesting dolls, I included physical features contextualized historically and in relation to surrounding spaces—landscaping by glaciers, inland seas, Lake Agassiz. I provided a political, cultural, and planetary time map related to that specific place, featuring markers from pop music, the price of a bushel of wheat, the record of the UND hockey team, and the phase of the moon. Then I stumbled warily into the morass of why the place came to mind at all: my memory, of two square bales of straw on a hill overlooking a valley sparsely populated with
trees. The land belongs to a farmer my dad knows. It’s November, I’m twelve, and my dad and I are posted up there hunting deer, trying to use the bales against the fierce arctic wind. They aren’t enough. I can’t feel my toes or fingers; the thrill of the hunt is gone, just misery now. I want release, refuge, to turn tail back to the pickup where the heater and a thermos of hot cocoa will make everything okay again, but I don’t because—can this be true?—the suffering pales in comparison to my desire to show my dad I am tough, to not disappoint him. I bring my maps to class, feeling somehow both wrung out and brimming, completely hooked by the subject and ready to plunge into deeper waters. I started then and there to pay attention to how places were formed and how they formed me. While that little hill in the boonies northwest of the tiny town of Edinburg, North Dakota, may not be special or important for anyone else, it’s a crucible for me, a moment in my progression to manhood and self-understanding that flushes my face with shame, ignites worry over exposure of weakness, and creates an anxious, frantic craving for some place more comfortable, a niggling feeling ever present. I brought everything I was at that time to that place—my whole twelve-year-old self—and I pushed hard against it, tried to make it what I wanted and needed it to be as a proving ground, and it met me head on, revealed my limits, toppled my bravado, shocked and scared me, threatened demise with dangerous cold and unrelenting wind. I kept all my fingers and toes, but now it takes goose down and layers of wool to keep pain at bay on even a mild winter day. ––––––––––––––––––––––– According to humanistic geographers like Edward Relph and Yi Fu Tuan, place is much more than a spatial index. Places are something we make, and those places also make us. Places put their prints on bodies and memories, nurturing our sense of who we are and what we are. Our consciousness about this reciprocal relationship is what it means to have a sense of place. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato is often credited with the seeds of this line of thought, infusing one of the Greek words for place chora with the notion of a mothering role, that of “wetnurse, suckler, and feeder of all things.” We are products of our mother’s milk. I think of my mother’s lap, the pillow I made of her soft breasts, the blue veins I traced under the smooth skin of her hands, the smell of her lipstick and Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, a place of comfort and safety. Sometimes I crawled onto her lap just to be there, but other times she gathered me up and cradled me there because I was crying, hungry, needy. I observed a new mother recently, learning to breastfeed, and it was hard on her. The baby had to learn how to latch, and being latched onto hurts. –––––––––––––––––––––––
19
[sense of place]
I extract the bike from its earthen stand and walk beside it for a stretch, mustering the courage to get back on—grateful I am not really hurt, that the consequences of my inattention and recklessness in this place weren’t worse. I don’t croon over the unalloyed beauty of a place. My sense of place is far from facile; these beauties have their beastly side. I’ve tried to listen and learn what places want from me, how to care for them and be responsible and ethical toward them. Now I see places as sacred, in the sense Wendell Berry invokes when he says there are only two kinds of places, sacred places and desecrated places, but again, this is complicated. I don’t always want to give what is required. I don’t always want to be where I am and I often want things on my terms. Places push back. Sometimes I stand in the National Grasslands and whisper in awe, “Look at all this wide open space.” Other times I’m beset by a restless loneliness. I can’t leave fast enough. I feel like I’m drowning. I hop on and start pedaling, feeling the blood pooling in bruises I can’t yet see, the wind cooling my face, concentration replacing fear. Latching on hurts, but it’s what feeds us and makes us grow. Nearly forty years have passed since that horsey ride and the badlands of western North Dakota are still working on me. These places work on me. I was birthed and nurtured on Red River Valley soil, but nowadays mostly I am fed by places west of the Mighty Mo’. Here my loneliness abates in company of meadowlarks and chickadees. Here I feel small measuring my hand against the print of a mountain lion and grow large again in conquering what seemed an impossible climb. Here I bring my penchant for website click bait, my distracted mind, my annoyance with neighbors and their leaf blowers. I wish I could bring a better version of myself to the place, but that is a foolish thought. I can’t be the best version of myself without these places. I put myself in place and place works on me like a sculptor chipping away to reveal the figure within the stone, and that is the power of place in life. l
TAYO BASQUIAT is associate professor of philosophy at Bismarck State College, the director of the college’s “Bringing Humanities to Life” program, a former chair and board member of the NDHC, and ongoing champion of the council’s mission and programs. He’s an avid adventurer, writer, and lover of the natural world, who can’t help but believe it would have been pretty cool to pal around with Yosemite with John Muir or the desert southwest with Edward Abbey.
I’ve tried to listen and learn what places want from me, how to care for them and be responsible and ethical toward them.
20
THANK YOU TO OUR GENEROUS SPONSORS PULITZER PRIZE EDITION: CELEBRATING 100 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE IN HISTORY AND JOURNALISM SEPTEMBER 24, 2016 BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA
21
[sense of place]
The heirloom cup area of the “Project Unpack: A Retrospective” exhibition at the Rourke Art Museum. Photo: Angela Smith
BRINIGING HUMANITIES TO LIFE If you ask Christina Weber how she developed an interest in studying of how war and trauma impact veterans and their families she states simply, “This is a topic that has been with me most of my life. My father is a Vietnam veteran and our family life was impacted greatly by his experiences in Vietnam and his experiences as a veteran trying to figure out how to come back to civilian life.” Her childhood experience became the focus of her graduate school dissertation and is the theme of her book, Social Memory and War Narratives: Transmitted Trauma among Children of Vietnam Veterans. During the last year, Weber, an associate professor of sociology at North Dakota State University, applied her research on memory and trauma to Project Unpack, a one-year program developed to initiate dialogues in the Fargo-Moorhead and North Dakota communities about the legacies of American wars. Her goal was to create space for veterans, their family members, and the larger community, to unpack— or in other words—talk freely, about complex topics such as life in the military, experiences of war, the return home, and readjusting to life as a civilian. While most programs tailored for veterans focus only on the soldiers themselves, Weber’s approach encompassed the whole family. “I think we sometimes forget about how family experience the impact of war, since it touches them on a day-to-day and deeply personal level,” says Weber. “It’s hard, too, because family members often don’t think they have a story to tell, but when you start talking to them, you realize they have their own particular understanding of war that is impacted by their relationship with their veteran family member.” Project Unpack included lectures from authors Tim O’Brien and Tom Bissell, as well as a literary and ceramics workshops, an oral history workshop, and the establishment of an oral history archive for the Fargo-Moorhead area. “North Dakota, although a small state, is home to nearly 58,000 veterans of war,” explains Weber. “They are not all the same, they do not fit stereotypes. Many of them face emotional, financial and family hardships. Some may seem to move forward easily with their families and communities, but they all live with a legacy and we want them to have a voice for that.” To learn more visit, unpackstories.org. 22
Christina D. Weber introducing the exhibition, “Project Unpack: A Retrospective,” at the opening reception on December 17, 2016 at the Rourke Art Museum. Photo: Ginny Pick
D I G I TA L H O R I ZO N S O N L I N E.O RG
Many of the photos in this issue can be found at DIGITAL HORIZONS. Digital Horizons is an
Help us deliver the lifelong learning programs you want in your community.
online digital archive of thousands of images, documents, videos, and oral histories depicting life on the Northern Plains from the late 1800s
Visit ndhumanities.org to fill out an online survey
to today. Here you’ll find a fascinating snapshot of the lives, culture, and history of the people who shaped life on the prairies.
D I G I TA L H O R I ZO N S O N L I N E.O RG
& We’ve all had deep discussions with our friends while we’re out at night—why not add a couple of experts to the mix and really take it up a notch? That’s the idea behind Think & Drink, a happy-hour series that sparks provocative conversations about big ideas. The series invites you to participate in a facilitated public conversation with public intellectuals who have expertise in the subject at hand. Join us and enjoy guided philosophical discussion and a pint of locally crafted beer. Find out more at ndhumanities.org.
23
[sense of place]
THE COLOR OF FREEDOM By Carol Kapaun Ratchenski
My two-year-old son died with Purple Passionflower polish on his toes and fingernails. As soon as he could ask for something, at six months, pointing and grunting his intentions for food, drink, me, and dazzle on his toes, I painted him to match me. Not a daughter, but this at least we had in common early on, and it made me sigh with joy to greet him in the middle of the night, his Sunset Orange fingers held my breast to his mouth as his Firefly Red toes danced with satisfaction against my still-swollen stomach. Once, a colleague of my husband’s laughed when he saw our sons and their Neon Punk Pink toes, made some homophobic joke that no one laughed at. The next day, my husband painted his own toes Deeply Madly Maroon and took his socks off at work and I knew I would never leave him in this lifetime. After my son’s last breath, my husband asked me if I was going to take off the polish before we carried his body to our van and then into the local funeral home. Off his fingers, not his toes. I would not take that much of his dignity away in death. His life meant something, and some days, freedom needs all its champions shouting at once. l
CAROL KAPAUN RATCHENSKI is a poet and fiction writer and mental health counselor. She lives in Fargo and is the owner-operator of Center for Compassion and Creativity. Her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, NDSU Magazine, Red Weather, Gypsy Cab, and other publications. Her book A Beautiful Hell was published in 2016 by New Rivers Press.
Some days, freedom needs all its champions shouting at once. 24
North Dakota Humanities Council. Making lifelong learning accessible to North Dakotans since 1973.
Support lifelong learning, give from the heart on February 9, 2017. Visit ndhumanities.org to donate.
[sense of place]
THE YEAR OF THE
NATIVE VOTER? NOT YET. By Mark Trahant
I had 2016’s headline already written: The Year of the Native Voter. There were, after all, a record-breaking number of American Indians and Alaska Natives running for public office across the country, as well as several state programs designed to increase turnout. These efforts built on decades of promise, a step-by-step effort to increase ballot access, recruit strong candidates, and create enthusiasm for the election process in Indian Country. As it turned out, 2016 was just another building year. The long-term goal of making sure Native Americans have fair representation in federal, state, and county governments remains distant. Consider Congress: Native Americans make up about 2 percent of the country’s population (concentrated in a few states), yet the representation in Congress is 0.37 percent, about one-third of 1 percent or two members. At one point this summer, there were nine candidates for Congress, including several who had experience and the ability to raise serious money in their quest. After election day, the only two who won were those reelected from Oklahoma. No change. 26
[sense of place]
The story of Native American election efforts dates back more than a century and is part of a larger narrative about a democracy for all. The New Jersey Constitution once limited the franchise to all residents “who are worth fifty pounds.” That included women and African Americans, but by 1807, that line was rewritten so clearly only white men were eligible. And in the nineteenth century, some voters were organized into exclusive paramilitary units, the Wide Awakes, who would march to the polls in a torchlike parade. In April 1880, John Elk set out to register to vote in Omaha, Nebraska. The clerk “designedly, corruptly, willfully, and maliciously, did then and there refuse to register this plaintiff, for the sole reason that the plaintiff was an Indian, and therefore not a citizen of the United States, and not therefore entitled to vote.” Elk went to the polls anyway. The same clerk was a judge and refused to give him a ballot. Eventually, the US Supreme Court agreed. The justices reasoned Elk had been born an Indian and therefore was not a citizen. So he could not vote. He owed his “immediate allegiance” to his tribe, not the United States. After World War I (American Indians have historically served in the military in high numbers), Congress passed the Citizenship Act guaranteeing Native Americans the right to vote. But that was a Washington, DC, idea—and many states objected. North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona all found legal loopholes to prevent Native Americans from voting until as late as 1962. The civil rights movement, and stricter federal oversight during the 1960s and 1970s, slowly increased access for Native American voters. ––––––––––––––– Even in 2016, state legislatures used a variety of measures to make it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote. A federal court said Native American voters were being singled out because of North Dakota’s voter identification law. US District Judge Daniel L. Hovland wrote: “The undisputed evidence before the court reveals that Native Americans face substantial and disproportionate burdens in obtaining each form of ID deemed acceptable under the new law.” There is also “undisputed evidence that more than 3,800 Native Americans may likely be denied the right to vote in the upcoming general election in November 2016, absent injunctive relief.” One of the main problems is that many who live on reservations do not have the same kind of addresses as those living in a city. A post office box won’t do, and streets and houses are
North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona all found legal loopholes to prevent Native Americans from voting until as late as 1962. not numbered. This remains a problem to be solved. Even with those obstacles, it’s worth noting how many American Indians and Alaska Natives chose to run for office. North Dakota was at the front of this trend. It’s a state where 90 percent of the population is white, and American Indians are the largest minority at 5.4 percent. Yet three Native American candidates ran for statewide office: Chase Iron Eyes, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, for US Congress; Ruth Buffalo, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (MHA), for state insurance commissioner; and Marlo Hunte-Beaubrun, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, for a seat on the three-member Public Service Commission. They all lost, and by wide margins, but it’s worth noting that they did better than many of the other Democrats running for office in the state. And, as I like to point out, you gotta run to win. And that was the story in Montana. The state’s high-profile race was the congressional race featuring Denise Juneau against the soonto-be interior secretary, Ryan Zinke. Juneau is an enrolled MHA member, and she jokes that she went from the Blackfeet Head Start program to Harvard. She’s an attorney and eight years ago, won the post of Montana’s superintendent of public instruction. She’s the only Native American woman to ever win a statewide office—and she had a shot at being the only Native American woman to ever win a seat in Congress. But not this year. “I am sad that I lost, but I do not feel bad about our campaign because we ran a damn good campaign,” Juneau said. “We raised more money than any Democrat that’s ever been in this race, we had good ads, we had great advocates out in the community, we had organizations helping us, we did everything we were supposed to do. We just lost. Those are bitter pills to swallow, but sometimes that’s what happens.” But this story is richer than just Juneau. Some twenty years ago, Montana was much like any other state with a significant Native American population, with only one or two Native Americans serving in the state legislature. But in 1997, a third Native American 27
[sense of place]
Rep. Wenona Benally represents counties including the Navajo Nation in the Arizona legislature. (Photo via her campaign Facebook page.)
Idaho Rep. Paullette Jordan. She is a member of the Couer d’Alene Tribe and represents Northern Idaho counties in the state legislature.
Denise Juneau is the most successful Native American woman to run for Congress. Even though she lost her bid for a seat from Montana she raised more money than any Native woman ever running. She is a member of North Dakota’s Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara Tribes. (Trahant photo)
candidate won. And then another and another. So this year, nine Native Americans were elected, an increase that included for the first time, representation from an urban area. Native legislators now make up 6 percent of the legislature in a state that’s 7.4 percent Native American. It’s not quite parity, but it’s closer than most states. The American Indian caucus could be a key bloc in the upcoming legislature, and both parties are paying attention. Representative Susan Webber (Blackfeet) told the Montana Standard: “We’ve been literally and figuratively the minority’s minority. I know it looks like we have a lot of people in the Indian caucus, a lot of people were elected, but in reality it should be more. But just us getting in there, from my perspective, is a real positive.” Montana, like most of the country, is changing. If you look at the schools, for example, the Native American population is significantly higher than the statewide percentage. William Frey, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of Diversity Explosion, posted an interactive map that showed the changing nature of America. Wolf Point and Roosevelt County, Montana, reflect the demographic shift as well as anywhere. This is home to the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes. For people who are old, say, eighty years old, the population is 78.5 percent white. That number drops to 63.3 percent for ages sixty-five to seventy-nine; and becomes a minority at fifty to sixty-four years old. The county itself is now 57 percent American Indian—a majority of voters. ––––––––––––––– Most, but not all, of the American Indians in politics are Democrats. One of the most powerful members of Congress is Oklahoma’s Tom Cole, a Republican and member of the Chickasaw Tribe. Cole is in the unique position of being close to House leadership, so he has a free pass to depart from party positions on American Indian issues. For example Cole was key to the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013 by convincing a few Republicans to join Democrats in voting for the Senate version of the bill. “I cannot support the House 28
[sense of place]
version,” Cole said at the time. “While it has made great strides in recognizing the jurisdiction of tribal courts over non-Indian offenders, it falls short of giving tribes what they need to keep their women safe.” The other Native American in Congress is Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, who is now a co-chair of President-elect Trump’s transition team on Native American issues.
We’ve been literally and figuratively the minority’s minority.
This election cycle, at least thirty-one Native American candidates ran unopposed. Often these were reservationbased districts where there were not as many potential Republicans who would surface as opponents. But Representative-elect Tawna Sanchez, who is ShoshoneBannock, was also in this group, running in Portland, Oregon, as well as Representative Ponke-We Victors in Kansas.
dignity above all else. However, while we continue moving forward after a shocking outcome, it’ll be up to us, the next generation of millennials, to make a more productive change our state and country needs. We have to chalk this up as a valuable lesson learned, while challenging ourselves to be more engaged and begin organizing in all the best ways possible. I remain optimistic for my community, as I have been blessed with your support and tasked to protect our base values for another term!”
Another twist this year: Several districts featured races where both candidates were Native American. There were two such districts in Montana. State Senator-elect Frank Smith, Assiniboine Sioux, a Democrat, defeated Representative G. Bruce Meyers, Chippewa Cree, in the northern part of the state. And State Senator-elect Jason Small, Northern Cheyenne, a Republican, defeated incumbent Carolyn Pease Lopez, Crow. This was also true in New Mexico, where State Representative Sharon Clahchischilliage narrowly defeated GloJean Todacheene. Both women are Navajo. Wyoming will have a new member in its legislature, Affie Ellis, Navajo, who was elected to the State Senate as a Republican, defeating an incumbent. She posted on Facebook: “I am humbled. And honored. Thank you for all the kind words of support. We knew it would be a tough race and I’m proud of our efforts. In the end, I secured 60% of the vote and am looking forward to serving in the Wyoming State Senate.” In Minnesota, the Native American caucus is also a Native women’s caucus after the reelection of State Representatives Susan Allen, Rosebud; Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Ojibwe; and Mary Kunesh-Podein, Standing Rock; and the election of state representative Jamie Becker Finn, Ojibwe. –––––––––––––––
Washington state’s Democrats will now be led by State Senator John McCoy, Tulalip, who takes on the role as minority leader. He is one of three Native Americans in that legislature. And, in Alaska, this election resulted in a new legislative alliance — and significant Alaska Native leadership. A coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents flipped the state House from Republicans, and the new speaker is an Alaska Native from Dillingham. (The state’s lieutenant governor, Byron Mallott, is also an Alaska Native and was elected two years ago.) There are now six Alaska Natives in the legislature representing both parties. Speaker Bryce Edgmon, Yup’ik, said his Native background is how he views the world. He told the Bristol Bay Times: “I know it’s not only my children and maybe their children’s future, but it’s also the future of our way of life out here in rural Alaska and a lot of our Native villages.” Perhaps I was too optimistic this year about the prospects for Native Americans at the polls. Then again, if you really think about it, this was a remarkable year. The quality of the candidates representing Indian Country continues to improve both on the mechanics (basically fundraising) and on the broader leadership and contribution to the body politic. Step by step. That’s how any success story is built. l
Every election sows seeds of what can be. This one was no exception. In Idaho, Representative Paulette Jordan, Coeur d’Alene, showed how to get elected as a Democrat in a largely Republican state. Jordan is the only Democrat elected north of Boise, and the legislature will be 84 percent controlled by Republicans, a super-majority. She posted on Facebook: “We worked hard, with great diligence and incredible
MARK TRAHANT is a Charles R. Johnson Endowed Professor of Journalism at University of North Dakota. He has won numerous journalism awards and was a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as co-author of a series on federal-Indian policy.
29
[sense of place]
IN THE WATER By Pamela Fisher
How strange to read the third-person description written by unknown hand about a moment in time I had mislaid, my friends and I young adults, girls and boys. The one of them ... her hand in the water is I, my arm over the edge of canoe, trailing in boat’s wake among river waves, wind ripples, paddle whorls. Even more startling, the image: my fifteen-year-old self, my friends caught unawares in age-bleached black and white (though I wore red). My desire
30
Institute for Regional Studies, NDSU, Fargo (2101.8.8)
[sense of place]
to always be in the water, even river flood, chilled and muddy, strewn with broken branches and swirling detritus, was rendered on film and archived.
while we held canoe against current pull, oblivious to how easily our shelter could have collapsed and the river swept us away like so much debris.
That afternoon we slipped through the streets of our town made canals by risen Park River, zigzagged among trees, skimmed across lawns submerged, between hedges and houses. On north edge of town
But time accomplished what the river did not, pulled us away from our hometown, from sunny afternoon gliding through disaster, memories of 1979 so long ago.
Leistikow Park looked a temporary lake with picnic shelter roofs so much like rafts that we disembarked, rested on thin metal some minutes, swift, icy waters moving relentlessly east under us
PAMELA FISHER was born and raised in Grafton, North Dakota. She currently lives in Grand Forks, where she teaches Spanish at a local high school.
31
UNDERSTATEMENT
Rambouillet sheep near Glen Ullin, N.D., State Historical Society of North Dakota (00090-0016)
32
By Betty Mills
[sense of place]
At a national convention workshop I attended, we were divided into pairs and instructed to draw a floor plan of a house we had lived in before we were nine years old. That barely required squandering any brain energy, since I lived in the same house for the first twenty-one years of my life and could have drawn in the worn spots on the linoleum. My partner for this exercise, however, drew a small room, a hall leading to the back door, and a pear tree. We were both astounded. He explained that during World War II his parents followed the lucrative job market, usually leaving him with some relative. His favorite was his grandfather, a widower, who was a barber in Chicago. He lived in a house across the alley from the shop where the boy spent much of his time—escaping his bedroom out the back door, past the pear tree, and into the shop. If I was intrigued by so nomadic a life at such a young age, he was equally fascinated by my life on a small sheep ranch on the western North Dakota prairie, and particularly with the thought that one or both of my parents were always around. It is still hard for me to really imagine his childhood. His barbershop childhood had obviously not curdled his life. He was a handsome man in his late thirties, wearing a white sports jacket and sharply creased trousers, his shoes shined. A college graduate with a family and a job in the finance industry somewhere in Indiana, he was exuberant and interested in everything. What makes his upbringing seem especially meager to me, however, is the alley and the pear tree—no knee-high prairie grass blowing in the wind, no towering elm trees to climb, no garden to plant, vegetables to water, pet lambs to feed, or flowers to pick to prove spring has really happened. Perhaps the phrase that covers this difference is something called a “sense of place,” defined by one dictionary as “either the intrinsic character of a place, or the meaning people give it, but, more often, a mixture of both.” Who am I to judge a pear tree and an alley, and maybe for that man the barber shop still sticks in his memory as a milestone. Or maybe the real significance of his childhood
experience was shown in his particular interest in the fact that my parents were always present in my young life. So the question then becomes the range of difference in people’s perception of what they consider their own sense of place. Ask anyone what feels like home to them and after you get past the easy chair and the smell of coffee for breakfast, their answers can be intriguing. My youngest daughter, who has lived all her adult life in the San Jose area of California, comes home in part just to be here, in North Dakota. Driving out in the country, exclaiming over the distant hills, the clouds stretched across the clear blue sky, the state of the crops in the fields as we pass, the occasional hawk sitting on a fence post unperturbed by our passing, she is clearly in love with the view. She has now added a new image to her repertoire. “Climb the Capitol steps,” she says. “Sit down and take in the magnificent view stretching over to the distant hills. It’s wonderful!” “Mom,” she explains, “I need this—this coming back to North Dakota. It’s like recharging my batteries. It’s how I remember who I am.” A friend describes how, after many moves and some personal dislocation, she arrived at the farm that would become her home for many years. “You grew up on a farm—did it remind you of home?” I ask. “No,” she replies. “Not at all. I can’t even explain it, except even now when I’m gone and return from wherever I’ve been, that same sense of calm runs through me—the thought that at this place, here, these trees, these hills, this is my peaceful world.” My son left home, left snow country, after high school, living in urban areas on the West Coast. He only recently moved to eastern Wyoming, some forty years later. His favorite time there is a
“Sense of place,” defined by one dictionary as “either the intrinsic character of a place, or the meaning people give it, but, more often, a mixture of both.” 33
[sense of place]
“I need this—this coming back to North Dakota. It’s like recharging my batteries. It’s how I remember who I am.”
winter night, in the silent darkness, snow on the ground, brilliant stars visible in the sky, the snow squeaking under his feet. “You’re describing North Dakota,” I point out, and he agrees that he has come home—that the snow and stars and squeaky footsteps constitute a special place for his sense of wellbeing. For many years there was a big old cottonwood tree I could see from my kitchen window—watch it leaf out, grow green, turn yellow, be bare again. When my life grew sudden ragged edges as all lives sometimes do, I focused on that big old cottonwood, a form of visual meditation perhaps. I let it take me back to my childhood when all was safe and serene, when the biggest excitement of summer was a chance to swim in the Heart River and cool off under the giant cottonwoods that fringed the river on my great uncle’s ranch.
BETTY MILLS is the granddaughter of Charles and Anna Lidstrom, who homesteaded south of Glen Ullin in 1887, when this land was still Dakota Territory. She was born in 1926 to Leonard and Crystal Sletmoen Lidstrom. Tractor driver and rattlesnake hunter, she graduated from Glen Ullin High School in 1944 and Mary College in 1967 with a degree in social work. 34
I worked on my dad’s threshing crew during World War II, a wonderfully joyful experience for me—outdoors, good food, a useful life, and the constant company of my father. So I don’t like those derelict threshing machines stationed on hills adjacent to the highway, reminding me sadly of a vanished prairie life that I once so cherished. Perhaps that is the essence of a sense of place, however: that spot in our memory, or if we’re lucky, right where we are, where our lives assume a coherent pattern, where the world makes sense or is, at the least, manageable—a halt in time where we can recapture some of the essence of how we became who we are, however far removed from that geography where we at the moment reside. My mother, who grew up in the leafy green world of Minnesota lake country and then married a rancher in tree-scarce North Dakota, said that had we not lived in a little green valley shielded from North Dakota’s ever-present winds and from the terrible dust storms of the Dirty Thirties, she was not sure she could have survived.
In retrospect, my parents were always working on turning our yard into a small green paradise, perhaps reminiscent of my mother’s childhood terrain. On the reverse side of that environmental coin, there are people who grow up in big cities, for whom the tall buildings, the busy streets, the noise of traffic, are part of a familiar world, and the big open space of North Dakota’s prairies is rather unnerving. Give them concrete under their feet, and they are at ease. Sadly, there are many people for whom memory is all they have left of what once formed the essentials of their lives. Think of the current refugees who leave everything and come to a strange new country where even the language is a barrier. Gone is all familiar geography, all memory invoking glimpses of a happier world, or at least a world they can recall, that they once called home. So how, then, do they fashion a sense of place out of this new strange territory when they are so engulfed in simple survival in a very different world? Can they somehow eventually find a substitute for the comfort they once found, some new space with new meaning, bringing with it security and comfort? How do we arrive at a personal sense of place? Is it somehow bred in our genes, maybe farther down the list from flight or flee, but still innate? Is it something that can be consciously conjured up, more common among some types than others, easier in some geographies, strictly dependent on personal circumstances— or maybe just the result of too much imagination and inner brooding? Maybe it is better not to nail it down with scientific analysis and precise terminology. That might spoil its magic, which is how I view it in my case. Or maybe it’s the luck of the genetic draw. So when people ask me where I’m from and I reply, “North Dakota is my home,” they have no clue that they have just heard the understatement of a lifetime. l
[sense of place]
I SUPPOSE THE WORLD By Taylor Brorby
finds the prairie drab. Brown, mottled, void of verticality, no beauty. Blue grama, with its firecracker head, sways in the sun, and prairie dogs bark at my strange steps on dry dirt, genuflect to the cottonwood, sing with the warble of the yellow-bellied meadowlark, root myself like silver sage to a land that thrums.
A native of Center, North Dakota, TAYLOR BRORBY is an award-winning essayist and a poet. He is reviews editor at Orion Magazine as well as editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. This poem is from his forthcoming collection, Crude: Poems, due out in May 2017 through Ice Cube Press.
35
BEING HUMAN IS A GIVEN. KEEPING OUR HUMANITY IS A CHOICE.
Have you ever imagined a world without the guidance of history, the wisdom of our greatest literature, the understanding of different religions, the ability to communicate in other languages, the engagement of citizens in the democratic process, or the ethical foundations of our legal system? These pursuits form the humanities and without them we would not know who we are or what we stand for.
SINCE 1973, THE NORTH DAKOTA HUMANITIES COUNCIL HAS AVANCED LIFELONG LEARNING.
Donate to help us create a more thoughtful, informed, and just world, starting right here in North Dakota.
RECENT DONORS GROUNDBREAKER $1,000 OR MORE Sarah M. Vogel SUPPORTER $500 - $999 Elizabeth Birmingham Jack & Kristen Paris ASSOCIATE $250 - $499 Bethany Andreasen Barbara & Steven Andrist Michele & Robert Daugherty In Memory of Vivian Mashek John & Rebecca Petrik CONTRIBUTOR $100 - $249 Levi & Bethany Andrist Tayo J. Basquiat Alvera M. Bergquist John & Mary Bluemle Julie Burgum William R. Caraher Noel & Judith Fedje Mary L. Galbreath Ron & Joyce Gerhardt Melissa Gjellstad Kenneth J. Glass Peter Grimes Tina Grumbo Kate Haugen Jay & Nancy Hestbeck Joseph C. Jastrzembski Mary Ann Johnson Christine Kujawa Carol Jean Larsen Cathie and David Lutgen Brenda K. Marshall Catherine McClintock
M. Kay Moxness Mabel A. Olson Sonja Prestangen Carol Kapaun Ratchenski Kathleen & Charles Refling Ken & Debi Rogers Richard M. Rothaus Ron & Nancy Saeger Laura Schmidt-Dockter Caroline Schwartz Alice R. Senechal Iris Swedlund Charles & Joyce Volk Robert & Susan Wefald Rande Zander FRIEND $99 AND BELOW Alice Jean Anderson Irene Askelson Pat Aune Lois Dawn Ballmann Betty J. Bender Roxy Boelz Erika Bolstad Brad & Georgia Brakke Shirley Branning Pamela K. Burkhardt Donna Chesak Stephanie Christeson Delores Clark Jim & Loah Clement Kathy Coates R. Blake Crosby Dora Diepolder Cami Dixon Lauren Donovan Dunn County Writers Gini Duval
Mary J. Davies Eidler In Memory of Judge Ronald N. Davies Mary Ellen Erickson Rebecca Esades Barbara J. Evanson Kathy & Dave Fagerland Mary Frojen Robin Gense Fred & Darlene Gerth Bill Glauber Eleanor Goodall Ruby Grove E. Bruce Hagen In Honor of Grace Link John S. Heinen Delaino G. Helm George Herman Coral Hoff Coliene Jacobsen Lowell & Karen Jensen Marilyn Johnson James Johnston Carrie A. Kahly Arvid & Darlene Knutson Linda L. Larson Elton & Dolores Leppke Sara Lindberg Reed & Marianna Malm Ann Crews Melton Sharon Miller Juneal Moen Don Morrison Gerald & Jean Newborg Kathleen Jones & Irvin Nodlund Sharon Omvig John & Margaret Page Cynthia M. Peterson
Jane & John Pinkerton Fern Pokorny Anna Rathbun June Rauschnabel Bridgette & Randy Readel Robert L. Richardson Roger F. Rieger Susan A. Roeder Mildred Rothgarn Katie Ryan-Anderson Kelly Sassi Stacy Schaffer Carole M. Schart In Memory of Ches Schart Dennis & Diane Schill Kayla A. Schmidt Ken Schmierer Janice M. Schultz Arne & Gayle Selbyg In Memory of Edward Mashek Cameo Skager Gerald M. Skogely Jane D. Slocum Marvin J. Snyder Sheryl Solberg Elna K. Solvang Carlyn A. Stevens Kathryn Strand Elizabeth Sund Betty Svihovec Fern Swenson Three Rivers Arts Council Carenlee Barkdull & Bret Weber Hazel I. Weber Michele R. Willman
DONOR CORNER Why do you donate to the North Dakota Humanities Council? I donate simply because I believe in the Mission, Vision, and Values of the ND Humanities Council. Check them out at ndhumanities.org/about. All may benefit from such wisdom. Why is lifelong learning important to you?
CONNIE HILDEBRAND
My hunger for understanding, knowledge, and wisdom is truly a passion. Since early adolescence, I have sought to understand the world around me. Poetry, music, philosophy, literature and art along with historical context have been critical for my growth. The Humanities are my key to a positive attitude and retaining an ability to adapt to the change required within a high-tech democracy. What is your hope for the future and how can the humanities help make it happen? My hope for the future is that public support and leadership sponsorship of humane, democratic policy will evolve from discussion and critical thinking. The Humanities are not only essential to such a healthy democratic society, but pivotal in shaping its values—and its destiny.
A THOUGHTFUL APPROACH TO OUTDOOR ADVENTURE IN NORTH DAKOTA. FIND YOURSELF GETTING LOST.
Created by philosopher and North Dakota native Tayo Basquiat, THINK OUTSIDE seeks to connect people with both ideas and the beauty of our natural landscape. Through guided Discussions around campfires during the evenings and outdoor adventures during the day, we hope to build a community of adventurers who come to know both themselves and the beauty of the Peace Garden State.
Visit ndhumanties.org for more information.
37
NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE
PAID
BISMARCK, ND PERMIT NO. 433
North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501
We have ways of making you think. NDHC Board of Directors CHAIR Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks VICE CHAIR Elizabeth Sund, Minot Bethany Andreasen, Minot Aaron Barth, Bismarck Elizabeth Birmingham, Fargo John S. Heinen, Dickinson Leslie W. Peltier, Belcourt Carol Kapaun Ratchenski, Fargo Richard Rothaus, Bismarck Ken Schmierer, Ellendale Jessie Veeder Scofield, Watford City Karel Sovak, Bismarck Iris Swedlund, Velva Sarah Vogel, Bismarck
Staff
Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Stacy Schaffer, Development Director Kayla Schmidt, Program Coordinator Freddie Campbell, Intern The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.
800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org
ndhumanities.org
“Most people would rather die than think; many do.” — Bertrand Russell
