NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
January 15, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1997 Plains Folk
"Plains people," says James Shortridge, "still expend too much energy fulfilling and reacting to the expectations of others." Shortridge is a geographer at the University of Kansas who writes with savvy about the Great Plains—and never more so than in his essay "The Expectations of Others: Struggles Toward a Sense of Place in the Northern Plains." The piece is in a new book from the University Press of Kansas called "Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity."
Of course I like it that Shortridge cites some of my folklore studies as evidence of an emerging regional identity, but there are other and better reasons commending his work. He writes about something that most academic commentators have yet to fathom, that is, the emergence of the Great Plains from its generation of malaise into a new generation of confidence and assertiveness. He defines the "northern plains" as the area from Kansas to North Dakota and draws most of his evidence either from Kansas, my native state, or North Dakota, my home state.
Shortridge realizes that people's ability to live well and prosper in a particular place depends on having a regional identity—what I would call a constructive mythology—that enables them to do the right things.
Most of the time, the identity of the plains has been shaped by outsiders. That goes for the myth of the plains as the Great American Desert as well as for the counter-myth of the Great Interior Garden. It ran through the history of farm protest, from Kansas' Populism to North Dakota's Nonpartisan League. It continued with urban America's determination that "anything rural" was backward and that the plains, land of the Dust Bowl, were particularly so.
From the 1950s, two aspects of this externally defined identity were evident. One was the Time-magazine-type conception of the Great Plains as flyover country—nothing down there of note—which eventually found extreme expression in the Buffalo Commons thesis. The "nearly universal dismissal of their region by outsiders" was a burden for plains folk, says Shortridge.
The other was the rise of the "victim argument," which Shortridge traces to the debate over the Pick-Sloan Plan for the Missouri River. People downstream wanted big dams for flood control. These would flood out a lot of Indians and farmers and other people who lived in the bottomlands upstream. Those people demanded electrical power and irrigation projects in return, and got half of what they wanted. The victim argument, though, grew into a general regional attitude of entitlement that was not exactly conducive to self-help.
Shortridge says, though, that "the worst is over in the heart of the Plains." Partly this is because the region has retrenched so much that it has done away with the overbuilding that historian Elwyn Robinson once called "the too-much mistake." Partly, though, it is due to people in the region finding their own identity and acting accordingly.
The new Great Plains identity is the hardy yeoman of previous generations updated as the competent entrepreneur and innovator of the 1990s. In particular Shortridge points to innovations such as producer-owned cooperatives and—it's good to see this mentioned—the collaboration of eight congregations in Griggs County, North Dakota, to ensure pastoral service—even though it meant, perish the thought, Presbyterians preaching in Lutheran pulpits.
He writes of the new prosperity evident in cities like Colby and Hays and in county seats like St. Francis and Atwood. This is hard to get used to, I know. But maybe we ought to try.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866