NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

June 24, 1999

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

Everybody knows about it by now, I guess—that ugly business with the Froistad case in Bowman, the guy who confessed on the Internet that he had burned his daughter to death, then said he didn't, but it turned out he did. It was on "20/20," for pete's sake.

And by now you've figured out that this is not going to be a feel-good column. So, at risk of ticking off the whole region, I'm going to tell you what is beginning to bother me about this sort of sad incident.

The county attorney in Bowman keeps getting in front of the cameras and talking about how shocking something like this is, because here on the northern plains, we have strong family values. We always do this when one of us—yes, one of us—does something horrible to his or her family. That's not who we are, we insist, and we're really shocked.

Not being entirely sure what family values are (although suspecting they have something to do with Happy Meals), I know anyway they are a good thing. My question is, why do we have to keep announcing to the world that we have them?

To say that we treasure our families has meaning only in comparison to someone or somewhere else. Who exactly, then, and where exactly, are these people who don't treasure their families? Pardon me for saying so, but in the eyes of many other cultures near and far, we appear rather indifferent to our families. Our children flee to cities east and west, our parents dash off to Arizona or Florida. As others view us in day-to-day interaction, we seem cool and lacking in affection.

This is not to say we of the northern plains lack honest affection for our kids and spouses and parents. It is to say when we declare ourselves somehow superior in these matters, we are being silly.

There are only two reasons I can think of why we do this, and neither is attractive. The first is to raise ourselves above our neighbors. It is to say those other people in the teeming cities, those people of other nations foreign to us, any people not like us are lesser, and we are better because of our bedrock family values.

Now I am right there in the front of those proclaiming the virtues of the northern plains, but those virtues do not have to do with superior family values or any other sort of moral superiority. Even if as a regional partisan I were inclined to claim some such moral superiority, my old catechism lessons wouldn't let me.

To claim that we are better people because of our family values is an expression of some deep insecurity about our standing in relation to other people, and that's not an attractive feature of the regional character.

The other reason for making such claims is, frankly, to make excuses. Let's say there is a meeting downtown to consider some community improvement, and nobody shows. What do we say then? Oh, everyone is so busy with family activities or just spending time with their families.

Have you ever noticed, though, that the people who do show up for the good of the community, the ones who do the work of the church and school, the ones you can count on for the common good, are the same people who raise the best kids? An open heart is open to both family and community.

I spend much of my time gathering and telling stories about this part of the country. A country needs stories—it needs a folk history, a mythology. At the same time, I am a historian, and the great story collector Austin Fife said that historians are supposed to be "the disciplinarians of myth." This story about family values, I am saying, isn't working.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136