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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
August 3, 2000
This may sound unlikely, but right now I'm in the middle of a five-week seminar for teachers from across the United States who have come, on purpose, to Fargo, North Dakota, to study the Great Plains. This is "The Great Plains from Texas to Saskatchewan," a summer program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Sixty people applied to get in, and 15 most of them not from the plains, one from Honolulu were accepted. So it's kind of like coaching the Dream Team. What amazes most people from this region, of course, is that a bunch of people from elsewhere in the country are intensely interested in life here.
Since plains folk read more than most other people, I thought you might be interested in what I'm having these seminar participants read to get the sense of the plains.
They started with The Great Plains, by Walter P. Webb. This book was first published in 1931, but it's been in print ever since. Webb was a professor of history at the University of Texas. His great idea which sounds so simple now was that in order to succeed on the plains, people had to adapt to the treeless, semiarid environment. Windmills, sod houses, and all that.
Nowadays Webb takes a lot of flak from critics. Scholars say he is simplistic. Modern readers consider him a racist, as he calls Indians "savages" and stereotypes Hispanics. But Webb wrote a great book that even his worst critics cannot ignore.
Then we moved on to Willa Cather's My Antonia. This is the greatest novel ever written about the plains, but my seminar scholars could not agree what was its subject. Some said it was about the prairie; others thought it was about the immigrant cultures of Nebraska; and still others thought it was about the coming of age of the narrator, Jim Burden. They all are right, of course. Personally, I keep reading Cather because she creates such admirable and alluring female characters Antonia and, in O Pioneers!, Alexandra.
In the third week we left behind Cather's Nebraska and struck for southwestern Oklahoma through Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Here Momaday sets out to rediscover his Kiowa identity by retelling the stories of his elders. This is a tough book for readers not accustomed to the literatures of native peoples, but it's worth the effort.
Momaday is like many of the other important writers of the second half of the twentieth century on the plains in that he makes memory "the remembered earth," as he says it his subject. The glory days of the plains, these writers tell us, were in the past. Now we sift through the rubble to piece together who we were, and thus who we are.
Which is what Wallace Stegner does, too, in Wolf Willow, his memoir about growing up in Eastend, Saskatchewan. This is a rich book, full of the layers of history and of boyhood experience, but in the end the prospects for the country are not good. The paths worn across the old homestead are grassed over again, as farming has failed. Town life is dull, stultifying; Eastend is a place to get away from.
My seminar scholars are resisting this. They say it is possible to live a full, thinking life in a small town on the plains. They want to believe in what Stegner calls the Geography of Hope. And if you've read this far, then you've helped them win their argument!
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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 231-8339
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865
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