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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
October 12, 2000
One of the wonderful things about living in a post-feminist generation in North America, and specifically on the Great Plains, is that it is possible for women to think and write publicly about different sorts of relationships with the land. Within my memory lies the time when male writers celebrated the Great Plains landscape, but female writers shrank from it. (I know there are exceptions, but I’m stating a generality here.)
This always bothered me, as one of the celebrants, for two reasons. In the first place, I figured women were missing out on something. Although I knew from private conversations that many women lived a rich life with the land, the depth of that was missing was from public discussion. This meant I, personally, missed out on something. My perceptions and expressions are unmistakably male. I need women to tell me about life on the plains, or else I miss a lot.
One of the women who writes in the new way about the plains is Linda Hasselstrom, of South Dakota and now Wyoming. Another, and the subject of this column, is Sharon Butala, of Eastend, Saskatchewan.
A few years ago Sharon surprised the country and herself with a remarkable memoir called The Perfection of the Morning. She thinks of herself as a novelist, and so the public embrace of her personal narrative took her by surprise. Now she answers with another memoir, Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice in the Fields (published by HarperCollins of Canada).
Perfection was the story of how Sharon, after marrying rancher Peter Butala and moving to southwest Saskatchewan, and finding it difficult to fit socially there, discovered an enlightening and satisfying relationship with nature. Wild Stone Heart doesn’t just continue the story of discovery, it deepens and colors it.
The narrative centers on a particular hundred-acre field of stony short-grass prairie retired from grazing or haying on the Butala hay ranch. Quite a bit of it deals with nature, scenting of sage and creeping juniper. Sharon wants to learn as much as she can by close observation of the land. Over time, though, she senses there are elements at work on her that are not matters merely of nature, not even of nature in some transcendent sense.
"One day, walking in the field," she recounts, "I found a stone circle, a tepee ring, as everyone calls them."
She goes on to find other artifacts on the land--turtle effigies, stone-marked paths, a petroglyph (she thinks), and most telling of all, burial cairns. Visiting scientists and Amerindian elders tell her some things about these artifacts, but she is determined to seek understanding mainly by long, personal, direct study of them, and by paying attention to voices and visions that cannot be footnoted.
Plains folk who pride themselves on their hardheaded practicality are going to have issues with this book. Sharon has ghosts in her house, finds meaning in dreams, and sees visions. Archeologists may think her book an affront to science. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the most splendid archeologist I ever met--the late Clark Mallam, the guy who studied the serpent intaglio in central Kansas--would understand Sharon’s story perfectly.
"Once in his life," the Kiowa Scott Momaday said, "a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth." Since Momaday, no man or woman has done that so well as Sharon Butala. Now that I think about it, I’m going to leave off the "since Momaday" part of that sentence.
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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865
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