July 26, 2001

Plains Folk: Common Sense and Memory

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The Osage country of northern Oklahoma, a land of tallgrass and blackjack, has a furnished place in my heart. Environmentally kin to the Flint Hills of Kansas, but historically divorced from them, it is a land enriched and scarred by the petroleum industry, and most of all a homeland for people such as Carter Revard, a mixed-blood Osage with Ponca family ties.

The surname Jump on his mother's side evokes for me expeditions to Jump's of Fairfax, a combination steak house-motel-roller rink where shortcut steaks lopped over all edges of the platter. Which is to say, the Osage is a rich country in its way, but not a place you expect to harbor literary lights. From Buck Creek, though, came Revard, destined to become a scholar of medieval literature and an acclaimed poet.

He journeyed to college in "the monstrous alien metropolis of Tulsa" and went on to Oxford and eventually to Yale for a Ph.D.

"Common sense would know I was bound to fail, could never get across that distance," he writes. "We all know that children born into poverty, whose parents and folks all ‘lack education and social skills,' particularly any child with one uncle killed hijacking bootleg whisky shipments while out on parole from robbing a bank, another uncle beaten to death by police in the local jail, all such children in raggedy clothes apt to hide in shame when strangers come to the door, must be doomed to a life of misery, failure, crime, underachievement."

Those words come from Revard's new memoir (University of Arizona Press), "Winning the Dust Bowl." They remind me of something, as I prepare again to meet my hundreds of undergraduate students. People ask me sometimes how it is that, at my age and professional station, I still devote myself so to undergraduate teaching at an open-access land-grant university on the plains. All such inquirers, read again the paragraph above.

"Winning the Dust Bowl" is in some ways a Great Plains work of common cast. As Wallace Stegner and so many others have observed, the plains are a great place for an author to be from. Revard, like Saskatchewan's Stegner (or Kansas's Ise, or Nebraska's Cather, or North Dakota's Hudson) has written a memory book.

"Memory" is the key word, and a mysterious filter. Read though I will in literature, psychology and history, trying to understand the workings of this wonderfully human obsession, I delight and despair that I cannot quite fathom its processes. I do know that "what actually happened" (to translate from a notorious German scholar) isn't actually important. And I do know that memory, remembrance, is the heart of what we think of ourselves here on the plains.

If you live in memory, as I do professionally, then let me commend Revard's book to you both as to how to practice remembrance and how to write it. The chapters each turn on a poem, a poem of remembrance. They back up from it, they go forward, they digress. As I keep trying to teach the engineers who take up the back three rows of my lecture classes, the past is not a straight line. It lives only in memory, and memory does not submit to calendar or to physics.

Revard writes: 

"Well, of course I had good teachers. I learned my words from experts, but who knows, the chance to practice ALL of them might never have come to me had I not lived for some time in my youth with my feet set firmly on an Indian Reservation."

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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