August 9, 2001

Plains Folk: The Prairie in Her Eyes

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

A friend of mine who both follows and promotes plains literature declined to read the new book by Ann Daum, "The Prairie in Her Eyes" (Milkweed Editions), because the dust jacket says the author "often spends winter in Budapest." He figures if you want to be a plainsperson and have standing as a plains author, you ought to winter here. I figure the publisher was trying to show that the author was not some prairie hick, but a cosmopolitan. In other words, I shifted the blame.

I read the book and agree with much of the publicity. Daum is a talented, lyric author. Her book is troubling, both for reasons she intended and for others she did not. As always with regional works, it sets me thinking about the virtues and shortcomings of life on the plains.

The author grew up on a ranch near Murdo in western South Dakota. Her mother came there, "like so many women, from a greener, more densely populated place. . . . The prairie has been hard on her," Daum says. As for her father, he "is the storyteller of the family." She writes of "my place in this family with all its stories and silences and dry, empty spaces."

Generally children of such farm and ranch families grow up and go away. "I see the places I know and that I call home changing and shrinking and crumbling away," Daum mourns. Many of us know the feeling. She is the one who comes back to the ranch, or a pared down version of the ranch, and begins a horse breeding operation on what was a cattle spread.

The Prairie in Her Eyes is a work in progress. I don’t mean it’s not a finished book. I mean it’s about the ongoing efforts of the author to come to terms with her family and ranch roots and to figure out her place in this place as it is now. That all sounds highly introspective and maybe little indulgent, but Daum is such an expressive writer that she carries the reader with her. She knows ranch life, and her descriptions of how she was inducted into ranch work as a girl are keen.

"My sister and I preferred horses to tractors," Daum writes. "The world I lived in was peopled mostly by animals." Moreover, "There were strict rules about how they were to be treated, which ones were protected, which were tolerated, which were exterminated." These quotations contain germs of two important insights carried within the book. 

First, young women of the plains are drawn to animal husbandry rather than field agriculture. I am speaking generally here, of course, and I’m not going to speculate whether it’s a matter of nature or of nurture, but both cultural observation and college enrollments (that is, choice of majors) show it to be so: most young women would rather work with animals than with crops. If these women inherit the earth, the plains will look different.

Second, there is the matter that will make male readers uncomfortable: the world described by Daum is male-dominant, and the worse for it. "We looked up to the cowboys as fathers, gods," Daum writes–but they failed to live up to such emulation. Men in her stories are cruel to animals, hostile to nature; they abuse girls and ruin women. And they are failures, which is why the country is going to ruin.

This is a hard teaching. Remember that an author recounts things as she has experienced them. And consider, too, that what she says may have far more general application than some of us wish to admit.

Which leads to a third point, not made by the author, but an observation of mine. Most of the best authors of the plains today are women. Without exception–correct me if I’m wrong–they are alienated and disaffected from local community. They love the plains as a place for connecting with nature and sometimes spirituality, and they struggle toward some familial reconciliation, but they do not fit in with the women or any other social reference in the locality. There prowls through the women’s literature of the contemporary plains a loneliness that watches and calls in the night. Is this wholly unrepresentative of the lives of other women of the plains?

###

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

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is suitable for printing. 
(1.5MB b&w photo)

Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern wearing a hat that is suitable for printing.
(1.3MB b&w photo)