August 14, 2003

Plains Folk: The Irish

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Historians characterize them as one of the invisible ethnic groups in the settlement of the Northern Plains. But if you lived through those times, they were not invisible at all:  the Irish. Immigrants from Ireland often entered readily into the social and economic life of the plains, especially the towns. Their Roman Catholicism set them somewhat apart, so that their men joined the Knights of Columbus, rather than a Masonic or other Protestant lodge.

Earlier, Irishmen had bulked large in the labor force building the great railroads. In those days, too, Anglo-Americans and Anglo-Canadians commonly denigrated them by telling Irish jokes, often of the Pat-and-Mike variety. The revenge of the Irish was their success, for by and large, they did well.  They did so well that they disappeared as a visible ethnic identity. 

Unlike the immigrants from the European continent, Irish families seldom gathered together into farming communities. You don’t find little Irish churches dotting the countryside. Other groups considered the Irish unlikely farmers, although of course, those Irish who farmed did as well as others. 

This background is what sets the story told in Forgetting Ireland: Uncovering a Family’s Secret History into bold relief. This is a new book written by Bridget Connelly and published by the Minnesota Historical Society under its Borealis imprint. Here is the story of an Irish colony that people forgot, perhaps because the details were so unsavory. There is mystery here, and the scent of scandal, but even more than that, the gloriously persistent survivalist instinct of the Irish. 

Connelly, the author, is a retired scholar of folklore and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, but she grew up in western Minnesota, in the little town of Graceville--still has farming relatives there. “The boys inherited the earth,” she explains. “I left right after high school.” She spent her academic career studying Arab folklore and then, on retirement, followed a pattern I have observed in many academics. She brought her skills back home and discovered the stories she had overlooked for so long. These were the stories of her Irish settler ancestors.

They came from a place called Connemara, County Galway. This became plain in the 1990s when a production crew from Ireland arrived to compile a documentary about what became of the Connemara immigrants in Minnesota. After that Connelly went to Ireland to rediscover her own history. 

Rediscover it, because it had been lost. She, the scholar, hadn’t known she was a descendant of the Connemara colonists. Indeed, Minnesotans spoke the word “Connemara” with contempt. Her family and everyone else denied association with the colonists. The story, as they told it, was that the Roman Catholic Church brought these people from Ireland to the locality as a misguided act of charity in 1880. They failed, of course, because they didn’t know how to farm, they didn’t know the country, and they were indolent and ignorant. Best they be forgotten, or if remembered, repudiated.

It turns out the scorned Connemaras, while no saints, were not to be faulted. The stories of their misery were inflated by Protestant community leaders who saw the chance to take a slap at the Catholic Church and, as I read it, show contempt for the Irish, too, by extending them charity. The Connemaras were given no chance to farm, as they arrived too late to put in crops. Then a bishop, it seems, snookered many of them out of their land by manipulating railroad land titles.

Forgetting Ireland is a wonderful book. Connelly writes with grace and with the excitement of discovery. Her fascinated and affectionate musings on the bridal photo of her grandmother are utterly poignant. By meeting her Irish kin, she learns things about herself--comes to understand her own tendency of “talking in the middle of things without any preamble,” her “lack of ceremony about hellos and good-byes,” even her “inability to give a straight yes or no answer.”

I’m not Irish, I’m German. My straight answer about this book: yes.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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