“It is important that we have conversations about our beloved state,” says Clay Jenkinson, introducing his book, The Language of Cottonwoods. “I love North Dakota with all my heart.”
It is no great insight to say that the identity question—"Who am I, who are we?"—is the oldest chestnut in the literary pantry of the prairies, but it still can be roasted to sweetness. Clay says his working title for the book was—perhaps is—"So, Who Are We Now?" The overall posture of the book holds this as a public question, perhaps a matter of policy. The language of the work suggests it is also a personal one.
Clay lays out his main questions clearly. At the core is an identity crisis: the decline of the traditional agrarian character of the state has left us in a vacuum. Farmers are few. Old-fashioned rural ties no longer bind. Threshing rings are museum artifacts. Try to have a potluck in Fargo, and most of the stuff on the board has a store label on it, hasn’t even been taken out of the plastic container and put into a serving dish. The erosion of identity leaves us vulnerable to invasive trends and toxic politics.
This decline leads to another alarming fact: the deterioration of our relationship with the land. Interestingly, Clay credits hunting as an important recreational pursuit that maintains a tie with the landscape. It is not enough, however. Much of The Language of Cottonwoods is devoted to our failure, in the face of extractive boom, to stand for the conservation of our iconic landscapes, particularly the Little Missouri River Valley.
Which failure is representative of our general inability to come to grips with extractive economic enterprise, as if the only alternatives were simpleminded cheerleading and reactionary opposition. Clay is sober and reasonable as to all this, mostly. I think I would add that although conservation seemed for a while to have tamed the extractive character of field agriculture, we have lost that battle, too.
Finally—and why is this so late in the bullet list?—there is the matter of the settler society coming to terms with Native Americans as neighbors. Perhaps this wants treatment as the genesis question in the identity complex, rather than as a piece of the puzzle.
Clay desires to envision a future North Dakota that is post-agrarian and, in the long term, post-carbon. We are handicapped by the weakness of our spirit of place, which is both physical and metaphysical, and by internal divisions—the old east-versus-west, country versus city, Imperial-Cass thing. Clay partakes of some of this himself, I think, which may be inevitable for a Jefferson scholar.
There is some other baggage weighing us down, as evidenced by the “North Dakota 101” section of the book laying out some assumptions about the Flicktertail State. Here the hidden hand of historian Elwyn Robinson is not even gloved, as Clay dwells upon our remoteness. I just don't buy this as a pre-existing condition for the 21st century. If anyone is isolate in North Dakota, it is by choice.
Then there is his glib acceptance of the proposition that North Dakotans are unusually, especially, perhaps supremely nice people. Often it may seem that way; I felt that way in a gathering of friends a few days ago, and I certainly feel that way when my students choose to forgive my forgetful faults, or my listeners here put up with my familiar fetishes and occasional rants; but Clay rises to a level of prairie exceptionalism in regard to this matter of niceness that I cannot reconcile with either broader knowledge or personal experience. This is a mythic weakness we should walk back a bit.
I take here a critical posture toward The Language of Cottonwoods because, as Mike Jacobs says, it is an important book. I will return to chew on some of its most interesting propositions.
