“When I went to Kent State in 1961,” recalls Shirley Fischer Arends, a great scholar of the history, language, and culture of the Germans from Russia, “I had no idea that I was part of any kind of a unique cultural people. I thought I was simply an American.”
“I came back to North Dakota and started to interview people . . . the pioneers who came from Russia to Dakota. . . . all these people were so delighted and so thrilled that somebody cared.”
A young woman in the 1950s, Miss Fischer’s ambitions were modestly aspirational. She got teacher training at Ellendale and Minot, and then taught for a year in Montana. Then off to Kent for the master’s in German literature, writing a thesis about the language and culture of the folks back home in Ashley, North Dakota.
After that, about twenty years living abroad before landing at Georgetown University, where she picked up her previous line of research for a dissertation. Which eventually became a landmark work, published in 1989 by Georgetown University Press — The Central Dakota Germans: Their History, Language, and Culture.
A mentor had advised her at mid-life to pursue the PhD in order to get scholarly guidance and elevate her work. This doesn’t always happen in a graduate program! But in this case it did, and reflecting on that, Arends provides some astonishing disclosures and reflections.
Of her dissertation experience, she says, “Magic healing is what the Germans call it. It’s the healing that we found in the communities. . . . In North Dakota we call it Brauche.” Brauche — the traditional practice of folk healing come to the prairies with the people from Russia. Arends actually is comparing the process of writing her dissertation to the healing arts of the folk physicians back home, and their communities.
She reveals, in fact, that her grandmother was a Brauche, crippled late in life by arthritis, but people still streamed to her house: “All of the old people of Ashley came to our home to visit her,” says Arends, “so as a child I had this enormous cultural knowledge.” Her mother, too, was a Brauche. Who, when her daughter came home for research, took her around to reintroduce her to people.
I’m writing and speaking here from a remarkable interview recorded with Arends in 1997 by the writer, Ron Vossler, himself a McIntosh County boy. You can go online to listen and read a transcript provided by the Germans from Russia Heritage Center at NDSU.
I’m writing and speaking, too, from a recent rereading of Arends’s book, The Central Dakota Germans. It’s well worth your time to sit with this work, wrestle with the disciplinary trappings of the linguist, continue through to the chapters where the author warms to her subject — the speech, the customs, the lifeways of her ancestral people.
“The language holds the culture,” she says. “Culture informs community, and community was the stuff of survival on the prairies. “I think that in North Dakota we have a real sense of community, and . . . I don't think you could have settled this vast plain without a real sense of community.” So says Shirley Fischer Arends, and we should listen to her. For magic healing.
