Sometime soon I will come to Prairie Public studios and record Plains Folk radio feature no. 1000. I am not winding down, but ramping up toward that recording, wherein I will, of course, offer some wise and witty remarks about life on the Great Plains of North America and the enterprise of telling their stories.
Actually, I find myself approaching this milestone with joy, but also introspection and humility. This is the same year we celebrated the sesquicentennial, 150th anniversary, of our family farm. The same year, too, that Dr. Kelley and I observed, quietly, my run of 50 years as a professional historian. It’s a lot to process.
My response, so as not to ramble on aimlessly, is to redouble my reading in history and folklore and especially the regional identity of the Great Plains. Which brings me to this new anthology, courtesy University of Nebraska Press: Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism, edited by Alexander Finkelstein and Anne F. Hyde. This is a pretty dense academic work, but the ideas in it are accessible and important. As the editors say, “Regional identification is ripe for historical analysis because it is so pertinent to collective and personal identity” — to my life on the plains, as another memoirist once said.
Leading off is the scholar Jennifer Rittenhouse with an essay on Southern identity. She acknowledges that southern regionalists have a double problem: the original sin of slavery, and the compounding sin of denial, the Lost Cause and all that. Also that sense of grievance, often aggressive, nursed through the generations.
Surely this has nothing to do with life on the plains, right? Actually, I recently wrote (quoting the Book of Acts) about our need to acknowledge the “field of blood” in our own history so that we can progress to a positive narrative of our place in the land. As for grievance — well, turn off Prairie Public for a few minutes, tune in a commercial station, and what do you hear? I took a lot of notes from Rittenhouse.
As well as from Lawrence Culver, whose contribution is “The Significance of Climate in American History.” He recounts the nineteenth-century struggle over the identity and image of the plains: Great American Desert, or Garden of the World? This matters not only in the broad strokes of branding but also in the granular composition of grassland memory — that’s why when historian Molly Rozum seems preoccupied with the subject of going barefoot on the prairies, I nod my head, maybe even drop a tear. “Americans might have thought they were done with climate,” writes Culver, but “climate is not done with them.” A few years ago, at a conference in Norway, I broached the subject of not climate, but climate change as a historical determinant of life on the plains. Now, the idea has wheels, historically.
As for other things not done with us — see the essay by Courtney E. Buchkoski, “Growing Up American,” detailing the history of New York’s Children’s Aid Society. I always thought this group gathered up orphans and brought them to the prairies for a chance in life. Now I learn that many of these “orphans” were Irish or other Catholic kids taken forcibly from their families. Yes, my Native friends, I know, this sounds familiar. It makes me think about other, possibly similar cases — what about mail-order brides? Not just the stuff of TV movies, I suspect.
Give me another fifty years, because I’ve got a lot to think about, and talk with you about.
