Two conferences of regional scholars, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, the other in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have taken the future of the Great Plains as their theme this spring. This sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. I can mouth off about the future like anyone else, but when I take up my tools as a historian, I have to say, the future is not my business. Heck, I’m not even sure the present exists.
Nevertheless, I spoke in Sioux Falls, with appropriate caveats. Here is the sense of what I said about the future of the Great Plains.
I am preaching from the text of Walter Prescott Webb’s foundational history of 1931, The Great Plains. Wherein, as a concluding prompt, Webb proposes, “Let Us Inquire What Has Been and What Is to Be the Meaning of th Great Plains in American Life.” I do decline, as a historian, to engage in prophecy. What I can do is identify current, historical trajectories on the plains, omens by which more daring visionaries might augur our future as plains folk.
Beginning with what I have come to call the Unfinished Business of 1851, meaning the struggles of Indigenous, colonizing, and diasporic peoples essaying to live together on the land. The peoples gathered in 1851 at Horse Creek, near Fort Laramie, sought to establish “a lasting peace,” peace among the tribes, peace between them and the white newcomers.
There is a lot of idealistic language in the treaty of 1851. There are pledges to prevent mischief by unwanted intruders, the famous “bad men” clauses. The treaty went unratified and produced no peace. We keep trying, sort of, but there are so many signs of failure: the taking of lands and children, myriad issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction, the woeful business of reclaiming remains from boarding schools. It was during the DAPL conflict of 2016 when I viewed what was happening on the Cannonball and said, Looks like a war to me. Then I realized, It’s not a war, it’s the war, and it’s been going on since 1851. Read Acts 1, the Field of Blood.
And while you have your Bible out, go Old Testament, to Jerimiah.
I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
Ask me if this hits me where I live. I am a serious partner in a 152-year-old family farm on the plains. Problems like nitrate pollution, soil impoverishment, even ground water depletion are soluble, but only if there is respect and love for the land. Most of us over the past generation have lost the vital connection with the land, so we don’t care enough to embrace husbandry (a word I like a lot). We can alter this trajectory only if we engineer widespread re-engagement with the land, Makoché.
And third, our experience on the prairies has taken Tocqueville’s democratic doctrine of human perfectability in a bad direction. There’s nothing wrong with individual aspiration. Each of us wants a greater fortune, more comforts and pleasures, a felicitous home and family, all well and good. When settler communities sprang up on the plains, individual aspiration was strong, but it was balanced. The level of community activity and commitment in a prairie town in the 1880s—literary societies, for pete’s sake—puts us in the shade. We wrote that balance between individual aspiration and the public good into our constitution in 1889. As a historian, I recommend reading it, frequently.
