![CEEL homepage [logo]](/images/logo.gif){kind=logo}
CEEL Projects
West River: North Dakota Farming Family Project
- Tom Fricke, Director of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life
When I asked John Gengler, the principal of West River High School, what kinds of changes he had seen in his 30 years in town, he didn't miss a beat. John leaned his solid frame of a body toward the kitchen table that divided us and slid his mug of coffee to the side. He needs room to move when he talks, and this was a litany that required the syncopation of hands. It was a late August day in the high plains country beyond the Missouri River, the time of year when the light takes on the liquid quality of autumn, the harvest is in full swing, and teachers think about the opening of school.
"You look at the businesses since I came to town 30 years ago," he started. "We had two auto dealers, they're both gone. We had three groceries and three service stations and now we're down to one." John worked his way through the list of closed businesses and schools, of departed doctors at the community hospital, and the movement of young people away from this compact North Dakota town of 626. His hands kept their beat. The tape recorder kept turning. And I was finishing up my last interview for the first phase of my anthropological research in West River.
But for the tape recorder and the tablet in front of me that day, most people would find it hard to place that scene as the site of ethnographic investigation. Yet, in one of several projects sponsored by the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life, this kitchen-table conversation was part of a larger effort to turn an ethnographic spotlight on the changes in work and family culture being experienced today by middle-class Americans.
The trends suggest a larger transformation that gets to the heart of our cultural understandings of work and family. Shifts in daily practice are clues to categorical and moral definition, to the felt conflicts and tensions embedded in kinship and work networks and their competing demands, to notions of personal identity and motivation, and to the cultures of obligation implied by work and family. Before the statistics, before the abstractions of social science, there are people's stories and daily lives. There is the emotional world of disappointment, uncertainty, and the brave coping of individual Americans reconciling their sense of how things should be with how they are. And there are the counter-stories of smooth sailing, when "should be" and "really are" describe the same thing.
Ethnographic approaches explore these larger themes by looking at everyday lives. And so I found myself in the Northern Plains beginning the research that links those disappearing prairie towns to the shifts in work and family culture that our center's researchers are studying.
The beginnings of my own research lie in a New York Times story from February 1998. The newspaper published a map showing, county by county, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over in the United States-the darker the shading, the higher the percentage of resident elderly. I was struck by the presence of a dark band running down the center of the country through the Great Plains, and a project was born. Not much by itself, that band contained the stories of family separation, the search for new lives and jobs, and all the tensions and negotiations between parents and the children who left them behind. "Can't expect them to stay; there's nothin' for them around here," as one 75-year-old resident of West River put it when I asked her about her own three children, long departed. Contained, too, is the erosion of community life recounted in John Gengler's litany of decline.
There's no avoiding the drama of place in West River country. Whereas in more humid and forested places the trees seem to spike the sky and hold it out of reach, the West River skies seem to brush the grass. One day's aching blue gives way to thunderhead or the green shimmer of the northern lights. Space and distance surround a person as in no other place. John Gengler joked about a student who came out to a nearby college "from New York or New Jersey, who was sitting on a hillside looking out over the prairie." John asked him if it weren't a beautiful sight and laughed at his reply: "Not particularly," said the student; "I just didn't think a person could see this far."
This was the country, swept by wind and frozen in winter blizzards, that the Northern Pacific Railroad and its agents tried to populate from the 1880s. It was some of the last open land in the United States to be settled, and boosters lured immigrants and easterners with exaggerated prose. An 1883 newspaper account claimed a future of powerful cities. An 1886 pamphlet extolled the "salubrity" of Dakota's climate. The lure of Dakota remained, nevertheless, fitful. As late as 1908, the Dickinson Commercial Club was still trying to tempt outsiders with its account of 160-acre homesteads and the promise that "nowhere upon this broad planet can the young, middle-aged, or old man, landowner or renter of the older states, or any woman, more easily gain a competence than by becoming a resident of this region."
West River is one of the towns along the railroad line that took hold. By the early part of the century, it was a largely German-speaking community and overwhelmingly Catholic. Brother Placid Gross, a Benedictine monk and one of the farmers I spent time with, had no illusions about the past, however. They came because, "in this part of the word there was land available," and even though "it was the poorest land, they wanted to be nothing else but farmers. They were willing to settle on the poorest land because they just figured that they could make it."
Of course, "making it" is a matter of degree. In counterpoint to the boosterism that began the century, the refrain at century's end is one of decline. The settlers of this region with their different motivations-setting up religious commonwealths, ethnic homelands, healthy farmsteads-were moved by their own visions and dream quests, which now have been frayed by a few generations of hard reality. Counties and towns began watching their numbers shrink two and more decades ago. Today, the entire southwestern region of North Dakota and parts of neighboring states, an area 250 miles by 120 miles, is served by a single phone book.
This is the place I chose for my research. Struck by the contrast of founding dreams and current decline, I sensed a world where peculiarly American tensions of family and work would be laid open. I drove from Ann Arbor into a landscape formed by dreams and shaped by something harder, past small towns that never grew into cities, past the Missouri River into the long upward slope of the Great Plains, past the scattered hills bearing names like Eagles Nest, Custer's Lookout, and Young Man's Butte, and toward West River. The town announces its presence from a distance by the twin spires of its Benedictine abbey church to the north and the grain elevators lining the railroad tracks to the south. I settled in and spoke to people where I found them: in farmyards and fields, in kitchens, factory offices, schools, churches, and bars.
Even though we're prone to exaggerating the reluctance of people to talk, it takes time anywhere to warm to a stranger. So ethnographic work means lots of things in addition to the jumping into daily life. For me, some of those things during my first few months included pleasant days sifting through nearly a hundred years of documents in the subterranean cool of the Benedictine abbey archives, where the abbey archivist and historian, Father Denis Fournier, O.S.B., introduced me to historical sources for the region.
At those rare times when you find Father Denis in his Benedictine habit, you are confronted with most people's idealized image of the monastic. His white hair and beard conspire with the black robes to soften your speech and make you slightly reverential. This all gets blown when you find him in his more usual working clothes of worn cords and a frayed clerical shirt of such vintage that it shines. Your preconceptions disappear forever when you hear his staccato laugh and outrageous jokes and begin to share in his delight at the stories from the abbey's history. Himself a transplant to the high plains, Father Denis is an example of how place gets internalized. We sat at the north end of the abbey dining room and talked about the course he teaches on plains literature at the university in Bismarck, where he is a professor of English. From the top of the ridge into the Knife River drainage where we sat, you can see nearly 50 miles to the Killdeer Mountains. Father Denis grew reflective and spoke about the ethos of the plains, something that translates into the physical and that has gotten inside of him so that he now feels claustrophobic and hemmed in by the forests of Minnesota where he was born. John Gengler and Father Denis eased me into the town.
A large part of ethnography is patience. The subject of study is right in front of you, and, whatever you do, things begin to happen. While not all center projects put researchers into archives, all require some way of entering communities or work places. The ways of gaining entry are various and appropriate to each researcher. Once gained, entry into a setting means access to lives and stories.
Even in the early stages of fieldwork, themes began emerging, casually at first and then in the follow-up of directed interviews. Take the interweaving of place and family. I first noticed it in the drive to find the site of St. Placidus, a once thriving community with school, church, post-office, and store, that is no more-not even a ghost town since all the buildings have been destroyed or moved. St. Placidus lives on only in its cemetery, where people still bring their dead, even though their families moved on years ago. But it wasn't the practice of burying the dead at the former site of a family's living that alerted me to the connection of family and place. It was the long drive south from West River with John and Mary Gengler and Father Denis, who held the maps for finding our lost town.
We couldn't pass a house or an abandoned farmstead or any other building or obvious marker-strangely shaped tree, creek, butte-without a story being attached to it and linked to a person or a family. John's running commentary filled the sterile Jeffersonian grid of township and range with stories. The small next step was noticing how signposts, ten miles from the nearest town, personalize the landscape with family names, or how county centennial volumes arrange family contributions by sections and townships rather than alphabetically. And from there I began asking, in interviews, about ties to place, and was told by one man whose nine siblings have all gone, how they sold their family's huge acreage, except for the 14 acres they retain-"because that's home."
The rhythm of ethnography is like that. You notice the practices; you look for pattern; you ask questions. My time in West River overlapped with haying season and the beginning of the harvest. Whole families worked the fields together in schedules choreographed by grass and grain. Daughters and sons, barely into their teens, drove trucks and many-tonned rigs along gravel roads and into fields. Haying needed doing when the grass was ready and not before. Once started, it needed to be finished. The oat harvest followed close behind. And then the wheat.
People in West River recognize that their character is tied up in that necessity. "I think that," as one person put it, "to me, for anybody, work is life." You need to do it for your sense of self. Ken Kreitinger, the compact and articulate president of West River's manufacturing company, made it clear, when I sat in his paneled office south of the old Northern Pacific Railroad tracks, that he had thought this through. We talked about his own life and the future of towns like West River. He and his wife had returned their family to North Dakota after beginning a promising career with Boeing Aircraft near Seattle. Something was missing out there, he said, something to do with the world they wanted for their kids. Ken recalled what it was to be eight years old, barely able to see over the steering wheel, driving his dad's truck into town. As he put it, when you've "got this truck and the hoist is broke, you shovel it off if it's loaded with wheat. You don't shovel it half off. You just shovel it off because you have to meet a combine." Where the demands of work are not negotiable, it seeps into who you are.
And the same may be true of place. My last few days that first season in West River, I walked a wheat field with Cal Hoff after a random hailstorm had turned his promising crop to near total loss. Kicking through the broken stems and shattered heads, he spoke the slow cadences of resignation. I had wondered why, just a week before, he was reluctant to speculate about his harvest, and here was the answer at our feet. It was a beautiful cloudless morning with a touch of coming fall weather, almost crisp. The grain would have been ready for harvest in just one more week. "Sometimes I ask myself," he said, when we stopped and looked around at the hills and sky and his broken wheat, "just why they stopped here. Why'd my grandpa think this was the place? Was it a broken axle on the wagon or what?" And then he laughed and we kept on walking. Cal was already talking about next year. Things might be better next year.
