Driving Tours in North Dakota - Raising North Dakota (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Destinations Special: Summer Road Trips
Raising North Dakota (Cont.)


	"This battered land": North Dakota's past tense, circa 1936 (Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

THE NEXT DAY I drove through the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, much of which was flooded when the Garrison Dam backed up Lake Sakakawea, in 1953. At the time it seemed like insult added to injury to the Three Affiliated Tribes who live there—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. After all, more than 80 percent of the Mandan tribe—who had befriended Lewis and Clark, helping Jefferson's predatory henchmen through the winter of 1804—had been wiped out by a smallpox epidemic introduced by whites in 1837. But like the bison, tribal people have not only held on; they may yet enjoy a sort of sweet demographic revenge. For one, their birth rates are far higher than those of whites. The Census Bureau reported that 25,870 Native Americans lived in North Dakota in 1990, 60 percent of them on four reservations and the rest scattered throughout the state. Ten years later the Indian population was 31,329, a 20 percent rate of growth. Also, more than 40 percent of the state's Indians—composed of the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and the Spirit Lake Tribe of Sioux—are less than 18 years old. Gary Bell, a 31-year-old Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara who wears his hair in a long black braid, works in New Town as an announcer and disc jockey spinning country-and-western, rock, and tribal tracks for KMHA, the Native American-owned public FM radio station. As we stood outside a traditional circular Mandan earth lodge, in which Kitty and I could live pretty comfortably and have plenty of room left over for our dogs, he said that, like a lot of Indians, he has connections to relatives in big cities all over the country but decided to stay put and raise his little girls right here.

"I want them to know who they are," he said. "I want them to live here, where we've always lived."

Marilyn Hudson, who's Mandan-Hidatsa, worked in San Francisco in 1960 before returning to her reservation to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, later, to administer the tribal museum. "Many Indian people are coming home after they retire," she said. "It's just easier to live here than in a city. You have more independence. It's cheaper. The roads are straight, and it's not as hard to get around."

But while Native Americans and old-timers are welcomed home with open arms, there's an undying distrust among North Dakotans for out-of-state opportunists (like me, I suppose). It was resentment among farmers about their subservience to distant moneyed classes—which controlled the railroads, paid low prices for wheat, and charged high prices for flour—that spawned the Nonpartisan League. This confederation of hayseeds took control of North Dakota after World War I, established a state-owned bank and grain elevators, and transformed the government into the closest thing to a socialist state America has ever had.

The modern incarnation of this paranoia about outsiders has created a law that bars most nonprofit organizations from purchasing agricultural land. The exceptions, including the Nature Conservancy, must get approval for any such purchase directly from Republican governor John Hoeven and a board of advisers that includes the state agriculture commissioner and the head of the Farm Bureau. This legislation, passed in 1993, was fueled by fear that North Dakota would be overrun by rich environmental organizations that would hammer down local competition for the best land, withdraw moneymaking acreage from production, and ban hunters.

Luckily, the state's xenophobic legislation doesn't apply to me, a private citizen. And I'll say it now, people: I have no intention of planting any damn wheat here. Or barley. I've seen buffalo all over the state, from the Logging Camp Ranch, in Slope County, to the Cannonball Ranch, in Mandan, near Bismarck, and am convinced of the importance of the beast in restoring this battered land to health.

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