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We’re doing it again. Getting all worked up about
a slur against North Dakota by the major media. In this case it’s
the hatchet job done on the Flickertail State by author Charles Bowdon
and photographer Eugene Richards in National Geographic. Their article
is entitled “The Emptied Prairie.”
This is headline news from Crosby to Fargo. We are told the governor is
preparing an official response. North Dakotans, spearheaded by the North
Dakota Ambassadors, are writing to their local editors and to National
Geographic to protest. We might as well write to Santa Claus.
The piece by Bowdon and Richards is both biased and shoddy – begin
with that. Without belaboring the content, just examine word choice in
the lead paragraph. It contains the following disparaging or gloomy words:
empty, lurches, bones, fragments, litter, down, wringer, long-dead, slipped,
abandoned, rust, moan, vanished, ghost, empty (again), bone, skeleton,
abandoned. Excluding prepositions and articles, the lead paragraph contains
76 words. Eighteen of them are pointedly negative.
And shoddy, in the most basic ways. This is National Geographic, for pete’s
sake, and yet the authors refer to it as “the High Plains.”
There are no “High Plains” north of Pine Ridge. “High Plains”
is a fundamental term of regional geography. That National Geographic
did not even correct fundamental error in geography indicates careless
disregard.
And yet, protest is useless. We have to realize what we are up against
here. It is not an incident. It is a historical pattern, a landscape of
representation with certain outstanding features. In the 1930s it was
The Plow that Broke the Plains, the gloomy government film that urged
people of the plains to get out while they could. Citizens and congressmen
protested, the film was withdrawn from circulation—and it became
a classic, still shown as historical fact in classrooms across the country.
My photographer friend Dennis Stillings points out that the National Geographic
images are posed and contrived. Of course! Farm Security Administration
photographers of the 1930s did the same thing in their documentary work.
Most of us don’t remember the 1930s, but we remember the furor over
the Buffalo Commons in the 1980s. The protest then succeeded mainly in
publicizing and enriching Frank and Deborah Popper, who had excellent
press agents.
What we are up against is a long-term pattern that I have come to call
eco-colonialism—the resolve of major media, and of many people at
large, to fix the image of the Great Plains as one of failure, and its
story as a morality play populated by tragic victims. Protest does not
change this. Purveyors of the colonialist image take protest as simply
additional evidence of how sadly deluded the people of the plains are.
So, what is to be done? Two things, both of which are in progress, but
could use additional attention. First, we need to get to work on our own
communities. Truth be told, too many of us have bought into the colonialist
image and failed to invest in our infrastructure, heritage, institutions,
and culture.
Second, we need to own the alternative media and reshape the image and
story of the plains through a guerilla campaign of niche marketing. The
alternative media include the Internet, old-fashioned personal contact,
and maybe even public radio. Stay tuned.
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