Great Plains Literature

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

10/31/2018 Added

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Author Linda Ray Pratt talks about her book "Great Plains Literature," part of the Discover the Great Plains series from the Center for Great Plains Studies and the University of Nebraska Press.

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[00:00:07.380]As you know the Discovering the Great Plains books
[00:00:10.890]are meant for lay readers who are interested
[00:00:15.260]in the Great Plains but probably not dedicated scholars
[00:00:18.480]to the subject, and the books needed to be fairly short.
[00:00:23.550]And so the question was what writers would you use,
[00:00:29.783]and deciding that, because there were really many more
[00:00:34.610]than I was gonna be able to discuss in this book,
[00:00:38.410]I tried to think of what my audience
[00:00:40.260]would most want to read.
[00:00:42.740]And my thought was the person who picks up this book
[00:00:46.660]is probably first of all interested in the Great Plains
[00:00:49.970]and perhaps secondly in the literature,
[00:00:53.120]or that they love literature,
[00:00:54.940]and so I thought I want this book
[00:00:57.180]to tell them important things about the history
[00:01:01.300]and the culture of the Great Plains.
[00:01:03.610]Once I made that decision, some authors were obvious.
[00:01:09.170]Some authors became I think important to that story,
[00:01:12.630]but they're not necessarily the writers
[00:01:16.030]that are always the most famous.
[00:01:18.960]But I liked the idea that I was bringing some new approaches
[00:01:24.730]and some new writers, and so I kind of thought through
[00:01:29.290]well what are the biggest episodes
[00:01:30.770]in the history of the Great Plains?
[00:01:33.570]And obviously two of them are settlement,
[00:01:37.510]pioneering settlement, subduing of the Indian nations,
[00:01:43.080]those were the two easy things to say,
[00:01:45.900]and they come in the 19th Century,
[00:01:50.420]but if you think a little further about the history,
[00:01:54.100]I think one of the next big things is the Depression.
[00:01:59.460]And the Depression was particular in the Great Plains
[00:02:03.180]because so much of it was rural.
[00:02:07.600]The land had been exploited so badly,
[00:02:11.160]and the Dust Bowl, what we call the Dust Bowl,
[00:02:17.700]actually did encompass the whole Great Plains.
[00:02:19.700]I think people think about it as Oklahoma,
[00:02:22.170]but it actually, the experts on it say it was
[00:02:25.620]perhaps even worse in the Dakotas.
[00:02:28.810]So I started picking authors that addressed these things.
[00:02:35.460]I also thought it's time we stop ignoring the fact
[00:02:40.100]that almost a majority of the people in some states
[00:02:45.847]live in cities, so I wanted to say something about cities.
[00:02:52.670]And three most essential writers
[00:02:55.410]that I knew from the start I was going to need to do
[00:02:59.000]were Black Elk Speaks as recorded by John Neihardt,
[00:03:04.690]Ole Rolvaag who did that wonderful trilogy,
[00:03:07.560]the most important book of which was Giants In The Earth,
[00:03:11.310]that is the most honest and thorough presentation
[00:03:16.050]of the first settlers, the ones that came
[00:03:19.661]when there was nothing on the prairie
[00:03:21.860]and built sod houses, and then the third writer
[00:03:27.530]that you knew you had to deal with was Willa Cather.
[00:03:31.770]But beyond that it began to be
[00:03:34.570]almost a roll of the dice, who next?
[00:03:38.060]And so I then thought about obviously Cather and Rolvaag
[00:03:45.530]could address settlement, but I wanted more
[00:03:49.400]than Black Elk's voice for the Native American experience,
[00:03:54.410]and I wanted Native people talking about their experience
[00:04:00.818]rather than white people talking about Indians,
[00:04:04.150]and so I added a writer, wonderful writer,
[00:04:07.690]named Zitkala-Sa, who was a Dakota woman,
[00:04:14.320]and she picks up the story, you know, Black Elk takes us
[00:04:18.910]really through 1890 and Wounded Knee,
[00:04:22.870]and Zitkala-Sa picks up the story of the Indians
[00:04:29.240]on the reservation, the early days.
[00:04:31.970]Children being sent to church schools, government schools,
[00:04:38.760]and how terrible that was, and then I did Cather
[00:04:42.680]for a kind of later follow-up of settlement
[00:04:46.830]because she's a good bit later than Ole Rolvaag.
[00:04:57.400]I think that the most that most people know
[00:04:58.552]about the Great Plains is settlers and Indians
[00:05:06.510]and maybe Great Depression,
[00:05:08.770]Dust Bowl, those are things that the media has played
[00:05:14.240]in movie after movie after movie.
[00:05:16.620]It's in the art, but I think there's a resistance
[00:05:24.160]to thinking about racism on the Plain,
[00:05:29.580]even resistance to thinking about what the removal
[00:05:34.440]of the Indians has really meant.
[00:05:39.740]I think that's a tragedy that hasn't come
[00:05:43.520]to any kind of resolution yet.
[00:05:48.000]I think most people don't think about the cities at all,
[00:05:52.020]and one of the things that's interesting about the cities,
[00:05:54.890]and this does show up in the literature written
[00:05:56.930]about the cities is that that's where you got
[00:06:02.260]so much of the ethnic and racial diversity.
[00:06:07.240]A city like Omaha or Kansas City,
[00:06:11.270]the borders of the Great Plains are almost always
[00:06:14.310]marked by cities.
[00:06:17.040]And there you have the immigrants who aren't Scandinavian
[00:06:24.090]and who aren't Lutheran.
[00:06:27.040]You get the Italians, you get the Eastern Europeans.
[00:06:33.240]In the 30s and in the 20s you got a lot of black people
[00:06:39.020]coming into places like Omaha and Kansas City
[00:06:42.320]to work in meatpacking, partly because they were trying
[00:06:46.290]to break the unions of white workers,
[00:06:50.970]but for whatever reason, a great many minority people
[00:06:54.490]were brought into the Great Plains.
[00:06:58.060]And I think we are still quite remiss
[00:07:00.440]in sort of factoring that in to how we think
[00:07:02.870]about the Great Plains.
[00:07:06.220]I don't think most people
[00:07:08.100]have thought about the Great Plains as being
[00:07:13.960]part of American literature, and the ways in which
[00:07:17.980]it's different, and the ways in which it reflects
[00:07:22.970]other kinds of traditions that you can find
[00:07:24.980]in a lot of other places in America.
[00:07:28.740]And I think that several of the books that I pick
[00:07:35.930]that are not so well known,
[00:07:37.290]things like Rilla Askew's Fire In Beulah,
[00:07:42.020]I don't think most people know
[00:07:43.470]that the very worst race riot ever in American history
[00:07:46.900]occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[00:07:51.973]Or probably a lot of people in Omaha
[00:07:53.300]don't know about Will Brown who was lynched
[00:07:55.470]and whose body was burned in downtown Omaha.
[00:07:59.820]These are the kinds of things I think
[00:08:01.930]are an important part of our history,
[00:08:05.040]important part of our culture,
[00:08:07.210]some of which our culture
[00:08:08.960]really still doesn't want to recognize,
[00:08:12.810]and so I wanted to bring that in, too,
[00:08:16.030]not just the courage of settlement, the hard times,
[00:08:23.070]but these other things, too.
[00:08:29.270]One of the things that came as a surprise for me,
[00:08:34.140]although I'm sure I intellectually knew this,
[00:08:37.770]was I started doing some, looking at times and dates
[00:08:44.070]of American literature,
[00:08:46.870]and virtually all of Great Plains literature
[00:08:51.910]is actually published in the 20th Century.
[00:08:57.410]We have writers who were born in, say, 1873,
[00:09:03.084]and we have speakers like Black Elk
[00:09:07.570]who was alive through everything from Custer
[00:09:12.465]to Wounded Knee in 1890, but we don't have that book.
[00:09:19.210]We don't have his voice in any way
[00:09:22.090]until Neihardt writes it and publishes it
[00:09:25.100]in the 20th Century.
[00:09:27.010]Cather doesn't start writing until the 20th Century.
[00:09:31.209]Rolvaag, who is dealing the earliest period
[00:09:36.445]of settlement in the Dakotas, doesn't publish the first
[00:09:42.010]of his series until 1927.
[00:09:45.250]And I realized that there was almost 200 years
[00:09:50.970]of American literature in the eastern part of the country
[00:09:55.790]and in New England before there was any Plains lit.
[00:10:03.470]Because we have William Berg writing in 1630,
[00:10:07.250]Of Plymouth Plantation.
[00:10:10.544]And it made me think again
[00:10:13.130]about where does Great Plains literature start?
[00:10:19.690]And I decided that the actual place that I wanted to start
[00:10:23.410]was the journals of Lewis and Clark.
[00:10:26.070]That's still about 150 years past Plymouth
[00:10:33.170]and Of Plymouth Plantation and so forth,
[00:10:36.500]but it's still about a hundred years before
[00:10:41.870]the first things by the 20th Century writers
[00:10:45.540]begin to appear, well what does that mean?
[00:10:49.850]If you look at early American literature,
[00:10:53.510]it was overshadowed completely
[00:10:57.120]by English, British conventions, British language,
[00:11:03.340]British subjects and themes.
[00:11:06.050]And so you have this new country emerging
[00:11:08.350]that is initially colonies of England of course,
[00:11:12.840]and when they began to have a true American identity,
[00:11:20.200]they didn't have a literary tradition as that.
[00:11:24.350]And we went through in the 18th Century and 19th Century
[00:11:30.030]this evolving of an American voice
[00:11:32.550]and American literary forms
[00:11:34.710]and in some ways it doesn't come to a full fruition
[00:11:38.340]until you get to Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.
[00:11:43.960]And in the Great Plains, those kinds of issues
[00:11:51.340]had been settled before we ever started writing,
[00:11:56.460]so aside from a few 1800s poems and essays
[00:12:04.370]that you can find from a few preachers and teachers
[00:12:08.510]that were on the Great Plains, you don't find things written
[00:12:13.350]with a kind of echo of a British voice
[00:12:17.290]or an echo of a British tradition.
[00:12:20.940]So when our literature comes forward,
[00:12:25.736]it's a Plains entity, in a way that the early writers
[00:12:35.410]in New England and the South couldn't manage, you know.
[00:12:41.080]The other thing that was different
[00:12:43.198]was in the early days of American literature,
[00:12:47.320]we were predominantly English speakers.
[00:12:52.010]In the early days of Great Plains, not so.
[00:12:56.940]It could be Norwegian, Swedish, Danish later.
[00:13:03.670]It could be Czech, it could be a lot of different things.
[00:13:08.440]And the people didn't actually speak each other's languages,
[00:13:13.970]and so I think it's fitting that the first great epic
[00:13:18.933]of settlement by Ole Rolvaag
[00:13:23.320]was written first in Norwegian.
[00:13:29.910]If I had to make a list of writers
[00:13:31.970]according to their major subject,
[00:13:34.460]city would probably have the shortest list.
[00:13:38.910]You do find references to city in Cather,
[00:13:42.010]there are people that go into Omaha,
[00:13:46.940]Marie in My Antonia goes to Omaha,
[00:13:52.475]some characters go in and out of Denver.
[00:13:58.830]In Canadian provinces, there are characters
[00:14:03.690]that go to Winnipeg from small towns and so forth,
[00:14:08.260]but usually it's just been a place
[00:14:12.060]where people went in and out of, and it's only a reference,
[00:14:17.530]but Tillie Olsen, who became quite famous in the 1960s, 70s,
[00:14:25.157]and her short story I Stand Here Ironing
[00:14:27.090]I think has been literally one of the two or three
[00:14:33.620]most reprinted, anthologized short stories
[00:14:36.560]in American literature.
[00:14:38.950]Well, she's from Omaha.
[00:14:41.300]And one of her novels, Yonnondio,
[00:14:44.880]is about a family who failed at farming
[00:14:50.230]and moved to the city, a meatpacking city,
[00:14:55.490]and the father in this family gets a job in meatpacking.
[00:15:00.770]And if you know Omaha, you know that the city
[00:15:03.667]in Yonnondio is Omaha, the geography of it all,
[00:15:09.191]and she talks about looking down into the valley
[00:15:11.790]and seeing the packing houses
[00:15:14.520]and the sign Armour, A-R-M-O-U-R,
[00:15:16.867]Armour's, Armour's, Armour's across the building.
[00:15:20.410]Until they tore down so much of that maybe 20 years ago now,
[00:15:26.504]you could still see that building,
[00:15:28.810]and it still said Armour's in big letters.
[00:15:32.480]So I used Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio,
[00:15:35.750]and I think that's an important book
[00:15:37.580]for Nebraskans in particular to read
[00:15:42.320]because we are now into generations
[00:15:47.240]that don't even remember the smell of south Omaha,
[00:15:52.156]let alone know about the cattle pens,
[00:15:57.720]or what it meant for the workers,
[00:15:59.210]or why there's all those little framed bungalows
[00:16:02.370]in south Omaha, and her book will bring that to life
[00:16:07.480]in a vivid way, you can almost smell the odors
[00:16:12.439]just reading that book.
[00:16:15.730]The other thing, the other writer I used
[00:16:18.330]was Meridel Le Sueur.
[00:16:20.589]Meridel's father, he adopted her,
[00:16:23.240]but she took his last name, was Arthur Le Sueur,
[00:16:27.120]and he was a socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota.
[00:16:34.070]And she spent a lot of her time in Kansas and North Dakota,
[00:16:37.240]as an adult, she lived in St. Paul.
[00:16:41.490]And she writes a different take entirely
[00:16:45.539]on the story of the country girl goes to the city.
[00:16:47.630]You know, we have novelists like Theodore Dreiser,
[00:16:51.620]who's written things like that, Sister Carrie,
[00:16:56.390]but Meridel actually knew what happened to women
[00:17:00.540]who left the farm during the Depression
[00:17:03.080]and went to the city,
[00:17:04.550]and it was a pretty grim story for women.
[00:17:08.070]They had very limited ways of making a living.
[00:17:11.180]Many of them did wind up in, or some did wind up,
[00:17:14.300]in prostitution.
[00:17:17.050]Others, the particular woman,
[00:17:19.480]The Girl is the name of her book,
[00:17:21.120]and she never mentions the girl by name,
[00:17:23.460]she's always the girl.
[00:17:25.870]The Girl gets a job as a waitress in a bar,
[00:17:30.116]and in fact, she's fairly lucky to get this job,
[00:17:34.725]but this is a bar where there's some petty gangsters
[00:17:38.650]that hang out, and she falls in love with one
[00:17:42.980]who's planning a bank robbery,
[00:17:45.280]and these are petty gangsters,
[00:17:48.770]and they make a mess of the bank robbery and run
[00:17:54.190]and leave the money in the bank, you know, and so forth.
[00:17:59.605]And the girl is thrown on her own,
[00:18:02.530]and one of the things that Meridel says,
[00:18:04.540]and I interviewed Meridel many times, and Tillie,
[00:18:08.760]they were alive until five and 10, 15 years ago,
[00:18:14.605]and one of the things that Meridel used to talk about a lot
[00:18:19.170]was the resources available to a woman in need
[00:18:23.840]in the cities in the early part of the century,
[00:18:27.460]let alone in the 19th Century, were almost nonexistent.

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Great Plains Literature

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