Tom Isern, NDSU

Holy smoke, this Facebook group, created by NDSU History major Annie Erling, is taking off like a rocket! Search in Facebook for "Volunteers on the Prairie." The group is organized as a vehicle to raise volunteers to carry out historic restorations across North Dakota. Personally, I hope to work with it to bring strong and able bodies to the Hutmacher restoration site in Dunn County. Consider the potential of 13,000 NDSU students as a volunteer pool to go out and rebuild historic North Dakota. The prospect is heady. Check it out.

Received the following unwelcome message from friend Sterling Evans, at the University of Oklahoma:

". . . did not know if you had heard that Paul Sharp died here late last week. I'm attaching the news article about that here: http://www.normantranscript.com/localnews/local_story_051015116."

After reading the good coverage of Paul's career and contributions in the Norman Transcript, I appended the following comments.

"Truly a gracious man, a statesman of higher education, a scholar and a gentleman. Norman residents know his contributions to the university. Let me add, too, that his contributions to scholarship, before embarking on his distinguished career in academic administration, were also profound. His two books, Agrarian Revolt In Western Canada and Whoop-Up Country, were ahead of their time. Because Sharp, an agile and broadminded scholar, crossed the international border so ably in his scholarship, neither Canadian nor American critics knew quite what to make of him. Today, though, we see a resurgence of borderlands studies among young scholars, among whom Sharp has assumed canonical status. Agrarian Revolt was the pioneering work for trans-border studies; Whoop-Up Country was the master work, an enduring classic. Gone, but not forgotten, not by a long shot."

The Montana Historical Society has launched an effort to encourage better writing of local histories. It's called the Montana County History Initiative. As hired expertise the society brought in none other that NDSU PhD candidate Miles Lewis, the boy from the Musselshell. After he conducted some workshops for local historians, the society published, as Pamphlet No. 1 of the Montana County History Initiative, a thirty-page handbook entitled Reflections on Regional History: A Short Guide to Crafting Regional Montana History, by Miles D. Lewis. It ranges from philosophy of History a la McNeill and Sieyes to common-sense advice like having a concrete thesis. Good work, Miles.

Not the tasty Creole kind, but the earthy, gummy kind. The kind that sticks to your tires if the minimum-maintenance section road you turned onto is a little wet. The kind that, in the days before the good roads movement, immobilized great tracts of the northern prairies. The kind that caused General George Crook in 1876 to refer to the Little Missouri country as a "horse-killer." Gumbo. The thing about it is, the more you try to move, the more you get bogged down in it.

You knew all along that was just some over-extended metaphor, right? Nevertheless, here we go: working at a university, particularly a university in progressive transition, such as NDSU, is a lot like walking on gumbo. It's so easy to get bogged down, but you don't have any choice, you just have to keep slogging on, carrying the dead weight with you.

A few weeks ago I posted an essay on the subject of commencement. Having reviewed the participation list for winter commencement, it seemed to me the turn-out by faculty was miserable. I also noted that I had not one departmental colleague for company at winter commencement. Because I had the temerity to say this wasn't right, I was rebuked by a couple of colleagues for my unreasonable expectations. What if, now this is just hypothetical, understand, but what if we commissioned a poll of the citizens of North Dakota who pay our salaries and asked them if it is an unreasonable expectation for faculty members to show up for commencement? How is it that this is even a matter for discussion? Gumbo.

I reprise this subject only because, gumbo-like, it just keeps gumming up. A departmental colleague recently published a creditable book with a state historical society press. Our excellent local independent bookstore invited the author to give a book talk one evening. Attending, I noticed no other colleague from the department present for what proved to be a rather good discussion. Silly me, I had the temerity to say in a meeting that this was a less-than-creditable representation of the department. Consequently, this afternoon I received a 10-minute lecture about my lack of collegiality for criticizing my colleagues. Say, wait a minute - wasn't I the one who showed up in support of the author? Let me say this plainly. On any given day various people may have conflicting responsibilities. No one can do everything or be everywhere. But when a colleague publishes a new book, and is featured in a public forum to talk about it, then the author deserves the support of departmental colleagues; failure to give such support is a failure of academic culture and should be noted as such. Since no one else is doing it, I hereby apologize to the author for the department's poor showing.

What I do not apologize for is saying, we can be better than we are. It is a matter of owning up. NDSU had a long previous life as a colonial university. The cultural habits of that--the resistance mentality, the unwillingness to take responsibility, the cynicism--take a long time to dry up. They are the gumbo. Get off my Luccheses, please.

Last April MA candidate Jeff Armstrong presented the paper, "Deadly Embrace: From State Sovereignty to Cooperative Agreements in a Public Law-280 State," in the American Indian Studies Section of the Western Social Science Association. The paper was well crafted and well received, and now it's been published to the online journal of the Indigenous Policy Network, Indigenous Policy. Read the piece here. Well done, Jeff.