North Dakota

What are the chances that North Dakota will come at you two days in a row? Perhaps not high, but also not impossible, as I discovered earlier today.

Yesterday, a friend from New York City sent us a link from a Hyperallergic article about a protest over the plan to send the controversial statue of Teddy Roosevelt from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC to the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. The site for the library is on seized Indigenous land in North Dakota.

After reading the Hyperallergic article, I crawled into a prairie dog hole on the TRPL website. The building site is near Medora, N.D., and TR's ranch and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Much of that land was seized in the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Rather like all of the other Indigenous land in North America that was bought, stolen, or seized from the Native Americans.

The book I am currently reading is Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo (2007). It was recommended by Dorothy when I mentioned that I had really enjoyed his The delight of being ordinary, about a road trip by Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Breakfast with Buddha is also about a road trip, about Otto Ringling who drives to North Dakota to empty his childhood home after his parents are killed in a traffic accident. He was supposed to take his wacky sister but she substitutes a somewhat inscrutable Rinpoche. An "inscrutable Rinpoche" may be inherently redundant.

While the Rinpoche is meditating before they set off for a day's journey, Otto sinks into a couple hours of morning television at their hotel. As he's speculating about the sordid and exposed lives of the guests on the talk show, he remembers what his father said about North Dakota as the family returned from a sun festival at one of the Indian reservations in North Dakota.

"After we'd watched the dancing and singing and were on our way home in our car, my dad remarked upon how far we'd advanced since the days when the land was ruled by Indian tribes. There were farms now, he said, where once there'd been only buffalo. Farms with telephones and TVs, tractors, airplanes, medicines ... whereas, in those old days there had been nothing. You worked from morning till night, you hunted and fished and sewed and cooked, sang and danced a few times a year, made war, made peace. 'Look at us now,' he said, sweeping his hand out near the windshield at a stretch of heartland. 'Look at all this.'" (page 137, ellipsis in the book) The protagonist compares this "nothing" or "all this" to the wasteland of the TV talk shows that he had just wallowed in for a couple hours.

By the way, North Dakota is one of the three U.S. states that I have never set foot in. And reading Buildings of North Dakota was the impetus for one of my first edits of a Wikipedia page when I noted a church by an architect who also did a church in Napoleon, Ohio.

Also, by the way, just a few pages beyond the protagonist's family trip memory in Breakfast with Buddha is a chapter that circles around coincidence.