Follow up to yesterday’s post, because things I was asserting about safety in certain sectors of Flyover Country haven’t sit well with me. I mean, I don’t think I have it right. What I said was that Texas (which I’m going to continue to include in Flyover Country only because I get to imagine how indignant it would make Texans) wants the non-Texanness of you to get the fuck out of there, and the Deep South will be very polite and hospitable to you without actually liking or even respecting you if they don’t know your people or where they hail from, but the Plains are a place of nice people, and their famous “Minnesota Nice” is real.

George Floyd’s murderer is from Minnesota, I seem to have forgotten. And Michael Stipe and Kate Pierson are from the Deep South.

Whenever I want to assert a thing about a people or a place, I should remember that I’m in dangerous rhetorical territory, particularly as a person who has vocally stood as an exception to whatever nonsense others were peddling about his current home state. So whatever is leading me to feel unsafe in other parts of the country reveals things about me, not those parts of the country.

In other words, I need to write, alas, about history.

*

History was my worst subject in school, and I’ve never really cared for it or bought into its dictum about being doomed to repeat it, so I’ll keep this quick. The history I have in the Plains is long and all those memories are (chiefly) fond ones. I continue to have people I love and miss who live here. This isn’t (as) true in other parts of Flyover Country, or F-150 Country, or the Bible Belt.^[*] I feel about the Plains the way I can tell a number of the grad students I taught in Alabama feel about the Deep South, a place I endured for three years until I could get out, and a place they had four of the most fulfilling years of their lives in.

With the right friends and family in the right places, you can feel safe and home everywhere. Even Boston, a city I’ve many times called the Angriest City In The World, which has plenty of its own Texas-style Get The Fuck Out Of Here vibes, but it’s also where my old college friend Jay lives (well, he lives in Quincy).

Boston has a big history of rebellion, given all that tea they spilled. Texas too, Jesus. I know so little of history, but I know that the Six Flags of those amusement parks refer to the 6 nations that have owned/stolen Texas throughout its history: Spain, Mexico, France, Texas Itself, the U.S., and the Confederate States of America. And the Deep South still claims its failed rebellion as its heritage. It remains important to them that they once tried and failed to hold onto a way of life that needed to enslave Africans to survive.

The Plains, on the other hand, was an empty land of bounty when the people my friends and family here claim cultural/ancestral connections to first showed up. The Missouri Compromise instilled slavery in one part of the Plains, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act spilled it outside of Missouri, but when people think about the Civil War we’re not looking at Flyover Country. What rebellions seemed to be waged here involved populist, pro-agrarian, William Jennings Bryan-style demands for fair labor and wages. (Right? I don’t know my history, I only know what I picked up after 7 years of living here, which is that it’s an exaggeration to call Plains voters “fiscally liberal, socially conservative” but like only a little.)

*

Every time I’m in Sioux Falls, I make sure at the HyVee to grab all the free magazines off the rack in the store’s vestibule: etc. for her and Sioux Falls Woman and The 605 and the rest of them. These are glossy monthlies printed here in what they call “the Sioux Empire”—i.e., the city of Sioux Falls and its suburbs. Print media is thriving here. And in the articles I read in those magazines about the history of this place, they always begin the story with the first settlers, which I don’t need to tell you means the first white settlers.

The Plains, like all of the U.S., are a site of Native American genocide. It’s probably going to take a while for South Dakota to see what’s psychically and historically wrong with the phrase “the Sioux Empire”, because if people don’t turn to denial and willful silence when confronted with their shame, they turn to anger. Neither emotion is good for growth. I recognize how it must read to have essentially a Plains Tourist like myself tell people whose people go back generations here to grow up, but maybe one way to end this post is to admit that it’s advice I need to take, too. We all do.

As much as people want to make the Civil War our country’s greatest conflict, a better one (well, “better” is a poor word here but you get what I mean) is our centuries-long genocide of Native peoples and theft of their land, “better” because it happened everywhere, it’s likely still happening, and in happening everywhere it can unite us as a country. The Native genocide isn’t a red/blue state conflict. It’s not contained in Flyover Country. San Francisco, where I live, was stolen from the Ramaytush speaking people, one of eight nations now referred to as Ohlone.

The South Dakotans I know grew up with Native Americans as neighbors, as a lived and seen reality. (How they treated or considered Native folks varies depending on who you talk to.) In Virginia, Native Americans were something out of history. Here they make history, like in the blocking of the Keystone XL Pipeline. If, as a Plains Tourist, I can have a dream for a state I only visit once or twice a year, it’s that South Dakota lead the nation in first acknowledging the tragedy of Native genocide and then working to restore Native lands and equitable treatment.

In the Deep South and Texas I feel like an outsider to their conflicts of two centuries ago. In the Plains I remember I’m another American, thriving from the spoils of genocide. If you’re curious which Indigenous people the land you live on belongs to, you can find that info at native-land.ca.