Folks, Pt. 2

I've always had a pretty romantic notion of place. When I first decided to come to South Dakota, I believed there was some kind of magic in the dirt out here, and by breathing it in I thought I would somehow earn cowboy boots not just for my feet, but for my soul, too; I thought I might tap into some earnest, rugged vein buried deep inside me. When your only knowledge of a place is built through images--whether the idealized images of the western TV shows I used to watch, or the carefully tailored images of poverty meant to summarize life on the rez--it's easy to think of a place not as real but--to use a ridiculous word for at least the second time on this blog--hyperreal.

Of course, despite everything I read in my postmodernism classes, the rez is still a real place, more solid and less magic than anything contained in those images. In short, real life here is the same as real life anywhere: an accumulation of bills to pay and dinners to cook and tests to grade (okay, that last one only applies to teachers). I'm no more of a cowboy than I was back in suburbia, and, nose to the grindstone, I hardly have a chance to look up and catch a glimpse of anything more spectacular.

My parents' visit gave me a chance to step back and look at this place with the kind of tourist eyes I had when I first arrived this summer. It was a reminder that for some people, being on the reservation is a "cultural experience," a chance to steep oneself in that imagery. One of my goals, I guess, in coming out here, was to have this kind of experience. But now being on the rez is not an experience at all; it's just life. My parents have done an admirable job educating themselves on life on the reservation and the issues it entails. I borrowed a book from my dad called Lakota Culture, World Economy, a published PhD thesis that examines the economies of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Interesting as that is, though, it was also a strange experience to see what is now my home being abstracted into statistics and academic conclusions. When the author discusses a "Wanbli businesswoman," my only thought is, damn, this is a town of 650 people: if I don't know her, she's got to be related to someone I do know. How did she become a piece of data? The problem with a "cultural experience" is that you are squeezing something real and substantial into the two-dimensional world of information: a reduction that is slightly insulting at best, and destructive at worst. I'm not indicting anyone's attempt to inform themselves about the issues of the world; at best that's all I'll be able to do, because even living next door to the problems on the reservation, I'm still not living them. (Besides, here I am, reducing South Dakota into my own words and images, all for the sake of informing the folks back home.) I guess I've just become more aware than I was before that beneath every image, lying under every fact, is something real and sacred that can't be contained in information alone.

Seeing the reservation through outside eyes showed me that my eyes are at least slightly less outside at this point. This place has gotten under my skin: it's home, for the moment. The weekend gave me a chance to step back and brush up against what's real--not hyperreal--, what I've been too busy to stop and touch so far. Even if it's not as romantic as western sound stage, there is something magic there, the simple magic of solid, irreducible reality.