Last Word

Bullion Butte wins another one

February 15th, 2017

There was a big dust-up about 5 years ago over the North Dakota State Land Board’s decision to offer, for lease, the right to drill for oil on the west side of one of southwest North Dakota’s major landmarks, Bullion Butte. The butte and some of the acreage around it are mostly owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and the area has been off limits to development since about 1977, and closed to even access by vehicles since 2001, when the Forest Service set it aside as one of five…

Dispatches from the United Against HB1427 rally

February 8th, 2017

The simplest description of HB1427 is this metaphor: imagine a dog p*ssing on the Constitution in front of your war-hero grandfather. Hundreds of people showed up to a rally in Fargo on Groundhog Day to rightfully oppose that concept.

People of many creeds and colors, tongues and towns showed up for this rally against this bad bill. Everyone had their reasons: family, business, solidarity. A map of pins showing attendees' ancestry filled every inhabited continent quickly.

Ostensibly…

Before I was a feminist

February 1st, 2017

What was I before I was a feminist, before I even knew what that word meant?

I was a proud daddy’s girl

In my mind, it meant that I was strong, independent and wild. I could be clever enough to figure out problems with my own two hands and ask the question ‘why.’ It allowed me to minimalize my mother's contributions, because what a mother gives is the right of her child, but what a father gives is a gift. These were never things my parents said, but what I learned from society.

I was…

A Christmas Campout

January 25th, 2017

I’ve spent a lot of nights sleeping within spitting distance of the Little Missouri River. God willing, I’ll spend a lot more. I’m pretty sure I’ve slept there in every month on the calendar. Some nights (and some months) were better than others. I’ve slept there alone, I’ve slept there with canoeing buddies, I’ve slept there with wives, with kids, with dogs, with a herd of bison trampling through my campsite, with coyotes howling, with a full moon and a new moon.

I’ve…

Honor, dishonor, and making America white again

January 18th, 2017

“It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“It is engraved in my memory that Stalin used the term Russia, and not Soviet Union, which meant that he was not only inspiring Russian nationalism but was himself inspired by it and identified himself with it. There were also anecdotes. Stalin liked one in particular which I told. A Turk and a Montenegrin were talking during a rare moment of truce. The Turk wondered why the…

Whose lives matter?

December 21st, 2016

In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of an unarmed 17-year-old boy.

A heartbroken Alicia Garza took to Facebook to write a love letter to her dismayed friends reading “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black lives matter.”

Her words resonated with other activists, who contacted her and organized a social media platform to spread #blacklivesmatter to a disenfranchised community. Alice Garza is a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement.…

The roots of Republican Party dishonor

December 21st, 2016

“This my prayer: Civil war fattening on men’s ruin shall not thunder in our city. Let not the dry dust that drinks the black blood of citizens through passion for revenge and bloodshed for bloodshed be given our state to prey upon.” - Aeschylus

“…the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith…in machinery…our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable,…All this, I say, tends to…

Saving lives, shattering myths

December 21st, 2016

I commend ND media outlets for raising awareness about the opiate epidemic and heroin overdoses in our communities. Stories about recovering addicts reduce stigma and shame, providing hope for those who still struggle with addictions; meanwhile, stories about people who died of an overdose offer a cautionary tale. Most importantly, media coverage about the epidemic can ignite social change and be the impetus for evidence-based policy reform.

Unfortunately, some of the coverage is…

Some Christmas poetry

December 14th, 2016

I’d be lying if I said James W. Foley was one of my favorite poets. Hokey might be the best word to describe him (but kind of wonderfully hokey). Foley, North Dakota’s longtime Poet Laureate (way before current Laureate Larry Woiwode) has been dead 75 years now, but there’s a renewed interest in his work, as evidenced by a series of new reprints of some of his 20 books of poetry, and you can now buy most of them in new, paperback editions, (Alibris.com is the best place) for less…

‘Our Water Is Our Single Last Property’

December 7th, 2016

The most consistent argument made by North Dakota regulators and the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline against the protest actions of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is that the Tribe entered the pipeline approval process too late; they should have made their feelings known earlier in the process.

In mid-November, just a couple weeks ago, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) CEO Kelcy Warren told reporters “I really wish, for the Standing Rock Sioux, that they had engaged in discussions way…

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