Kathleen Norris's "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" offers a unique perspective on life and spirituality in one of America’s original and most distinctive native nations, the Dakota. Spanning more than two centuries, the book provides an in-depth look at Dakota life and spirituality, from the tribe's earliest days to the present.
Through vivid descriptions of traditional Dakota ceremonies and beliefs, as well as interviews with contemporary Dakota people, Norris paints a thoughtful account of the spiritual life of this remarkable community. She explores how Dakota spirituality has shaped their unique way of life and offers a fresh perspective on the contemporary world. In 1993, "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" took the literary world by storm.
Norris's Journey to Dakota
Kathleen Norris and her husband moved to the small town of Lemmon, South Dakota, after her grandparents died, to care for the farm interests they left the family. She expected to stay a few years but made a home there. Norris discovered in that place something akin to what the desert fathers and mothers found in the deserts of Egypt back in the fourth century - a place with few enough distractions that it can serve to help a person deepen their spiritual roots and grow in their faith.
Norris came (back) to Dakota as an adult: her grandparents were of that place, and when she inherited their home there, she and her husband moved in. She is both from there (because the communities knew her grandparents) and not (because she grew up elsewhere and came in as a traveled, educated, artistic outsider), which made for some interesting challenges for her and her new neighbors.
The Essence of Place
As her subtitle notes, she is concerned with spirituality and geography. As you might have noted by now about me, I am not attracted to spiritual musings, but I was won over by the geography (in so many senses) and the sense of place which is at the heart of this collection. And I found myself on board for a certain amount of spirituality as well. My favorite parts of the book were those that characterize place: the physical, biological, climactic characteristics that make “Dakota,” the unique region of both western North and South Dakota that Norris calls home, as well as the cultural and human characteristics of this scarcely populated area.
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I love thinking about and learning what is definitive about place, in both those senses: the natural, physical, extra-human as well as the human, and the idea of their interconnectedness. Kathleen Norris fell in love with her place, too, and out of that love came this beautiful book. I have a personal belief that all faithful living begins with falling in love with the place, whatever place that may be. That has certainly been true in my ministry, and in my life.
Themes Explored in "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography"
This is a book that is about so much more than the Dakotas or about living in a small town. In many ways, this book is about the (often overlooked) importance of small towns and small congregations in our country and world. These small communities are places where we can find ourselves, learn to love others, and grow in our faith and life.
- The Holy Use of Gossip: "The Holy Use of Gossip” taught me how gossip can be a good thing, or rather, taught me to recognize as “gossip” (originating, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from God + sibling) the talking about each other we do in my close group of friends: when we share with each other that one of us is having a bad day, has suffered a loss, needs our help.
- Community: She writes a good bit about community, how it is formed and how it can be both good and bad for itself.
- Monasticism: On the subject of community, I am intrigued by her repeated conflation of the desert, the plains, and even the ocean that once covered this region, with the monastery. She spends quite a few pages throughout comparing the sense of quiet, of great distances increasing mutual support, and contrasting some of the ways in which these communities work.
Like the desert tales that monks have used for centuries as a basis for a theology and way of life, the tales of small-town gossip are morally instructive, illustrating the ways ordinary people survive the worst that happens to them; or, conversely, the ways in which self-pity, anger, and despair overwhelm and destroy them. What a helpful re-framing of gossip this is!
One thing that distinguishes the monastery from the small town is that the Rule of Saint Benedict, read aloud daily and constantly interpreted, provides definition of certain agreed-upon values that make for community.
The Spiritual Connection
Norris often returns to stories of the desert fathers and mothers to discover wisdom applicable to her life in the Great Plains, and this is one from St. “Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are.
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“For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean.
“Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, “But what is there to see?” The answer, of course, is nothing.
I live in an American desert, without much company, without television, because I am trying to know where on earth I am. Dakota discipline, like monastic discipline, requires me to know.
I find that prairie people are receptive to a broad range of contemporary poetry, although they’d be unlikely to cross town to attend a poetry reading at a college, were there a college in the vicinity. Their appreciation of the poems I’ve read aloud - from a broad spectrum of contemporary American poets - has given me a new understanding of the communal role of poets, a role poets have mostly abandoned by closeting themselves in academia.
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Challenges and Blessings of Small-Town Life
It is a truism that outsiders, often professionals with no family ties, are never fully accepted into a rural or small-town community. It is impossible to exaggerate how much the unconscious, the hidden story, dictates behavior in such families (I would add congregations). If you know the story going back fifty years or so, their behavior makes sense. If you don’t, and you’re an outsider, especially a teacher or pastor, someone whose profession connects with people’s deepest (and most deeply embedded) needs, then God help you.
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I have learned as a pastor how important it is to remember this, for so many reasons, and when I have kept this in mind it has given me patience and courage in the face of the inevitable conflicts that have arisen in my ministry. This book offers an honest look at the challenges of living in small towns, but also the blessings.
Norris's Writing Style
Norris, a poet, of course writes beautifully; it’s worth reading her words for their language alone. Intermittent “Weather Reports” read like short, poetic journal entries of real, specific days, in between more formal essays.
Dakota gets more and more spiritual in its subject matter as it progresses, so that I struggled more toward the end. Discussion of monastic retreats, and Norris’s relationship with the religious communities of Dakota, were often interesting to me; they are in some ways further discussion of community ideals, and I am more or less on board with the spirituality of nature, of relating to wind and sky and plant life. But occasionally there was too much God for my personal tastes.
Dakota: A Place of Origin
These people and their stories point to a dilemma: the Dakotas are a place people are from, a place that has suffered a steady outmigration for the better part of a hundred years. What does this do to those of us who remain? Although I explored that question in Dakota, I don’t pretend to have any answers. I did discover that many former Dakotans felt that my book reaffirms their sense of being glad to have escaped, while others found, especially in the descriptions of the Plains’ physical beauty, a reminder of the place they were forced to leave for economic reasons, but dream of returning to one day.
And I’ve received letters from people who feel that I’ve somehow described their own “small town.” I was stunned by the variety of people the book had touched. I wanted the book to be a portrait of a place, the kind of small Dakota town that has had little written about it by those who live there.
The question about Dakota I have been asked most often is “How have the people back home responded to the book?” That was something that had concerned me, and I am relieved that things have gone far better than I could have imagined. Now, when I am asked about the local reaction to my book, I describe it as a mixture of wariness and pride.
My roots in South Dakota go back three generations, and I have now lived here for half of my life. I suspect I will always feel compelled to write about the place, and for good or ill, I am especially engaged by the contradictions I find here. In fact, I began this book because of them.
Economic Realities
People will confidently tell you, for example, that their small town is a haven where “nothing ever changes.” In 1920, Lemmon supported eight lumberyards. Now there are two. Six banks, now three. Five hotels, now two. Ten general stores, now four. Since 1970, school enrollment has dropped by a third, and one Lemmon store estimates that its customer base has dropped 46 percent. Its volume of business has dropped by one half. This slow but steady attrition is not often acknowledged as a form of social upheaval.