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Dakotah: The Return of the Future by Charles Bowden

2021; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2021.0009

1948-7142

Maria O’Connell,

American Environmental and Regional History

Reviewed by: Dakotah: The Return of the Future by Charles Bowden Maria O'Connell Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future. Austin: U of Texas P, 2019. 187 pp. Hardcover, $24.95; e-book. $14.49. Charles Bowden's Dakotah is difficult to review, for all the usual reasons. This posthumously published memoir/history makes no attempt at coherence or a straightforward narrative. As Terry Tempest Williams notes in her introduction, it is "the conversation [she] wanted to have with Chuck Bowden but never did" (v). The book explores Bowden's attachment to the land and to nature, while also revealing some of his personal history, the history of the Great Plains, the history of American music, all slipping in and out of time. The book reads like one side of a conversation where memories and stories come unbidden, wander off, and return somewhere else. Bowden's first chapter, "My Piece of Ground," describes "a piece [End Page 402] of ground on the side" of an imagined bend in a river. He says, "I have never belonged to a place or movement or belief. But still I look" (3). As was his wont in all his books, Bowden looks not only on his own behalf but on ours as well, stitching together a story of migration, warfare, agriculture, and music in the middle of the country. He makes few judgments on the characters, either in his own past or in the country's. As he notes, "American lives are supposed to have straight narratives ending in redemption. … A life can have meaning without having a lesson. My life is about dirt" (8). He then transitions into a discussion about race from multiple perspectives, his own and others, including a runaway slave notice from Andrew Jackson. He uses this moment to remind us that there is no separation between himself and others, not even the separation of time. Many observations concern his father, Jude, and the difficulties of a life in the heartland of America, the dream of a farm, and the reality of Chicago and all the difficulties of achieving an American dream. Interspersed are vignettes about Lewis and Clark, Indian captivity, Peggy Lee, and Daniel Boone, among others. The movement back and forth is both confusing and effective in stitching together a personal memoir that recognizes the history and the people that brought Bowden's life in the direction it has gone. His heartland is not simply a place in the middle of a country but a place of the heart that inspired interest, compassion, and creativity as he struggled to belong to and understand the ground around him. The ground can be in the middle or at the borders, but it must be internalized to be home ground. In between the personal history of Charles Bowden and the histories of notable Americans and famous musicians there are several vignettes of elderly people living in dying towns, where the interstate never came and the railroads died out and where farming is very difficult. He makes the connections between these immigrants to the area and the others who have lived in the area, both human and animal. Toward the end of the book he tells the story of Melvin Wisdahl in Corinth, North Dakota. Melvin and his wife are among the "fewer than ten souls" who still occupy the town on the Bone Trail (152). Bowden links this abandonment with others: [End Page 403] The empty is always there to fill some hole in those who come. The tribes find buffalo, get the horse and build both a life and a belief in the eternal trueness of this life. And then in less than two centuries they are broken and the buffalo is bones. (153) Ranching dreams last less than a decade for most. The weather is too harsh, and in 1886–87 "the breath of the place kills the beasts in place" (153). Each of Bowden's vignettes situates the present on a continuum of time. The humans and their animals occupy the ground for a time, but the ground, the earth, still continues. This posthumous work continues Bowden's uniquely ecocritical writing—starting from human common ground...