Pacing Dakota by Thomas D. Isern (review)

M O N T A N A T H E M A G A Z I N E O F W E S T E R N H I S T O R Y 72 of the Great Migration. By including studies of­ Houston, Spokane, and Oklahoma, Ruffin and coeditor Dwayne Mack illustrate the western migration of African Americans in the early twentieth century. Though the essays are insular in nature, they are tied together by the anthology’s shared arguments and separated into five components that “explore community formation, multiculturalism, civil rights and black empowerment, artistic empowerment and identity, and U.S. West scholarship in a twenty-first-­ century context” (26). Each of these sections propels the claim that Black Western life often ­ differed from Black life in the rest of the country. Perhaps most emblematic of this divergence is Emily Lutenski’s “The New Negro Frontier: Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and African American Modernism in the West.” Lutenski purposes the authors’ unpublished writings about the West as an allegory for Black western migration and Black Western life, using the two well-known Harlemites to reimagine African­ American presence in the twentieth-century West. This assertion simultaneously challenges preconceived understandings of the Great Migration and explores Toomer and Thurman’s conceptualizations of themselves in the West vis-à-vis Harlem. Lastly, Mack and Ruffin establish the interracial nature of many Black organizations in the West, including the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Arts Movement. Freedom’s Racial Frontier will be useful to­students and teachers of Western history and ­African American history but is generally accessible to a wide audience as well. Educators at any level will benefit from this anthology and its deconstruction of the myth of the white West. Secondary ­ educators will benefit from Julian Kunnie’s “Apartheid in Arizona? HB 2281 and Arizona’s Denial of Human Rights to Peoples of Color,” which clearly articulates the­ dangers of centralized secondary curriculums, ­ citing Arizona’s ban of ethnic studies in 2010. Freedom’s Racial Frontier pushes the direction of African American Western history to answer new and important questions ­ facing the region. Ryan McCarty University of Montana Pacing Dakota Thomas D. Isern North Dakota State University Press, Fargo, 2018. $29.95 cloth. Thomas D. Isern’s voice should be familiar; he regularly offers up “Plains Folk”on North Dakota’s ­Prairie Public Radio. In Pacing Dakota, you cannot hear the actual timbre of his voice, but if you ­concentrate, you certainly can gain the conversational style,the friendly asides, the droll humor, and the intense ­ affection Isern has for his adopted home state. Pacing Dakota is a grassroots celebration of North Dakota, with an occasional nod to Saskatchewan and South Dakota, in which Isern spins his narratives of German-Russian pastries, barn dances, semi-reformed prostitutes, the power of a church’s tolling bells,the resurrection of barns,and the ­making of memories. The point of it all is the celebration of one’s fellows and the ability of a good conversation “to invest the land with story, make a place of it, a work that is never finished. . . . From the countless stories, sources first of mere delight, come certain emergences, patterns that constitute understandings, maybe even a grain of wisdom. We should all live so long” (72). Our first ever digital issue— African Americans in Montana and the West—is available online for free! mhs.mt.gov/pubs/MMWHDigitalIssueSum2020 R E V I E W S | S P R I N G 2 0 2 1 73 Pacing Dakota is laden with sensory ­ stimulants. You can hear the men’s quartet at Canaan ­ Moravian Brethren Church on Christmas Eve as easily as you can see its sanctuary illuminated by flickering candle­ light. You can taste the sauerkraut at St. Mary’s­CatholicChurchinBarnesCounty,aswellasthepickled ­ herring, hard Christmas chocolates, and ­ ribbon­candies sold by Pisek’s J-Mart.If these do not stir the senses, perhaps the restoration of a ­ German-Russian homestead in Dunn County can do the job. In an effort at authenticity, volunteers from Preservation North Dakota and Isern’s classes plastered the homestead ’s walls with fresh manure from the cattle of the...

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