Ever since the movie "Fargo" came out a decade ago, my ability to mimic the Scandinavian-inflected accent of my hometown and home state of North Dakota has been a guaranteed way to elicit laughter during my public speaking.
That joking ended earlier this month, when I realized -- in a painfully public manner -- that my use of that North Dakota accent was in a small but undeniable way supportive of a white-supremacist account of the history of this country. The story of that episode illustrates not just the depth of the pathology of white America but also a way we white folks can -- with self-reflection and help from others -- start to transform ourselves.
For those who have never seen the 1996 movie or heard a white person from the Dakotas or Minnesota (despite the title "Fargo," which is the largest city in North Dakota, the film is set in Minnesota), the accent has an amusing sing-songy quality and trademark phrases such as, "Ah, geez" and "Yah, you betcha!" In print it may not sound particularly funny, but with the right delivery it can be a crowd-pleaser.
That is, it's a crowd pleaser in certain crowds -- such as an audience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was speaking, and where few are likely to think much about real Dakota history.
I was at the university to participate in a panel on racism and white privilege, a subject about which I've written a book, making me an alleged expert. In my introductory remarks I made reference to my upbringing in North Dakota and the accent made famous by the movie, using it for a bit of comic relief in a discussion of a difficult subject.
On that panel with me was D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, a professor of American Indian Studies at that university and a citizen of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa. Although I didn't poll the audience, I'm pretty sure Clark was one of the few indigenous people there. (Clark told me later that of the 100-plus students and faculty who have self-identified as American Indian on campus in recent years, about 15 to 20 are citizens of Indian nations or tribal members, and even fewer are tribally connected.)
In the course of his talk, Clark made reference to the fact that in the United States, English is a foreign language. That remark set off in my head a chain of thoughts that left me resolved to never again joke about a North Dakota accent.
Let's start with the obvious: While some of the indigenous people killed or displaced by Europeans and their descendants learned to communicate in English with the settler-colonizers, they did so in a second (or third, fourth, or fifth) language. English is not a native language in the territory we now call the United States -- it's the language of a colonizing people who pursued a genocidal strategy to acquire that territory and its resources. Though I've spent some time reading about that history, it had never occurred to me think of English in that way; being part of the dominant group in a society allowed me to avoid those kinds of obvious, and harsh, realities.
As I sat at the table next to Clark, I realized what his remark meant: I don't really speak with a North Dakota accent, and to label my speech as such is to obscure that history of European colonization and barbarism toward indigenous people. What would a real Dakota accent, North or South, sound like? Nothing like the characters from "Fargo," that's for sure. That white Dakota accent is mostly Scandinavian, transplanted through colonization.
As all this ran through my head, I realized I should scrap my planned closing remarks and use my last few minutes to face this issue. I told the group that I was embarrassed that for so long I had not recognized these obvious points. I was emotional and probably not being all that clear; I looked out at the audience and saw that I wasn't explaining it well. So I went to the blackboard and wrote "North Dakota," and then erased "North." What's left? "Dakota." Who are the people today who really speak with a "Dakota" accent? Their ancestors aren't from Scandinavia or any other part of Europe.
Those people were -- and still are -- the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, usually collectively referred to as the Great Sioux Nation. Their languages are part of a family that linguistic anthropologists call Siouan or Siouan-Catawban, which is still spoken on the Great Plains of the United States and parts of southern Canada.
I don't speak any of those languages. I can't reproduce the accent with which those peoples speak. In other words, I can't do a real Dakota accent. I can only do the settler-colonizers' accent.
In my home state, we took not only the land of the people of those nations but their name as well, and we then pretend that we are Dakotans. It's perhaps a small point, but an important one: I am not of the Dakota people. I am of the people who tried to exterminate the Dakota and who colonized their land.
And what of those original colonizers and their descendants? I can hear my people in North Dakota saying something like this: "Hey, most of those so-called colonizers were relatively poor farmers from Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe who came to the United States to scratch out a living and who built a prosperous life through a lot of hard work."
Fair enough; those folks did work hard under arduous conditions. In my family, the last immigrant from Scandinavia was my paternal grandfather, who came from Denmark as a teenager and worked hard his whole life as a blacksmith, mostly in North Dakota and Minnesota.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book, All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice, will be published in 2009 by Soft Skull Press. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen's articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.
I have seen the movie 'Fargo' and maybe due to my own immigrant origin I did not notice any specific accent:). My own accent is Meditteranian or I refer to it as Dalmatian which baffles many Americans because they do not anything about Dalmatia except for the dogs. In fact, Dalmatians are people, they still live in Dalmatia which is a region in the former Jugoslavia which we bombed without knowing that there were such people there...
Having said all that I would say that I always liked Prof. Jensen's positions and also admired his convictions thus his primary message that we have to challenge ourselves with sometimes uncomfortable encounters seems very valuable to me. But on the particular subject I would argue that accent is not such a big a deal to connect it with world's injustice if I may say. There is no justice in this world and we all walk on bones. We do have to know that. That's a part of being human. But that does not mean that we have to bask in guilt, to change our accents or to somehow pray every day for forgiveness. Nope. We just have to know. And when we know and understand that we are no better than our ancestors who were sometimes pigs and sometimes angels we have to live with it and learn lessons. Those lessons include for a person like me, who was born and raised an atheist that if I see some idiot who wants to burn a church I would stop him. The same way with all those Dakota things. Accent really does not matter. What does matter is the acknowledgement of the truth- those lands were taken from Indians,their descendants still live there and thus we have to know that and do our best to preserve that land and those people. Who knows, God works in mysterious ways and that land might return to them. It will then return to them with us on it.
Thanks
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Mark Sashine (47 articles, 19 quicklinks, 236 diaries, 3362 comments)
on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 7:51:31 AM
Are we American? I know our decendants were not from America. I know the tribes they displaced were not from India, either.I appreciate the recognition of the forms of white supremacy in which we often unintentionally participate. I embrace efforts to abolish those behaviors. But all cultures have roots in some form of barbarism. Even people native to the land we know as North, Central and South America were sometimes hostile to each other and conquered one another. We can't move forward still thinking about who's land is it anyway. We are all parasites on the earth.
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jberwin (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 6 comments)
on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 8:16:07 AM
Firstly, Ive a grandson who is a member of the Red Lakes band Chippewas, living near Duluth. Ironically , one of my oldest friends is a Red Cliffs band member, smallish world after all, thus I speak to this subject from an involved perspective and am not being dismissive out of hand.
How one arrives at the conclusion that saying "yah, you betcha" supports a white supremicist ideology escapes me and leads me immediately to all the criticisms folks level at so-called "liberals" for their (justified) unwavering insistence upon political correctness. Should a member of the community of those with such accents find insult in your use of that parody then of course you should stop.
Just as Stanford University changed its mascot from an "Indian" because of pressure from members of local tribes, we must be sensitive to the needs of all. But this sort of thinking goes much too far ,in my own opinion, and further opens the entire belief system of the progressive to parody and insult, diminishing the message.
Criticism from those directly involved is important, coming from someone consumed , apparently, with some sort of "white guilt" is not.
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ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 8:45:08 AM
