- [Matt] The northern plains of the United States conjure a few images in our histories.

Glaciers, blizzards, and bison.

Indigenous hunters on horseback, fur traders, forts, immigrants, and railroads.

An agricultural revolution that reshaped the Indigenous landscape in cattle, wheat fields, and water towers.

- But to those of us who call this place home, we think of our own lives: the families, communities, and tribes formed primarily by Dakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Ojibwe ancestors, and the descendants of primarily German and Scandinavian immigrants.

One image that doesn't often spring to mind here is that of Black America, whose histories tend to take form in the south and in large, industrial cities.

However, long before wheat and the Northern Pacific found a home in Minnesota, Montana, and the two Dakotas, Black history was weaving its way through the northern plains.

Join us as our narrator, Matt Olien, guides us through this series and we explore these stories and think about how the broad strokes of history can lose sight of critical and colorful details.

I'm Troy Jackson II, with Prairie Public, and this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(soulful music) - [Matt] When Professor Elwyn B. Robinson set to the task of writing a history of North Dakota in the 1950s and '60s, his story of the plains started with grass: the foundation of the immense northern ecologies that stretch from the Great Lakes forests to the Rocky Mountain foothills, and from the boreal forests of Canada south to the Nebraska Sandhills, where the Central and Southern Plains begin their journey to the Chihuahuan desert.

This vast grassland was created over vast, geological periods of time.

The landscape was carved through the North American continent by the Western Interior Seaway 100 million years ago.

As oceans and tectonic plates swelled and dropped, the Rocky Mountains were pushed into the sky, and erosion from the process filled this shallow saltwater sea with sand, silt, and mud.

As the sea receded, the Mississippi River soon took its place.

The past 2 1/2 million years brought glaciers, thousands of feet high.

Advancing and retreating, growing and melting, these glaciers created rivers, like the Missouri, Minnesota, and James; and lakes, like the Souris, McKenzie, and Agassiz.

At its largest, Lake Agassiz was twice the current size of Lake Superior, holding an estimated volume of 23,000 cubic kilometers of water.

Like Agassiz, Superior and the other Great Lakes were formed by glaciers, too.

As these glaciers retreated to the Arctic Ocean, many of those lakes followed, leaving rivers and flatlands in their path.

The Red River Valley and Lake Winnipeg, for instance, follow Lake Agassiz's final retreat to the north.

The first peoples survived as hunter-gatherers, moving through seasonal camps in the plains and woodlands to harvest food and resources like bison, wild rice, mussels, berries, wood, flint, and clay.

Later, they cultivated corn, squash, beans, and tobacco.

Their wealth and success were evident to newer arrivals over the last 500 years from France, Spain, England, and the United States, people who soon developed an interest in Indigenous minerals, furs, and lands.

Black history in the northern plains begins in these exchanges.

As a field of study, Black history in the United States is about as old as these early arrivals to the northern plains.

Of course, African histories are among the oldest on our planet.

African-American writers, too, have recorded their thoughts and experiences in various forms for centuries, in literary works like Phyllis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral;" autobiographies like Gustavus Vassa's "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano," and Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass;" and speeches like Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?"

However, the earliest histories of the United States, much like its foundational documents, were written by white men, many of whom were slaveholders, with little interest in the humanity of Black folks.

The first historical accounts of Black America were produced by Black writers in the abolitionary spirit of New England in the 1830s and '40s.

After the Civil War and Emancipation, historians of Black America took a more scientific and secular turn in their accounts.

George Washington Williams, a Civil War veteran and journalist, was the most influential of this next generation.

His 1883 "History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880" used modern historical methods to reconstruct African-American life, drawing from news stories, maps, public records, and interviews.

Writing during the end of Reconstruction and the early years of the following period of violence and political repression we now know as Jim Crow, Williams watched as religious rationalizations of slavery evolved into powerful pseudoscientific endorsements of racial segregation.

In response, Williams championed education and Black self-determination, arguing, "For too long we've allowed others to tell our story."

These historians, who lived primarily during the years of Jim Crow and segregation, were led by scholars like W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson, the first two African-American historians to earn a Ph.D. in the United States; the Howard University bibliographer, Dorothy Porter Wesley; and John Hope Franklin, the author of a groundbreaking 1947 study of Black life in the United States, "From Slavery to Freedom."

These scholars built the necessary infrastructure to pursue Black history as a serious academic field, which was vital, as they were frequently excluded from archives and academic organizations.

Since the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and '60s, as American institutions have increasingly opened their doors to African-American scholars and scholarship, Black history has flourished in journals, universities, and popular media.

These studies have given greater focus to the lives of Black women, artists, entrepreneurs, and subcultures, and, increasingly, Black experiences outside of the South and since Reconstruction.

- Studies of Black America in the northern plains are even newer.

Contemporary works of the 1990s and 2000s surveyed Black life in Minnesota and North Dakota.

Focused works on the roles of the enslaved, slaveholders, and racial segregation in our region from historians like William Green, Christopher Lehman, and Walt Bachman, have been followed by institutions, such as the 2018 opening of the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery.

Our work in "Black Histories of the Northern Plains" follows right in these footsteps.

We hope you'll join us for the journey.

I'm Troy Jackson II.

Thank you for watching.

(soulful music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.