(woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and by the members of Prairie Public.

Welcome to "Prairie Mosaic," a patchwork of stories about the art, culture, and history in our region.

Hi, I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien.

On this edition of "Prairie Mosaic," we'll visit a museum dedicated to sugar beets, look into the world of costume design and listen to regional musicians perform some country rock originals.

♪ You see I'm older now and bolder now ♪ Damber Subba and Punya Ghimirey are musicians who perform traditional Nepali music.

Originally from Bhutan, they both eventually made their way to Fargo.

Now they are preserving their tradition by sharing their music with new audiences.

[Punya sings in Nepali] [singing in Nepali] [singing in Nepali] Camilla Morrison is a costume designer at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.

Her vibrant personality and attention to detail are just two of the reasons that students appreciate her teachings and her talents.

[orchestra plays softly] One of the things I would love people to know about custom design is all of the work that goes into each tiny decision that's made about what you see in movies, on the screen, on the stage-- everything has a very purposeful and meaningful decision behind it.

I grew up in the Republic of the Marshall Islands on an island named Kwajalein.

On the islands it's a very colorful culture that has ceremonies where different things are celebrated in different ways, and I always found that to be really beautiful and very theatrical.

So before I even realized it, I was interested in how we represent ourselves through clothing.

That's ultimately the very beginning how I got started with costume design.

I moved to Grand Forks to take the job at UND to become their costume designer instructor.

I love teaching, it's one of my greatest passions.

I always knew I wanted wanted to be a teacher in some capacity.

One of the greatest joys of teaching is helping people to realize that everybody has a creative streak, and everybody has the capacity to have ideas and to grow in their own designer identity.

(Shelby Hazel) One of my favorite things is pattern making and draping.

She taught me everything about that.

From the beginning she's thrown me into projects like that that I didn't know would lead into pattern making and draping.

Not having that knowledge and her being like, try this thing out, then it works out, then I'm like, wow, I want to do this again!

Then just go for it.

This is bolt cutting.

(Camilla) I think yeah, there's so many things that happen during the planning of your favorite shows and to things that you see on stage.

We have a process before anything hits the stage where we will read the script, analyze the script.

We have meetings with the director and other designers.

The costume designer stays involved in choosing fabrics.

If we're going to be making some costumes which we do here in this shop.

And we also will find things that we might use from storage, or we might buy or alter things that we found.

There have been many fittings that I've been in where the actors will come in and put on their costumes and say, wow, I really start to feel like my character now.

I got my MFA in costume technology and design from Louisiana State University.

As part of that program, we have to do a thesis project.

I knew coming into the program that I wanted to do something outside of the ordinary.

I have always sort of had this question of what does it mean to be a woman in the world.

I think it's partially because I grew up in another country, and I got to see that culture and how women fit in to that culture.

My Masters thesis, "Nightmares are Dreams, Too" is a reflection of at the time what I felt it was like to be a woman in the world.

My individual art of fellowship from NDCA focuses on a project that I'm doing where I'm interviewing people who identify as women who grew up in North Dakota or who are from North Dakota and asking them to tell me some stories about their ideas about what does feminism mean, what are their views on aging, what are their ideas about being a woman, thinking about just the environment of North Dakota.

I'm creating a series of avant-garde costumes to reflect these stories.

The stories are not going to be told word for word onstage, rather they're going to be reflected through the costumes.

I think I find a lot of inspiration just in nature and the world that we inhabit.

If I have an opportunity to go somewhere else, I find meeting new people to be really inspiring.

We choose to put something on every day.

Often our clothing is a reflection of how we feel, and I think that if we mindfully are curating our clothing and putting on things that really are reflecting how we feel, our clothing tells us a lot about who we are.

Crookston, Minnesota is the logical location for a sugar beet museum, because over 100 years ago, the first beets in the Red River Valley were planted there.

Retired sugar beet farmer Allan Dragseth gives us a tour of this small-town treasure.

[acoustic guitar plays in bright rhythm] (Allan Dragseth) Crookston is the logical place to have a museum because this is the first place that sugar beets were raised in the Red River Valley.

In 1918 a guy from Michigan moved here, and he'd raised sugar beets in Michigan.

He brought some seed along, and he planted it in a garden up on the north edge of Crookston, and from there it's gone to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Red River Valley.

Well, we've got lots of beet harvesters.

We've gone all the way up to Alvarado and down to Kindred to get machines.

We've restored them back here in the shop and painted them.

After the First World War there was such a shortage of labor that the government set up a commission of some sort and they gave out grants to machinery companies to develop something that would harvest the beets without so much labor.

This one behind me is a McCormick Deering one row lifter.

That was one of the first ones to come out and became the most popular, at least in the Valley.

It top-lifted, and cleaned the beets, then they went up an elevator and got dropped onto a moving conveyor belt on a cart.

Two people stood on that, picked the beats out of the mud and dropped them down into the cart, and the mud fell off the back of the conveyor belt.

We've got a whole display along the wall here that's got all kinds of stuff from cameras to telephones to phonographs.

Yeah, we've got the beet knives here, like this to pick the beets up off the ground.

Grab them with their left hand, cut the tops off.

They'd use a fork like that.

Beet fork looks like potato fork, but it has knobs on the tips because you're shoveling up off from the ground.

That would help them from digging into the ground.

One thing we looked for for years is a guy that had a welding shop in town here by the name of A.O.

Espe.

He took Model T's and put big steel wheels on the back and made a beet cultivator out of them.

That was the first power driven cultivator.

I've walked through many many tree rows and have not been able to find them.

We plant about 2 acres of beets here every year, then harvest them on Sunday afternoon in September.

We usually get 400 or 500 people that show up.

We'll have tractor pulling contests, wheat thrashing with a steam engine, and also harvesting sugar beets out here, all in that second weekend in September.

The fellow that moved here from Michigan and raised the first beets, he dug them by hand from his garden and put them in gunnysacks and shipped them down to Chaska, Minnesota, to the beet factory there.

And they wrote back to him that they have good quality and looked good--plant some more the next year, and so he did.

Then the Northwest Experiment Station out here at UMC now, just about right away they started researching them, then Minnesota Beet Company got interested, and they decided they'd build a factory up here.

It eventually became American Crystal.

From there, it's history.

Robb Justice and his band perform a mix of Americana and old country that is reminiscent of the solitude found in wide-open landscapes.

Enjoy their performance from our series, Prairie Musicians.

[playing in country-rock rhythm] ♪ [harmonica solo] ♪ ♪ I was born in the USA ♪ ♪ Around the fourth of July ♪ ♪ Never thought for a second that I'd make it to 25 ♪ ♪ I hit the road found myself ♪ ♪ Different points of view ♪ ♪ Now I'm back where I started ♪ ♪ And I'll tell you what I wanna do ♪ ♪ I wanna live my life love my wife ♪ ♪ Raise my kids do what's right ♪ ♪ Take 'em to the ocean teach 'em 'bout the motion of the tide ♪ ♪ I wanna climb this mountain ♪ ♪ Until I reach the sky yeah ♪ [harmonica solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Spent lots of time in different towns ♪ ♪ To find we're all the same ♪ ♪ Different folks telling the same ol' jokes ♪ ♪ Wearing different names ♪ ♪ You see I'm older now bolder now ♪ ♪ Than when I wore the younger shoe ♪ ♪ I paid some dues so I could sing the blues ♪ ♪ And I'll tell you what I'm gonna do ♪ ♪ I'm gonna live my life love my wife ♪ ♪ Raise my kids do what's right ♪ ♪ Take 'em to the ocean teach 'em 'bout the motion of the tide ♪ ♪ I gonna climb this mountain ♪ ♪ Until I reach the sky ♪ ♪ I-I-I-I ♪ ♪ I-I-I-I ♪ [harmonica solo] ♪ ♪ I'm gonna live my life love my wife ♪ ♪ Raise my kids do what's right ♪ ♪ Take 'em to the ocean teach 'em 'bout the motion of the tide ♪ ♪ I'm gonna climb this mountain ♪ ♪ Until I reach the sky yeah ♪ ♪ Oh I'm gonna live my life love my wife ♪ ♪ I'm gonna raise my kids I'm gonna do what's right ♪ ♪ Take 'em to the ocean teach 'em 'bout the motion of the tide ♪ ♪ I'm gonna climb this mountain ♪ ♪ Until I reach the sky ♪ ♪ Oh I'm gonna climb this mountain ♪ ♪ Until I reach the sky ♪ ♪ [harmonica solo] [playing a melodic intro] ♪ ♪ [playing in country rhythm] ♪ When times been hard there ain't much to give ♪ ♪ Or the means of having much means to live ♪ ♪ I got this heart go have some fun ♪ ♪ Take my hand and away we'll run ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ ♪ Count the stars until sunrise ♪ ♪ Be by me be by my side ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ [harmonica solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Time will tell and in the end we'll know ♪ ♪ When to move fast or slow ♪ ♪ We're at the mercy of ebb and flow ♪ ♪ So take my hand and away we'll go oh ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ ♪ Count the stars until sunrise ♪ ♪ Be by me be by my side ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ ♪ ♪ The river is deep the river is wide ♪ ♪ I like to watch it roll by ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ ♪ Count the stars until sunrise ♪ ♪ Be by me be by my side ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ ♪ Count the stars until sunrise ♪ ♪ Be by me be by my side ♪ ♪ Let's go down to the river tonight ♪ All right!

[harmonica solo] ♪ [playing rock 'n' roll] ♪ ♪ ♪ Well I wrote this song for you today ♪ ♪ Just to send you on your way ♪ ♪ ♪ And to say ♪ ♪ ♪ All the little things that you do ♪ ♪ That make me love you ♪ ♪ Do you love me too ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ We'll take it from the very start ♪ ♪ It's my favorite part ♪ ♪ Here comes my heart ♪ ♪ It goes 1, 2, 3, 4 ♪ ♪ But she walked out the door ♪ ♪ So I'll say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no oh oh oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh oh ♪ ♪ No oh oh ♪ ♪ I say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no oh oh oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh oh ♪ ♪ No oh oh ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Well I wrote this song for you today ♪ ♪ To just send you on your way ♪ ♪ And to say ♪ ♪ ♪ It goes 1 2 1 2 3 4 ♪ ♪ ♪ When she walked out the door ♪ ♪ So I'll say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ ♪ She walked out the door ♪ ♪ So I'll say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ ♪ She walked out the door ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no oh oh oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh oh ♪ ♪ ♪ No oh-oh ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ ♪ I'll say no oh oh oh-oh oh-oh oh-oh oh ♪ ♪ No oh-oh ♪ ♪ I'll say no more ♪ If you know of an artist, topic or organization in our region that you think might make for an interesting segment, please contact us at... (Barb) You can watch this and other episodes of "Prairie Mosaic" on Prairie Public's YouTube channel, and follow Prairie Public on social media as well.

I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien.

Thanks for joining us for another edition of "Prairie Mosaic."

[guitar, bass, & drums play in bright country rhythm] (woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and by the members of Prairie Public.