Prairie Mosaic
Prairie Mosaic 1404
Season 14 Episode 4 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Ross Hier, Poetry Out Loud 2023, Black Histories of the Northern Plains, Terry Mackner
On this episode, we'll meet Ross Hier, a painter from Crookston, MN; meet Gabrielle Johnson, the 2023 ND State Poetry Out Loud champion from Minot High School; watch the first segment of Black Histories of the Northern Plains; listen to country musician Terry Mackner from Gary, MN.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Prairie Mosaic is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public
Prairie Mosaic
Prairie Mosaic 1404
Season 14 Episode 4 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
On this episode, we'll meet Ross Hier, a painter from Crookston, MN; meet Gabrielle Johnson, the 2023 ND State Poetry Out Loud champion from Minot High School; watch the first segment of Black Histories of the Northern Plains; listen to country musician Terry Mackner from Gary, MN.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 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 meet a state poetry champion, watch part one of "Black Histories of the Northern Plains," and meet a charismatic country musician!
♪ I'm afraid to leave this world ♪ Ross Hier is a talented, award winning painter from Crookston, Minnesota who specializes in intricate, detailed paintings of birds, many that he's seen throughout his travels across the world.
[acoustic guitar plays softly] (Ross) You can go anywhere on the planet, there's going to be a bird species there.
There's something like 9000 species on the planet, still some being discovered today which is amazing considering how populated the earth is.
I just think it's such a gift to the earth and humanity to have these creatures around.
♪ ♪ I started painting when I was probably 7 or so.
I had just a desire to create these incredible creatures that I could see every day of my life.
Never had any training in school.
I am a wildlife biologist by training.
My whole being is immersed in nature.
There's all kinds of offshoots that come from that every day of my life, whether it's making duck decoys or painting or walking on the prairie and just observing.
I definitely gravitate towards watercolors.
My excitement is getting pigment on wet watercolor paper.
Ideas come to my mind, and some of them have been described as whimsical.
I don't like to use the word realistic.
I yearn in my mind to be more impressionistic.
My style tends to be loose background washes and then bringing detail forward.
Sometimes when you travel you get all kinds of great gifts.
In Ecuador both an amazing 164 species or so.
I saw several hundred new species on that trip, of them were 33 hummingbird species.
When I got home I just got this wild idea to paint all 33 of those species, and I'm up to about number 18, and it's already been [chuckles] 2-1/2 years since that trip!
It's fun; they're challenging.
Watercolors doing iridescent bright colors is difficult, for me anyway.
It's been a fun project.
We've been gone from Antarctica quite some time, but it was the most amazing place I've ever been on the planet.
It's a watercolor painter's dream world because of all the blues and greens and the ice and the bird life.
I've done a few Antarctica paintings, but I'd like to do kind of a series of that.
I've known Ross for, I would guess over 20 years, actually.
He started doing art when he was working with the DNR.
Our relationship grew because we have an annual art show.
So he would enter 2 pieces of his watercolor that he would do when he was out on the job.
He had a really great year with us.
He was recognized as our artist of the year, then the jurors selected him as second place.
That's a real feather in my cap, and I'm proud of it because Northwest Minnesota has some tremendous artists.
You go through life doing what you do and whether it was in my professional work or my hobbies, when you just put your nose to the grindstone and love what you're doing as an effort you do find out that people do see that.
I think that's all anybody can hope for.
I've really enjoyed his art, he has a fine style to the way that he handles watercolor.
His love of nature and his very specific attention to detail because he knows the animals so well.
He can talk about the bird itself because he has his career working with nature and with wildlife.
(Ross) It is something I'm so glad that is still burning in me.
I'll paint as long as my hands and my mind, you know, vision-wise is kind of a big deal.
I've been nearsighted since I was in 5th grade.
I've got hearing aids now, I mean, [chuckles], slowly being kept together with technology!
It's something I can continue to do.
There are thousands of people that paint and do other things, but to be able to keep that love for it here-- that's the big gift to me.
I've had a great life, I mean, I don't know how life can get any better.
Poetry Out Loud is a high school program that encourages students to learn about poetry while mastering public speaking skills and building self-confidence.
Gabrielle Johnson from Minot High School is the 2023 North Dakota State Poetry Out Loud Champion.
"shall I tell you then "that we exist?
"there came a light "blue and white careening, "the police like wailing angels "to bitter me.
Competitive speech is something that I do.
There is different events that you can do and one of them is poetry interpretation.
I find that poetry is my event.
Poetry is a good outlet.
Sometimes poetry doesn't make sense, but you think about it more, it makes you understand it better.
"Poetry Out Loud" is poetry out loud-- in a competition!
It starts off as schoolwide competition, then you go to state, and if you win you get to go to nationals.
Poems are selected from the Poetry Out Loud website.
You select 3 poems, you have 2 that you recite, then if you make it to the top 5 you then can recite your 3rd poem.
One of them has to be less than 25 lines, and the other has to be pre 20th century.
You're being judged on accuracy, the appropriateness of dramatization, as well as your body language.
When I do poetry it's more dramatic.
I had to kind of unlearn what I learned to do for competitive speech poetry.
And it really gets to the core of Poetry Out Loud which is really being the poem.
"The country I come from is called the Midwest."
Bob Dylan "I want to be doused in cheese "& fried.
"I want to wander the aisles, my heart's supermarket Stocked high as cholesterol."
I like poems that are literal and just kind of like straightforward.
Most of the poems on that website are poetic and metaphorical.
With preparing and practicing it really taught me to like, really read.
It's really like trying to find what the author meant, also trying to find a space and a way to bring my voice into it.
(woman) The North Dakota Poetry Out Loud 2023 State Champion Gabrielle Johnson.
[applause & cheers] (Gabriel) I'm still processing that.
That was really like, I did it!
Hey!
Like that's crazy!
[laughs] Poetry's a great way to get people to think and think about what you want to say and the message you want to bring to other people.
I feel like that's great, and that's what I want to do, and that's what I did, and I'm going to keep doing that.
"Let me sing the songs for the people, "Songs for the old and young; "Songs to stir like a battle-cry "Wherever they are sung.
"Not for the clashing of sabers, For carnage nor for strife; But songs to thrill the hearts of men" Poetry can be cool, it can be fun.
It's an art form, it's how people express themselves and how you can inspire and touch other people, I've never seen Poetry Out Loud or did I know much about it, and I came out here and watched.
It inspired me.
There aren't a lot of opportunities for people to just say poetry so coming here, being around other people who want to listen to poetry, it creates like a nice environment to listen to it.
It reaches other people, it makes them think, it's just cool vibes, and Poetry Out Loud is able to do that with what they do.
"Black Matters" is by Keith S. Wilson after D,H, Lawrence.
When I first started I was just like, is this like talking about black holes or something?
What's going on?
But then looking back and analyzing it, I'm like, okay, this is really metaphorical.
I like the first line, "shall i tell you, then, that we exist?"
And that really spoke to me because we exist, not your average Midwesterner, different cultures, different races, different backgrounds-- we exist, and the struggles that come with that.
I really wanted to bring that to life and talk about those things.
"Black Matters" by Keith S. Wilson after D.H. Lawrence "shall i tell you, then, "that we exist?
"there came a light, blue and white careening.
"the police like wailing angels to bitter me.
"and so this: "dark matter is hypothetical.
"know that it cannot be seen "in the gunpowder of a flower, "in a worm that raisins on the concrete, "in a man that wills himself not to speak.
"gags, oh gags.
"for a shadow cannot breathe.
"it deprives them of nothing.
"pride is born in the black and then dies in it.
"i hear our shadow, "low treble of the clasping of our hands.
"dark matter is invisible.
"we infer it: "how light bends "around a black body, "and still you do not see "black halos, "even here, my having told you plainly where they are."
The image of Black people in Minnesota and the Dakotas doesn't always spring to mind when thinking about this area.
"Black Histories of the Northern Plains" will provide a perspective on what the first Black settlers faced when arriving in the Upper Midwest.
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."
[drum, & guitar play the blues;] [man hums in sync with the guitar] (Matt Olien) 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 two-and-a-half 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' "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 oppression 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.
Terry Mackner is a charismatic country artist from Gary, Minnesota who has recorded albums in Nashville and toured the midwest.
He's always working on new material and likes to collaborate with other musicians.
Hey guys, I'm Terry Mackner, I'm from Gary Minnesota.
and I like to play country music.
Honestly, I never thought of music being any type of income or anything like that professionally.
I sang in choir in high school.
My teacher, Mrs. Larsen, back in like '90, '91, '92, got me singing a little bit more in choir, like the National Anthem at football games, things like that, and I just decided that I love singin'.
And that's kind of where it started for me.
The older I got, never once considered singin' professionally or anything like that until about '96.
In '96 I started a garage band called Southbound.
We practiced for 8 hours at a time in this garage out in Brandon, North Dakota.
Go home, go to work the next morning, go back out there and practice more and that's pretty much how it started.
My first actual show getting paid, I think it was like $600, and we drove all the way to Pollock, South Dakota.
I found out that was what I wanted to do, just having fun on stage and performing.
So I thank Mrs. Larsen and my choir teacher back in high school for getting me started.
So that's where it all began for me.
[playing softly & slowly] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ This might sound a little bit crazy ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Our Love is like a movie baby ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Good night see you in the morning I love you ♪ ♪ My kind of crazy ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It's been a long and winding road ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ This is the road that I chose ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I wouldn't have it any other way ♪ ♪ I wouldn't trade it for anything ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Every time I close my eyes ♪ ♪ I'm afraid to leave this world behind ♪ ♪ You took a chance on a boy like me ♪ ♪ I think they call that destiny ♪ ♪ A love like this don't fade away ♪ ♪ You've got my heart and soul baby ♪ ♪ I will love you always and forever ♪ ♪ Forever and a day ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Here we stand as one together ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ In this movie scene forever ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Nothing looks better on you than a ring ♪ ♪ Except for my last name ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Every time I close my eyes ♪ ♪ I'm afraid to leave this world behind ♪ ♪ You took a chance on a boy like me ♪ ♪ I think they call that destiny ♪ ♪ A love like this don't fade away ♪ ♪ You've got my heart and soul baby ♪ ♪ I will love you ♪ ♪ Always and forever ♪ ♪ Forever and a day ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Every time I close my eyes ♪ ♪ I'm afraid to leave this world behind ♪ ♪ You took a chance on a boy like me ♪ ♪ I think they call that destiny ♪ ♪ A love like this don't fade away ♪ ♪ You've got my heart and soul baby ♪ ♪ I will love you ♪ ♪ Always and forever ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I will love you ♪ ♪ Always and forever ♪ ♪ Forever and a day ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Forever and a day ♪ ♪ ♪ If you know of an artist, topic or organization 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 please, follow Prairie Public on social media as well.
I'm Barb Gravel.
And I'm Matt Olien.
Thank you 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 Nov. 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and by the members of Prairie Public.
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Prairie Mosaic is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public