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Bridge and square Northfield,
Postcard 1876, MN Historical Society
Central High School, Northfield, ca. 1880, MN
Historical Society
Women with racquets and boy with
bat on porch, Northfield, ca. 1900. MN Historical Society
Street Scene, Downtown Northfield, 1900, MN
Historical Society
Northfield
Residence, 1900, MN Historical Society
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What does it mean to be a “homecomer” to Northfield? What is
it
like to grow up as a citizen in this community, leave (for any number
of
reasons), and then return home to live here again? What valuable
local
knowledge exists here in Northfield, but remains undocumented? I
have pondered why it is that fewer and fewer people return home to
where
they
grew up, and what that means for small communities like
Northfield. These are the larger questions my project strives
to answer.
Most researchers start out with a question, and then form a hypothesis
about it. This process has been challenging for me, because of my
lack of familiarity with the scientific method. After much
thought, I decided: I believe that having a larger
(informed)
idea of the community one lives in probably breeds a respect for the
communities
that we choose to live in, and thus builds a more sustainable ethic of
living
in the community.
My project, “Coming Home to
Northfield” successfully fulfills our class theme, “A Cannon River
Region: A Sense of Place,” by collecting oral histories from
citizens of Northfield. The questions I ask pertain to their
childhoods, why they left Northfield, why they returned, and their
experience as returning citizens of Northfield. The information
that I gathered helped me with my final project of writing a
children’s book about the importance of local knowledge. After
completing the book section of my project, I will donate hard copies to
not only St. Olaf College Library, but also the public libraries of
Northfield.
This project fulfills not only
the course
assignment, but also at the same time, it provides me with a unique
opportunity
as an environmental studies humanities major, to merge my environmental
understanding,
my love of people, and my passion for telling children stories, with
unique
Northfield oral histories.
I want to know why people leave
home, why they return, how they fit into their communities, and how
their specific knowledge of place is valued in the community. I
want to try to understand how people form roots in their communities,
and how those roots enrich the communities in which they live. I
want to hear stories that my interview subjects tell about
Northfield. I want to recover and document some of this valuable
local knowledge before it disappears completely.
I believe an essential component of my
project, is my plan to leave the final product of my project
behind with not only the St. Olaf library, but also the surrounding
public libraries. In preliminary research for my project, I found
zero information about what the importance of living in Northfield
means to its citizens.
I
have found no information about valuable local knowledge that people in
Northfield
have. I understand the difficulty in declaring the value of
community,
of specialized place knowledge, of information that people know, but
never
put in books, because to them, it seems like common knowledge.
I’ve
learned this through my environmental coursework. I’ve learned
the
importance of being persuasive in my passionate humanitarian or
environmental pursuits. With this project, I strove to
document local knowledge held by members of the Northfield community.
This information might be held as common knowledge with the local
people, however, upon my preliminary search with St. Olaf reference
librarian, Kris MacPherson, I was unable to find solid
academic source material to help frame my project. I wanted to find
real
stories
that would help me illustrate what being a “homecomer” to Northfield is
all
about. I believe my project will stand as a valuable, if not
historic
artifact for not only the individuals that I interview, but also for
the
Northfield community itself.
The body of scholarly research addressing topic of my project is very
small. Actually, if a large body of academic research exists
about local knowledge, it has eluded Kris MacPherson, other research
librarians here at St. Olaf College, and myself. The scholarly
research I hopeed to find myself drawing from, is the work of Wes
Jackson,
and some of Wendell Berry’s essays. I also hoped to find some
scholarly information
about writing children’s books.
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Literature
Review
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For organizational sake, my literature review is broken down into three
categories: Homecomers, Local Knowledge, and Education.
These are the
three major parts of my research project, and the authors whom I
researched fit quite nicely into these categories.
Homecomers:
Orr, David W. Earth in
Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect.
Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1994.
Much of this book is incredible, but it doesn’t relate completely to my
project. Therefore, I mostly used David Orr’s essay Refugees or
Homecomers? Conjectures About the Future of Rural America within
his
book Earth in Mind.
Orr sounds off as an extreme voice, calling for rural literacy
now! I
understand him, and his passion to figure out how to set the world
aright, but I don’t believe that the revolution of American culture
will be so extreme. Orr seems much more convinced than I
about
populations moving in droves back into rural America. I do
however,
subscribe to the idea that when (and in my understanding, if)
populations return to farming as a way of life, we need to be
knowledgeable about how to go about doing it.
His booming voice, calling for localness and rural knowledge, helped
shape the working framework for my project.
Perry, Michael. Population
485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time. New
York: HarperCollins, 2002.
I used this book primarily as a starting point from which to consider
people’s real stories. Perry writes his entire book about rural
life
without romanticizing it at all, and I find that really valuable, and
powerful. He writes about real people, and tells their
stories. His
style was something that I wanted to attempt to emulate.
Perry was a homecomer himself. He grew up in New Auburn,
Wisconsin,
and he left to go to school, to become a nurse, a profession that the
men in town didn’t exactly smile on. Like he said at a reading
that he
did in Northfield, he left town a farmer’s son and a good football
player, and he came back to town a nurse and a writer. He tells
good
stories about it all.
Kingsolver, Barbara.
Homeland: and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.
This book is full of fictional stories about place. I read this
book
over spring break, while on vacation. This book, along with many
others, helped me to focus what I wanted my project to be about.
The
title essay, homeland especially inspired my thinking about
place. The
story is about a Great-grandmother, who is Native American. The
“Great
Mam” is very old, and her family brings her back to the land where she
grew up to die. Upon arrival, Great Mam learns that the place
that she
left has changed so much, that it is as if she had never been there
before.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Small
Wonder. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
I was reading this book as leisure reading during the first half of the
While our class reading helped to formulate my ideas about the
hypothetical importance of local knowledge, storytelling, and
homecoming, Barbara Kingsolver’s book helped show the importance of it
all. She didn’t talk about definitions of homecomer, or local
knowledge. I’m not even sure if she set out with the purpose of
illustrating those issues so well, but it helped me immensely.
Local Knowledge:
Berry, Wendell. Life is a
Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Washington
D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.
I really feel that any project about local knowledge, staying put, and
homecoming would be incomplete without a Wendell Berry essay or
two. I
used this book primarily as a blueprint, which I inserted my original
ideas into.
Jackson, Wes. Becoming
Native To This Place. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1994.
We read this book in class in the first few weeks of our seminar. This
is the book that inspired my final project. Wes Jackson writes in
his
chapter “Becoming Native to Our Places” about the necessity of a
“homecoming major” at universities. Within this, he calls for
ecological accounting, an educated group of people who understand a
cost-benefit relationship with the earth.
A group of my peers and I lead one of the many class discussions
attempting to dissect Wes Jackson’s book. For my portion of the
discussion, I lead the class through an exercise requesting that people
make a list of classes that would be on their “mandated by Wes Jackson”
individualized homecoming major.
My personal list included: local politics and group organizing,
wise
family baking, child healthcare, how to tend a productive garden,
clothes making and mending, and money management. I have great
faith
in education, but to my horror, none of those things that I
passionately needed to know, had ever been taught to me in a
classroom.
All of this raised my awareness of the validity of local knowledge and
the importance of homecoming. All of the things that I wanted to
learn
were things that I could learn from my mom, from our neighbors, from
spending time working in a family business, but I didn’t know any of
these things yet, and I was a senior in college.
In fact, within my project, Wes Jackson even inspired the word
“homecomer,” as one word.
Sanders, Scott Russell.
Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
This book is the backbone on which my project was built. Scott
Russell
Sanders has attempted to describe and explain what makes having
“fidelity to place” important. My copy of this book is tattered
and
underlined when I found something essential, written in and scribbled
in, when I disagreed with him. It has become my bible during this
project.
The chapters of Settling Down and The Force of Moving Water were
especially essential to my project. In each, he writes about his
personal native history as a boy growing up in Ohio, and he ruminates
on the value of other’s personal native histories. He paints
every
point with a story about his childhood, or the childhood of people whom
he knows well.
Sanders believes completely in the value of local knowledge and
“staying put.” His book does the important work of convincing his
readers why he’s chosen the life he’s chosen. His belief in the
importance of rootedness opens my project, and it’s the meditation that
I have come back to each step of the way when expanding my project.
What I tried to do more exhaustively in my project was to convince
people of the importance of knowing a place, and coming home, without
my personal story. I believe that my own insecurities about
returning
home, are essential to the effectiveness of the project. I’m
trying to
convince myself of the goals of my project, while at the same time
attempting to influence the readers of my project. I feel that
because
I come to the project with the views of someone who is not a homecomer,
I can successfully fill in the gaps that Sanders may have left unfilled.
When deciding which questions to ask my homecomers, I thought back to
the text of this book, and what sort of questions I would have had to
ask Sanders, for him to divulge the same stories that he wrote about
willingly. He weaves text of authors that make a liberal arts student
head spin. Authors as diverse as: Mark Twain, Aldo Leopold,
Wendell
Berry, George Washington, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman.
I believe that my project does the investigative work in project form
that Sanders does in book form.
Education:
Sukhomlinsky, Vassily. How
Much Truth Do We Tell the Children? First
and Foremost Books. Minneapolis: Marxist Educational Press,
1988.
This book was really an odd place to find this essay, I
realize. This is one of the books that I stumbled across when I
started to research about children’s literature, and writing for
children. This essay documented, using scientifically researched
data,
the importance of literature for children. Books are essential to
the
formation of our early years. This book documented my
hunches.
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Froggy
Bottoms Pub, Downtown
Northfield