Occupy Rural America

From the Occupy West Plains, Missouri event; Jill Henderson

This morning our Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster sent me word of some Occupy Wall Street gatherings and marches that are beginning to emerge in her region of southern Missouri. 

As the photograph reprinted from The Hill 'N Holler Review demonstrates, these rural manifestations of the Occupy movement are intergenerational, and offer a more coherent and to-the-point articulation of specific demands.  Furthermore, their proposed solutions are local, practical, and eminently sensible.

Here's Carroll Lucas, in her article for the H'NH: 

A group of about 25 persons showed up at the West Plains branch of Bank of America Friday afternoon, Oct. 7, and held their signs up in peaceful protest as part of the mushrooming national movement Occupy Wall Street. Occupy West Plains spokesman Dean Henderson said they decided to join in protest with the Wall Street kids and show their solidarity. He referred to Bank of America as an international bank that was a symbol of big money. He said people needed to withdraw their checking accounts, run them out of town and throw their support to local banks.

Some of the protesters told the Hill ’n Holler Review that they were there because they are part of the 99 percent. I’m uninsured and working part time, one said. She was referring to the slogan coined by this movement. “We are the 99 per cent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 per cent.”

Rachel Reynolds Luster also organized an Occupy Oregon County march in Alton, Missouri yesterday. As I learned from corresponding with her this morning, the gathering was much like that which Ms. Lucas describes above -- and it also gathered folks from across the political spectrum. I asked Rachel if she might share her perspective on the role of rural people in this movement, and if she might offer some positive outcomes that might emerge from the larger Occupy movement. Here's her response:

I think it’s important for rural Americans to engage in this conversation. Sure, we don’t house the headquarters of the world’s financial system, but corporate greed and influence permeate our daily lives. They influence domestic and foreign policy that affect us. They influence environmental, energy, and agricultural policy which affects us. Many of the issues that we as rural Americans face, such as lack of access to broadband and adequate healthcare, can be directly tied to the fact that we are not a profitable investment. Corporate greed influences our personal possibility and the health of our communities on a daily basis. We are the 99%! It’s important that our voices are heard.

At the same time, I think that we carry the power to impart positive change. Certainly, I think there should be steps taken on the policy level to limit corporate influence in our government, but many actions, and perhaps the MOST powerful steps, can be taken on the individual and community level. If we all pulled our money out of major banking institutions like Bank of America and re-invested our money in community banks and credit unions that would have a measurable impact. We should support our local businesses. We can grow our own food and/or support those in our communities that do.

I encourage all Americans to participate in the current conversations concerning Occupy but I think that it is especially important for rural America and those who care about it to participate and make their voices heard. We are not a passive people. We are the 99%.

Are Occupy gatherings emerging in your part of rural America? Please let us know by contacting us on our Facebook page or at artoftherural at gmail.com.

Farmville Files: Pastoral Romance

 

Longtime readers will remember a time on the site over a year ago when we posted a number of articles under the "Farmville Files" moniker. At the time, we thought of the series as a way to utilize the popularity of the Facebook application as a way to talk about what the online game had to say about pop culture's representations of rural people and agricultural work. 

As this morning's article on The Farmer-Veteran Coalition suggests, there's much more work to be done on this front -- especially in linking agriculture to culture and to the arts. While there are many excellent sites related to sustainability and local food systems, we'd like to add our own perspective to these issues through a revitalized "Farmville Files" series of articles and contextual links. 

To those ends, I'd like to share "Pastoral Romance" by Brent Cunningham; it's a provocative essay originally published in the Food issue of Lapham's Quarterly this summer. This piece focuses on two self-confessed urban foodies' sojourn in Huntington, West Virginia and their efforts to eat (and promote) local, sustainable agriculture. 

If this sounds like a scenario you've heard a thousand times before, give Mr. Cunningham's essay a read. He covers the "'bourgeois nostalgia' [that] pervades the food-reform movement," and a number of other issues that can make some elements of the organic food phenomenon a thorny subject. There may be, after all, some unsettling philosophical connections between the attraction of Farmville and those irresistible tables of produce at an urban farmers market. 

Here's the opening paragraphs of Brent Cunningham's "Pastoral Romance:"

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it."

The Farmer-Veteran Coalition

Farmer-Veteran Coalition founder Michael O'Gorman; Melissa Barnes

I've worked in the organic-farming industry for 40 years. I visited New York not long after 9/11 and came across the statue of a guy beating his sword into a plowshare, and a light bulb went off in my head. In 2007 I talked to some Northern California farmers about creating jobs for returning veterans. From the beginning, there's been something so positive about the concept. It transcends politics. 

          - Michael O'Gorman, as interviewed in Sierra Magazine

I'd like to start of the week with news of The Farmer-Veteran Coalition, a national organization that supports and trains returning veterans seeking a career in sustainable agriculture. Funded by the USDA and a number of other foundations, the FVC has already provided assistance to many veteran-farmers working across the country.

As Coalition founder Michael O'Gorman told Patricia Leigh Brown of The New York Times, the convergence of soldiers returning to civilian life and an aging farming population create a unique opportunity. “The military is not for the faint of heart, and farming isn’t either," he told the Times,  "There are eight times as many farmers over age 65 as under. There is a tremendous need for young farmers, and a big wave of young people inspired to go into the service who are coming home.”

This August the organization announced its first eight Bob Woodruff Farming Fellows along with its inaugural Wells Fargo Fellow. As the titles above suggest, the FVC has been able to not only encourage support within the organic farming community, but beyond, and it should also suggest to folks across rural america that this could be modeled across rural America-- regardless of the specific farming methods or philosophies. 

As this program so powerfully demonstrates, these farmer-veterans not only find a vocation and a means of healing from their combat experiences, but they also help reinvigorate their communities. Folks can read the stories of these extraordinary farmer-veterans on the FVC news page; visit the Fellowship Fund to learn how to share this information with possible candidate or how to donate funds, equipment, or expertise.

Included below is the video of Matt McCue, who discusses how his time spent in rural Iraq opened up a path to a farm apprenticeship in California and a co-ownership of a local CSA:

Rather than thinking of Iraq as the place where my heart was broken and my mind was controlled I prefer to think of Iraq as the place where I discovered the key to my freedom. I prefer to remember the trucks full of watermelons and pomegranates that would pass through our checkpoints. I felt strangely human as I waved cars by with pomegranate seeds stuck to my Kevlar vest.

“I first learned the value of sustainability and the resilience of agricultural communities while serving as an Infantryman in Iraq. In the middle of the chaos of a regime change and a damaged infrastructure the farmers kept growing and kept selling. Seeing this strength is what made me want to be a farmer. [continue reading here]

Much more information on can be found on the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, along with photos, videos and a blog page. Reprinted below is a short excerpt from the FVC mission statement:

The mission of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition is to mobilize our food and farming community to create healthy and viable futures for America’s veterans by enlisting their help in building our green economy, rebuilding our rural communities, and securing a safe and healthy food supply for all.  The coalition seeks to simultaneously assist the farming community by developing a new generation of farmers and to help our returning veterans find viable careers and means to heal on America’s farms.

The Farmer-Veteran Coalition was founded by farmers and food industry leaders with long histories in overcoming the agricultural, managerial, financial, and marketing obstacles to be successful in their work.  The goal of our work is to share our experiences with recent military veterans and to assist them in using their many relevant skills to create a new generation of innovative, ecological, and financially successful young farmers.  Our program has the ability to help veterans reduce risk and become successful farmers by utilizing the many specific and unique resources available to help military veterans starting businesses, buying land, or overcoming disabilities.

National Arts & Humanities Month in Rural America

Last week I had the honor of sharing the mission of The Art of the Rural with a number of local and national arts leaders on a conference call organized by Americans For The Arts and chaired by Theresa Cameron and Mitch Menchaca. On this call I also learned President Obama was set to declare October National Arts & Humanities Month. 

Americans For The Arts is offering up a number of online features to help citizens from across the country engage in this conversation and even facilitate dialogues in their own communities. The organization has designed an attractive and user-friendly map program to illustrate where and when NAHM events are taking place across the country. Here is the embedded map, though following the link above will open a full page of resources:

Add Events| View Larger Map

Americans For The Arts also offers a suite of resources for folks to create and publicize their own events -- and this information can be accessed here. The Creative Conversation stands at the heart of this community dialogue; these gathering seeks to "elevate the profile of the arts in America," but on a local, place-specific context by "connecting the cultural sector with the business community and political leadership." 

This month comes at an important juncture: we have read the feedback report from the White House Rural Council, considered the NEA's report on value of Creative Placemaking in rural America, and encountered a increasingly vocal cultural discussion on the distribution of wealth and media access sparked by the Occupy Wall Street protests. Regardless of our readers' political or philosophical views of any of the above, it's hard to deny that we are in a living in a moment that needs Creative Conversations more than ever.

Much more information on National Arts & Humanities Month is available on the organization's extraordinary ARTSblog. Below I will reprint a significant excerpt from President Obama's declaration:

Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers are classic and recognizable portrayals of American life. A longtime advocate of tolerance, Rockwell was criticized by some for a painting now hanging steps from the Oval Office — The Problem We All Live With. Inspired by the story of Ruby Bridges, this painting depicts a young girl being escorted to her newly-integrated school by United States Marshals. Today, the portrait remains a symbol of our Nation’s struggle for racial equality.

Like Rockwell’s painting, art in all its forms often challenges us to consider new perspectives and to rethink how we see the world. This image still moves us with its simple poignancy, capturing a moment in American history that changed us forever. This is the power of the arts and humanities — they speak to our condition and affirm our desire for something more and something better. Great works of literature, theater, dance, fine art, and music reach us through a universal language that unites us regardless of background, gender, race, or creed.

Millions of Americans earn a living in the arts and humanities, and the non-profit and for-profit arts industries are important parts of both our cultural heritage and our economy. The First Lady and I have been proud to honor this work by displaying American art at the White House and by hosting music, dance, poetry, and film performances and screenings. The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services continues to recognize the skill and creativity of American artists, historians, and philosophers while helping educate and inspire our children through the power of the arts and humanities.

We must recognize the contributions of the arts and humanities not only by supporting the artists of today, but also by giving opportunities to the creative thinkers of tomorrow. Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education. Through their work, they are empowering our Nation’s students with the ability to meet the challenges of a global marketplace. It is a well-rounded education for our children that will fuel our efforts to lead in a new economy where critical and creative thinking will be the keys to success.

Today, the arts and humanities continue to break social and political barriers. Throughout our history, American hopes and aspirations have been captured in the arts, from the songs of enslaved Americans yearning for freedom to the films that grace our screens today. This month, we celebrate the enlightenment and insight we have gained from the arts and humanities, and we recommit to supporting expression that challenges our assumptions, sparks our curiosity, and continues to drive us toward a more perfect union.

In Brief: Odysseys, Brown Revolutions, Rural Druggists, Towns Running Their Age, and Some Resurrection Blues

Jim Howell, Brandon Dalton, and Zachary Jones, Horse Creek, SD; Lisa M. Hamilton

• Double Edge Theatre has just released a gorgeous slideshow of images taken from the preparation for, and performances of, this summer's Odyssey spectacle. We've previously written about their visionary work here: 

• Here's Lisa M. Hamilton, setting the scene for her recent Atlantic article "The Brown Revolution: Increasing Agricultural Productivity Naturally:"

On this particular 8,000-acre section of the Plains there is a single light in view, coming from inside a trailer. Bustling about camp are three men -- cowboys, you'd probably call them. They certainly look the part, dressed in boots and wide-brimmed hats, one of them splitting old fence posts with an axe to build a campfire, another working on some beef for dinner. They call this pasture Horse Creek for the water running down its center, and on it they have 1,100 yearling cattle.

And yet, for these men the bovines are only a means to a greater end. According to the unofficial ringleader, Jim Howell, their goal is nothing less than helping the world to avert a looming global catastrophe. What they're doing here is not just herding cattle; they are starting what they call "The Brown Revolution."

• In another national publication, Peter Hessler offers a vignette of rural healthcare we don't often see. Many thanks to Chuck Shuford for the tip:  "Dr. Don: The Life of a Small-Town Druggist" appears in last week's New Yorker:

Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few rows of grocery shelves, a gift-card rack, a Pepsi fountain, and a diabetes section, which is decorated with the mounted heads of two mule deer and an antelope. Next to the game heads is the pharmacist’s counter. Customers don’t line up at a discreet distance, the way city folk do; in Nucla they crowd the counter and talk loudly about health problems. 

“What have you heard about sticking your head in a beehive?” This on a Tuesday afternoon, from a heavyset man suffering from arthritis and an acute desire to find low-cost treatment.

• Long time readers will no doubt be familiar with Folkstreams, a phenomenal resource with a mission to "build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures" and "give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet." Here's a recent addition, Mr. Jimmy's Birthday Challenge; the trailer follows below, with the full available for viewing on the Folkstreams site. 

When Mr. Jimmy Moore challenged himself to run 80 kilometers in 1 day for his 80th birthday, his small Mississippi town got behind him to see if they too could "run their age," from age 8 to 80. Mr. Jimmy's quest reveals how a retired railroad man-turned extreme athlete could face the death of his wife and the limitations of his aging body to "enjoy life right up to the end."

• Folks may also be familiar with the North Carolina-based Paradise of Bachelors label from our writing here and here on their excellent 2010 release Said I Had A Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee. A new record is in the works, now available for pre-order: Poor Moon by Hiss Golden Messenger, also known as folklorist and musician M.C. Taylor. This LP greets the world on November 1st, though anyone who preorders will receive access to further new and unreleased EPs by the artist. Live in Bovina documents a festival performance in Bovina, New York (pop. 664) that also included appearances by Endless Boogie, P.G. Six, Meg Baird, and Michael Talbott. As we are told, "considering the condition of most participants that summer—and what has come since—it's amazing that this even exists." Here's a stand-out track from this live EP, "Resurrection Blues:"

Laura McPhee: River Of No Return

1920's Settlers' Cabin At The Edge of a Subdivision; Laura McPhee, courtesy Alturas Foundation

Laura McPhee made these remarkable photographs over several years on successive visits to the Sawtooth Valley [in central Idaho]. River of No Return is organized like a long poem or a piece of music...a stunning look at an actual place, a meditation on rivers, nature, history, the history of landscape photography, of the American West and the idea of the American West. And—while I'm piling theme on theme—the nature of fact and the nature of myth, and how we hold the world in our hands. 

That's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Haas writing on the work of Laura McPhee, an artist raised in rural New Jersey and whose recent work has chosen cultural environments as various as New York City and Kolkata, India. Many thanks to Texas-based artist Chris Sauter who recently shared news of her River Of No Return series.

Yale University Press published a selection of these photographs in 2008, with a forward by Mr. Haas, an essay by Joanne Lukitsh, and an interview between the artist and Dabney Hailey. As the Press elaborates below, these photographs consider the long history of the West's place as symbol and aspirational landscape within the American consciousness, while also cultivating an honest and engaged connection with the real people and real places of this region:

Photographer Laura McPhee follows in the tradition of 19th-century artistic approaches toward the sublime, relying on a large-format view camera to capture images of exquisite color, clarity, and definition. In images spanning all seasons, McPhee depicts the magnificence and history of the Sawtooth Valley in central Idaho. Her subject matter includes the region’s spectacular mountain ranges, rivers, and ranchlands; its immense spaces and natural resources; the effects of mining and devastating wildfires; and the human stories of those who live and work there. Featured texts set McPhee’s photographs in the context of the work of American predecessors including Frederick Sommer and J.B. Jackson, and discuss her working methods and experiences photographing the evolving landscape.

One Car Passing, Valley Road, Sawtooth Valley, 2003; Alturas Foundation

Ms. McPhee first came to Sawtooth Valley as an artist-in-residence through the Alturas Foundation. As she tells Jennifer Tuohy of The Sun Valley Guide, she was expecting to encounter new questions about the relationship of nature to culture, yet also found herself, in the process of getting to know the place and its people, rethinking her relationship to everything from family history to hunting:

Although she was initially overwhelmed by the magnitude of her subject, those first impressions set the tone for what McPhee describes as work she has been preparing all of her life to make.

When she arrived at the top of Galena Pass her thoughts traveled to her grandmother. Raised by a divorced Ohio schoolteacher, she grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, traveling across the West with her mother and sister, living a subsistence life in rudimentary log cabins. “I stood on Galena and I thought about her passing from one mining town to another as a child. And for me that was the hook, an emotional, autobiographical hook. Of course,” McPhee continued with a laugh, “she didn’t arrive there in a white Suburban.”

With thoughts of her late grandmother floating around in her head, McPhee traveled down to the valley floor (in a white Suburban). “The first thing I saw was the sign that says, ‘Headwaters: River of No Return.’ And it struck me, that’s it. Somebody’s experience passes away and passes forward and you never really know exactly what it was like to stand in that person’s shoes or to have that experience, so it’s always an approximation of that. That’s how you understand someone else’s subjective experience or history. So for me, that name really stuck.

 Illegally Kept Snake River Chinook Salmon With Freezer Burn, Custer County, Idaho, 2005 

Skinned Elk, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho, 2004; Alturas Foundation

Ms. McPhee's site presents many more of these photographs, in a larger, high-resolution format, as does the Alturas Foundation page. This collection of 40 large 6' x 8' prints were also exhibited as Laura McPhee: River of No Return at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 

Related Articles:
Chris Sauter's Rural Intallations
The Rural Avant Garde

Bill Frisell And The Great Flood

From the world premiere of The Great Flood at ELLNORA

Last month Bill Frisell premiered The Great Flood at ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival  at the Kranert Center, University of Illinois. Below we will feature a 5 minute excerpt from the piece, as well as a short documentary clip with Mr. Frisell and the director of The Great Flood film, Bill Morrison.

Aside from the artistry of these musicians, the project also highlights one of the key moments in the ever-changing rural-urban conversation, a period of time which gave birth to so many of the art forms and ideas we have covered in these pages.

This is a preview of an evening long suite - 75 minutes of original music to be composed and performed by Bill Frisell, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen and  Ron Miles with accompanying film and staging by Bill Morrison, based on the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the ensuing transformation of American society and music. Frisell’s wide-ranging musical palette will use elements of the vocabulary in American roots music, but as always, it will be refracted through his own inimitable lens and filters to yield a highly personal and illuminating musical vision, with the overall objective of contributing to a journey of discovery for the audience.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet.  Part of it’s enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. [reprinted from the project's United States Artists page]