A bit of personal history - and derring-do!

The View from Sequin Heights. May 5, 2013

A bit of personal history and derring-do!

On Friday, May 3, 2013 William J Cronon gave the annual Ralph Hall Brown Day Lecture to a packed auditorium in the Carlson School of Management. The event was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of Geography, Environment & Society. Among many credentials, Dr. Cronon is a past president of the American Historical Society, a former recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, and is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wi.

His topic, astonishingly, was “The Portage: Time, Memory and Storytelling in the Making of an American Place”. The ‘Portage’ he explored with us was none other than the portage and subsequent significance of the near-juncture of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers at what is now Portage, Wi. 

Having spent several years growing up in Portage, this was almost embarrassingly familiar. I did take occasion to interrupt the proceedings right at the conclusion of Professor Cronon’s talk to tell the assembly anonymously that I was essentially an avatar – germane to the topic in many ways consonant with the good professor’s affection for the significance of personal anecdotes and other informal approaches to that German ideal “Die Gelegenheit wie es eigentlich war”. 

I was able to inform the speaker and the hall that I was turning 75 years old this summer and had given guided tours of the Indian Agency House when I was 7 years old. I indicated that my relatives had been in custodial control of the House and its environs for the past seventy-odd years, were still in that role, and that I hoped to visit them in Wisconsin this very summer. I gave a few anecdotes from my own early years in Portage, thus confirming by my own testimony the value of first-hand accounts over the often dry and uncertain narratives written by historians and others at one or more removes from the time and place of interest. 

Dr. Cronon had new information for me as well. Frederick Jackson Turner and John Muir grew up just a few miles downstream from the Agency House and their influence later in life was profound in the evolving life of our nation and that of the Native Americans. The lessons they drew from their early years remain with us as well as recollection of a third individual who worked for years to reforest what had been cleared for cultivation in this same vicinity. Young Lieutenant Jefferson Davis – hailing originally from Mississippi - was stationed at Fort Winnebago in the early 1830s, also nearby, and went on to become a member of Lincoln’s cabinet and still later, the President of the Confederate States of America. 

Given the recent fascination with numbers and number theory, it was briefly instructive to learn that the ancient portage trail was/is 2600 paces long. A bit over a mile in all. I described how I would ride my bike down the levee on the Wisconsin end of this wonder en route to the county fair in the first ward. I indicated that the city fathers had had to build the levee to keep the first ward from flooding every spring. Ah, yes, quoth the good professor, Irish immigrants had settled on that low ground. 

I had been invited to attend this event as an alumnus of the U of MN Geography Department. My summa degree dates from 1993 and the intervening years have seen much community activity on my part and almost no contact with the faculty of that earlier time. Attrition has understandably sharply reduced their ranks and I only recognized a couple of faces – Will Craig, with whom I worked briefly in the later 1990s on the emerging utility of GIS technology in neighborhood settings, and John Adams, long emeritus, a former chair of the Geography Department, and a teacher from whom I learned much about the geography of the Twin Cities as such was then understood. 

I left before the body was gearing up to adjourn to a nearly reception because, alumnus cum “avatar”  notwithstanding, I have been pointedly distant from the department ever since I was advised at the beginning of my graduate career also in 1993 that I ought rather go live with “those people” in San Francisco and give no thought to following up on my summa thesis “Are Gay Studies on the Map”.

This unfortunate ignorance uttered by a former editor of the Annals of American Geography, known for his ruthless practices as an editor of student writing, when coupled with the non-response from a number of seasoned faculty who really should have known better, convinced me that whatever my various attainments within this realm have been or may yet be, I would never lend my good name to such intellectual garbage as was clearly ascendant at that time in that otherwise highly prestigious department in the heady international world of such scholarship.

Events continue to create their own headlines and histories in these matters and I regret that my sharp recollections of the first three decades of my own life are unavailable to the good offices of such later generations of scholars as have recently emerged around much of the globe. Actually, the next four decades in my life – moving now toward the appellation”octogenarian” in the fifth such subsequent decade – have quite their own story to tell. Should I move to write a formal memoir, the early years that I touched on at the Brown Day lecture episode will have their place in such a narrative.  

Just not under the auspices of the Geography Department that would have relegated me to the presumed fleshpots of the West Coast. 

I’m just not that forgiving.

Fred Markus

Starting a 2013 exploration

Tony Scallon writes to Minneapolis Issues to urge that the polished rhetoric of Abdi Warsame’s speech to the Ward 6 DFL convention ought to quiet concerns about Mr. Warsame’s notion of the good in politics. This despite the well-documented outrage being expressed by seasoned veterans of the DFL’s caucus and convention processes. And given the laundry list of recollections intimated by Dave Garland, there is ample reason to doubt the integrity of the DFL party’s internal motivations as against the expressed letter and intent of that party’s origins and current fundamental documents.

Well it’s a messy business, all right, but how about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

As Andrea Schaerf has appropriately suggested, the swamping of precinct caucuses only goes so far – too much gasoline, as it were, and not enough fire prevention or firefighting assets in place. The issue, as she suggests, is that these organized marches of one part of the “vox populi” only obtains if there is sufficient combustible material beyond the often docile ranks of the disaffected participant/victors in this presumably structured partisan environment.

Item: it’s well known that R.T. et al were dismissive of legitimate East African concerns, whatever the public rhetoric ladled out, save only for an investment in Hussein Samatar’s nascent development corporation. A “causus belli”, IMHO with reference to the less-established but rapidly growing interest in the mechanics of nomination, endorsement, and potential election in what is an essentially one-party city with seriously flawed policy practices in that party and in the behavior of a whole string of elected incumbents up to and including our state-level governing bodies.

Item: Conversely, the track record of our incumbent City Council Member, sitting Vice-President of that body CM Robert Lilligren, is frankly formidable. His vita is readily available from his campaign website. I know from Mr. Warsame’s introductory letter announcing his intention to seek the Ward 6 seat on the Minneapolis City Council that he has the perquisite professional background and leadership involvement in his personal portfolio. But not at the level of a thirteen-member governing body who made short shrift of the Green Party incumbents in the early years of the first decade of this century while continuing a well-worn practice of kowtowing to developers and major business interests for whom grassroots initiatives were, and still are, seemingly much more annoying than valid.

Item: On sexual and gender diversity issues, one must look askance at Mr. Warsame’s elision of any potential commitment to the well-established policy profiles lately achieved in Minnesota’s public life and determinedly valid in the City of Minneapolis. Will we see continued commitment in these matters from a conservative Muslim cohort who, like many evangelicals, see moral and religious turpitude as definitive in these matters, whatever the increasingly probative value of research in the academic world that establishes such diversity as part of the normal range of possibility in homo sapiens sapiens.

Would we see vigorous action from either of these major candidates regarding the high-risk lives led by our hundreds of homeless teenagers, whatever their sexual or gender understandings?  As a large municipal destination magnet, we as a society are confronted in these matters by bullying, parental rejection, suicides,  and inimical pressures from sexual predators, the black-market drug culture, gang-related intimidation, and an often hostile police force.

Item: What can be done to address the ever-growing demand curve as baby boomers reach retirement and grasp that their personal preparations are proving to be hopelessly inadequate. This has been a major concern for a very long time in Minneapolis and elsewhere and face it – we won’t all be able to live in market-rate condos and apartments or shell out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for essential medical procedures or supportive living environments. 

Item: We are in a serious financial pickle in the current reality of hugely expensive “trophy projects” – stadiums and convention centers that are reliably predicted to be net loss long-term investments nationwide. Just imagine what a billion dollars would do in the realm of essential municipal services right here in Minneapolis!

Who shall best advocate for a more sensible balance in the assignment of resources here? This is not a parlor game or a popularity contest. Lives are lost, children are marked for life, and families are torn asunder with increasing regularity as the banks continue to hoard assets and corporate leadership awards itself grossly inflated financial benefits, outsources productive activity to places far from the land of ten thousand lakes, and routinely uses offshore tax havens and other rather obvious public subsidies rather than to share in constitutional requirements about the good of the whole.

Item: Secrecy versus transparency has become the norm in our municipal governance lately. This is unacceptable for a host of historical reasons. When coupled with the increasing militarization of our law enforcement establishment sans meaningful oversight, there’s a recipe here for violence here that may make the Plymouth Ave. riots seem minor in comparison. Our place is becoming chock-a-block with nasty weapons meant for waging war and both instructions and examples of a capacity for massive slaughter abound in the news and online.

Our local government can’t fix all these things, but we can educate and inform far more sensibly in our ever-evolving population. We can also learn new values from both our new neighbors and those who were here before the Europeans ever got involved. And we can do this, as has happened in our past, without ruining the place with short-sighted machinations that just fuel all sorts of fires.

Of course there’s more to follow!

Fred Markus