Sweet 1970s NoDak Women

I last week started volunteering at the North Dakota Historical Society. For my first assignment, they asked me to digitize video of the 1970s news magazine, Spin.

Spin was produced in Fargo out of Prairie Public Television. Before MTV. Before CNN. So, it’s striking to eyes trained by modern cable how slowly the show moves. And how much real content it contains.

When Dave Brubeck played at North Dakota State University in Fargo, in 1977, the people at Spin pointed a camera at him and let him play. A whole tune. Drum solo, too.

But let me tell you about the women. There’s Ragna Marie Ralston, an 89-year-old woman who writes hymns. She’s written more than 400 of them because God gave it to her to do.  A follow up Google search turns up nothing about her today. Lost. Hymns and all? I hope not.

There’s Harriett Skye, a 30-ish Native American woman who won a scholarship to Julliard in the 1950s. But then turned it down on the advice of a counselor who suggested stenography school instead. By 1977, she’d become an activist who hosted TV and radio programs about Native Americans. She reclined with a More ultra-thin cigarette as she told her story to Spin that year. She was a paragon of 70s feminism.

The good news is that Google has plenty to  say about Skye today. She went on to get a PhD and now is a Vice President at the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck.

Finally, there is woman after woman who speaks in that 1970s girl voice. I think singing instructors would call it your head voice…a voice that comes from behind your nose rather than from your gut.  And up a register or so.  It tells the world you are no threat. Whether you’re warning the world about the environmental and cultural disaster of the Garrison diversion,  trying to express concern about corporate agriculture, or even singing Ain’t That a Shame at the prison rodeo, you use your girl voice in 1970s North Dakota. You say it high and soft.

Nobody talks like that today, and I’d remember it all with irony and kitch now, if I hadn’t worked so hard to forget it in the 1980s.