Category: culture

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Why South Dakota?

By Fraser Harrison

The rolling hills along the Missouri River near Platte are an attribute that draws Fraser Harrison to South Dakota. Photo by Christian Begeman.

I was lost. Somewhere west of Springfield in Bon Homme County I had missed a vital turn that would have taken me to Marty and the Yankton Indian Reservation by way of the Scenic Byway that runs parallel with the Missouri River. Surrounded by fields of green corn, I was now adrift in a network of straight and seemingly endless dirt roads, none of them on the map, all terminating in junctions without signs. Mine appeared to be the only vehicle trapped in this labyrinth, and while I passed several fields occupied by contented cattle, I drove for many miles before seeing a farmhouse close to the road. I drew into the yard to ask for directions.

As a rule the traveler is well advised to be wary of farm dogs. But on this occasion the creature in question was a grizzled, moth-eaten Corgi that was wagging its stump of a tail and appeared to be friendly enough. I got out of my car and walked into the farmyard. Using what I hoped was a reassuring tone, I asked the mutt where his owner was. Giving the equivalent of a canine shrug, he looked around the yard, which was deserted, though signs of life could be seen everywhere. A barn stood open with a tractor at the ready in its doorway. I walked over and called out. The dog followed me, apparently as interested in the outcome as I was. We looked into buildings and workshops, but got no response. Finally, we climbed the stoop and knocked at the door of the farmhouse. I could see lights burning inside. I shouted, the dog looked expectantly, but still no answer came. I was forced to say farewell to the amiable janitor of this forsaken property and drive away.

Guided by my compass, I reckoned that if I kept going west or south whenever I was offered the choice I was bound to hit the river eventually. And, sure enough, after another 20 minutes the land began to undulate and lines of cottonwoods appeared, telling me that the riverbed was close. When at last I saw the Missouri River, it was a mere trickle wandering aimlessly among yellow sandbanks that had invaded its ample course. A little further upstream, where the channel was narrower, the water was flowing vigorously, but its surface was bristling with scores of snags. Blackened branches and trunks of trees were rooted in the mud and angled like spears placed to repel a raid.

I had found my way. Furthermore, I had reconnected with the river that is South Dakota’s great artery, the river that has determined much of its history, the river that splits both the state and the continent. I can never contemplate the Missouri without a pang of respect for this leviathan, which like the plains that form its basin belongs to a mammoth category of nature not found in our islands.

Why return so repeatedly to a state not famous for its beauty? Even at its dullest, South Dakota possesses a quality that is both charismatic and hard to define.

No one likes to be lost, but it is a condition I am used to. Thanks to having no sense of direction, I suffer from a virtual disability when making journeys — hence the compass in my car that is as valuable to me as my passport. But if I had to be lost, this was the landscape in which I preferred to have it happen.

I have been coming to South Dakota for more than 20 years, and its topography still has not lost the power to excite me. Why return so repeatedly to a state not famous for its beauty (excepting the Black Hills)? It is a question that always smacks of condescension when it comes from someone, American or otherwise, who lives outside the state. And it is a question that I always feel I answer inadequately when it comes from a resident. True, parts of East River may sometimes appear featureless, and its roads may sometimes dismay the most optimistic driver as they relentlessly unwind across the prairie, turning a slight rise into a positive adventure. But even at its dullest, South Dakota possesses a quality that, for me, is both charismatic and very hard to define.

I live in the eastern part of England, not far from Cambridge, which is an area that is largely flat and fertile, a kind of miniature equivalent to the American Midwest and known as the”breadbasket of England.” By upbringing and inclination I am an urbanite (Liverpool), but I have come to value my adopted region for its spacious, uninterrupted skies. These are the skies that John Constable, the English artist, painted so movingly in the 19th century, capturing their luminous airiness and moist, cloudy hurly-burly. He believed that the sky in a picture was”the chief organ of sentiment,” and over the years I have been lucky enough to live in houses that have had views encompassing the open sky and distant horizons, views that seemed charged with the emotional dimension that obsessed the painter. That emotion has primarily been the very English one of submitting philosophically to the weather, as we must submit to time and our biological fate, by rejoicing in sunshine and blue skies when they come, while always knowing that cloud and rain may soon replace them. To that degree, we are Stoics.

But our East Anglian skies are miniatures by comparison with the immensities of deep blue that open above the South Dakota grasslands, and it is this vastness of scale that calls me back year after year. (I know that skies of similar immensity are to be found in other states, most famously Montana and its self-styled”big sky country.” However, Montana is also a mountainous state, and it is the particular quality, exemplified by South Dakota, created by the horizontal profile of the prairies and grassland and their infinitely extensible horizons, to which I have become addicted.) The English countryside is full of variety, and every turn in the road can bring fresh and surprising beauty, but the fact is the road is often narrow and enclosed by hedges. Our geography is small-scale, which is the secret of its picturesque changeability, but that does not protect some of us from occasional twinges of claustrophobia. As a result, the sensation of exchanging the confines of my local countryside for the limitless spaces of South Dakota is always prodigious. It is like opening a little gate in a wall and stepping out of a pretty English garden (there are none prettier) only to discover that I have joined the Lewis and Clark expedition and now face an unmapped wilderness.

I am talking about the sensation that overwhelms me whenever I leave the airport in Sioux Falls and begin a new journey into the state, especially on a fine summer’s day when the sky has acquired that piercing azure color we never see in England, and the white clouds (cumulus mediocris) are strung out like prairie schooners and can almost be heard to creak as they lumber across the horizon, and — to complete the picture — a turkey buzzard is already lolling on a thermal, methodically spiraling as if it hopes to sniff out carrion in the panorama below. I feel as if my soul is expanding within me while the landscape unrolls beyond my car windows. The eye is suddenly let loose to run as far as it can in all directions, to the very frontier of visibility. As with the eye, so with the mind; the sensation is at once external and internal. Though I am surrounded by what has become a domesticated terrain earning its keep as farmland, its sheer scale makes me feel as if my own capacities — for thinking, for feeling, for loving — have been enlarged in proportion with the topography. I feel intoxicated, capable of anything; I feel liberated; I feel taller, fitter, younger; I feel invested with infinite possibility.

I do not feel diminished when I return home to the cozier dimensions of my Suffolk scenery; nor do I feel that I have left behind the qualities, however illusory, with which I felt the prairie had empowered me. Adjustments have to be made; jet lag and post-travel blues demand their malicious fee; but in the end I know that my mind and soul have been amplified. With each visit some mysterious process of spiritual transportation ensures that what could be called my mindscape has been enriched by the South Dakotan factor.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2014 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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This Isn’t Yankee Stadium

By Colin Kapitan


Editor’s Note: Colin “Kap” Kapitan, a fixture on the South Dakota sports scene for six decades, died Dec. 28. Kap was a fun-loving character and a man who could both tell a story in the bar or hammer it out on a keyboard. He was a sportswriter and editor for the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan. But he will be best remembered as a dedicated sports official who reffed countless high school and college football and basketball games. He also umpired one baseball game in his hometown of Yankton, and he wrote about the experience in our May/June 1994 issue.


People often ask me why baseball umpiring is not part of my summer activity since I’ve officiated and reffed high school and college football games for years and years. Actually, I did don the umpire blue for three seasons. How clearly I remember my last stint behind the plate. That day, I decided shin guards, chest protectors and face masks were not conductive to me having fun. Here’s the background story.

Baseball umpiring was a tradeoff for me. In 1962, I was looking for a basketball referee partner. A friend, Darrell, was seeking a baseball-umpiring sidekick. We compromised. Darrell would work basketball with me. Together, we would work college baseball six weeks in the spring.

I worked a lot of games. Southern State, Yankton, Wayne, Morningside and the University of South Dakota. Three, sometimes four doubleheaders a week. For three years. Three long years.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get into balls and strikes. Certainly it wasn’t that I didn’t love the game. Or that I didn’t know the game.

Maybe it was those doubleheaders. Start at noon and go ’til dark. No daylight savings time then. Maybe it was the dreary weather. Wind and rain. More wind. More rain. I wore more clothes on the diamond than when shoveling snow.

My last afternoon was a day much like just described. Riverside diamond in Yankton. The wind was whipping off the river, bringing slow and steady precipitation. The temperature was in the mid-30s. Your regular college baseball doubleheader. The Yankton College Greyhounds were entertaining John F. Kennedy College of Wahoo, Neb. Both schools are now defunct.

I was behind the plate for the first game and should have suspected this would be worse than your ordinary game when the JFK catcher came out for the bottom of the first. Despite the weather, he wore a t-shirt. Maybe he figured all those tattoos would keep him warm. He looked 35 and sounded like a Marine drill sergeant. Jose was his name.

Jose didn’t like most of my decisions. His coach agreed with him. The coach? Bob Cerv. Not a name that rings a bell with your average baseball fan, but Bob Cerv was a good player on the New York Yankee teams of the mid-1950s. He played with Mickey Mantle. He had several World Series championship rings. This day he was as big as a house. Three hundred and fifty pounds, plus. Over a 6-foot-4 frame. With a growly voice and a vocabulary that put his foulmouthed catcher to shame. He visited me often during the first game.

I struggled through the contest. Actually the seven innings went pretty fast. I figured I had it made. Just seven more innings on the bases, collect my $30 and get home to a hot bath.

It wasn’t that easy. I forgot Murphy’s Law.

First play of the second game. A bang bang at first base. My call went against JFK. Here came Cerv across the diamond as fast as a 350-pounder can make it.

I made up my mind right there. Before the ex-big leaguer could utter a word, I had my say! To my surprise, Bob Cerv grinned. He left the diamond, never to return that afternoon.

Darrell could hardly wait to get to me after the game. “What happened?” he asked. “What transpired that Cerv never again left the dugout?”

As Cerv approached in that first inning, I chose my words carefully. “Excuse me, Mr. Cerv, but this isn’t Yankee Stadium. Don’t think you’ll make it there as a manager nor I as an umpire. But I will tell you one thing. If you leave me alone the rest of the afternoon, I promise you that I’ll never umpire another baseball game so long as I live.”

The lumbering giant stopped. He looked dazed for a moment, then gathered himself and smiled. “You got it, kid.”

He kept his word. And I have kept mine.

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Music From Home

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Derrick Lawrence perform “Sails” for the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth and final installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Throughout this project, I’ve really enjoyed exploring the musical landscape of South Dakota through the eyes of other musicians. Inhabiting such a rural and spread-out state, we’re not always in tune with what is happening in other areas. I often find myself going back and forth between Sioux Falls and the Black Hills to play concerts, but Sisseton, with its low rolling hills, modest population, and close proximity to the Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation has quite a nice music scene.

It is a community that not only raised me, musically speaking, but also continues to support and inspire me as well as other players in the area. Before I had even completed the concept for this project, I knew I wanted to work with guitarist Derrick Lawrence. On a small stage in Peever, he and I took in classic country, polka and folk music while honing our own performance skills.

Lawrence was always around music at home, with his father’s guitar picking and his mother’s love for the piano.”She still plays to this day,” he says. Perhaps this early immersion is why he started playing at a younger age than most musicians. At 8 years old, he was chording along with favorite songs, and he eventually dove into finger-style acoustic guitar. Chet Atkins and his father, Elden, were his first musical role models. During my formative years, I was mesmerized watching Elden play tasteful, twangy lead guitar at the monthly Jamboree in Peever. I didn’t know it then, but through listening to Elden and Derrick play guitar, I was already a fan of Chet Atkins. Today, Derrick still draws heavily on his style when performing on acoustic guitar.

In middle school, Lawrence and a few friends formed a rock band, starting out with cover songs but eventually writing some originals. The core of the band later became”Eclipse,” which, though comprised of different members, still tours the region today.”There were three of us that played guitar, I think, and we switched off,” he recalls. The early band premiered their music at Camp Dakotah, near Sisseton.”To mixed reviews,” Lawrence adds with a chuckle. Local musician Lance Pond was Lawrence’s first exposure to the”flat-picking” style that he would later employ when playing electric guitar in rock bands.

Though Lawrence plays more instrumental music than not, he’s done some lyrical writing throughout the years, and enjoys recording in his home studio and the recording studio at Sisseton Wahpeton College, where he works. For our duet, Lawrence and I selected a Steve Wariner arrangement of”Sails” written by John and Johanna Hall. The tune is almost meditative, and Lawrence’s clean fingering and even tone give it space that, when paired with the natural reverb of the windowed hall at the college, make this recording really special.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

Erin Castle

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Inspired by a Prairie Garden

By John Andrews

Eliza Blue and her children, Wesley and Emmy Rose, recreate the scene depicted in Harvey Dunn’s The Prairie is My Garden.

The September/October 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine features a story on Harvey Dunn’s iconic painting The Prairie is My Garden, and the people and places that may have served as his inspiration. The story is illustrated with a modern-day recreation of Dunn’s scene, staged on a summer’s evening at a homestead near Isabel.

Christian Begeman and Eliza Blue teamed up to make the image happen. Begeman lives and works in Sioux Falls, but he grew up on a farm near Isabel. His photographs appear regularly in our magazine and on our website. Blue is a singer/songwriter who lives on a ranch in Perkins County.

As they studied the painting and tried to situate themselves as closely as possible to Dunn’s vision, Blue was inspired to write a song.”Originally I was trying to channel the mother from the painting, and tell a story of gathering flowers from her perspective, but, as is often the case, the song had its own ideas,” she says.”It morphed into a story told by the flowers instead.”

Begeman shifted from photographer to videographer, and the two created an impromptu music video for Blue’s”The Prairie is My Garden,” which you can watch below. If you live East River and would like to see Blue perform live, she is traveling this weekend to several venues with Spearfish musician Jami Lynn. Here’s the schedule:

Sept. 13: Pierre Music Store, Pierre, 4:30 p.m.

Sept. 14: Fernson on 8th, Sioux Falls, 7 p.m.

Sept. 15: AME Church, Yankton, 7 p.m.

Sept. 16: Good Roots Farm, Brookings, 6 p.m.

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A Voice for All Genres

By Jami Lynn

Jami Lynn and Erin Castle perform “Brush and String” for the fifth installment of Dakota Duets.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Erin Castle may not always take the lead, but she has carved out a niche for herself in the Sioux Falls music scene for over a decade. You may know her from folk band The Union Grove Pickers, or the alt-rock collaboration A Ghostwood Calm, but Castle’s glimmering vocals shine on their own or in the midst of a six piece band.

Castle spent most of her formative years in Brandon, where she participated in band and choir. She describes her first solo performance in fifth grade as terrifying. But the terror soon gave way to a different kind of flutter — the drive to regularly perform in front of people.”It made me feel something that I’d never felt before,” Castle says.

Towards the end of her high school days, Castle’s proximity to Sioux Falls brought her access to the burgeoning basement concert scene. The 605 House and other private venues exposed her to local and touring hard core and punk rock bands. Parts of this underground, word-of-mouth scene of the early 2000s are mirrored in Sioux Falls today. Local venue and record store Total Drag has given a home to young bands whose members are writing their own music and playing out.”I’m watching all these surf rock bands popping up in the middle of the plains, and it’s awesome,” she says.

No matter the genre in which she’s performing, Castle has a sharp ear for supporting other vocalists, male or female. As a solo vocalist now dabbling in supporting others in this series of duets, I really admire this skill. She also has piles of journals from her adolescent days, just like me. Unlike the straightforward, but methodical journals of our grandmothers, these are brimming with unrequited feelings of angst. It appears we were already collecting material to distill down into songs.

Castle’s original song”Brush and String” reads like a lullaby, but actually explores how relationships weather major life changes. I love singing with Erin Castle, and I hope to see more of her original work come to the forefront.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

Jake Jackson

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A Man and His Guitar

By Jami Lynn

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide exploration of music featuring Spearfish singer/songwriter Jami Lynn and musicians from around South Dakota.

Jami Lynn and Jake Jackson perform Jackson’s “Once in Awhile” for the fourth Dakota Duet.

A musician’s attachment to their first real instrument is magical. Finding my first beloved instrument took years, multiple guitars and two banjos. To find the guitar that flat-picker Jake Jackson affectionately refers to as his”workhorse,” took him a few days tooling around guitar shops on Colorado’s front range.”It was actually the first guitar that I played out of the whole trip,” Jackson says.”I probably played 30 guitars, and for whatever reason, that was just the one.”

Years of hard playing indoors and outdoors, a stint in the Lawrence County evidence locker following the guitar’s theft from his truck, and several major tune-ups still haven’t shaken his attachment to his instrument.

But for Jackson, it wasn’t always about the guitar. In second grade, the Black Hills Chamber Orchestra visited his school. After the performance, he went home and announced that he was going to play the violin. He started in the Rapid City Schools’ orchestra program and took private lessons. Eventually, he joined the bar scene in Rapid City and Tuesday night old-time jam sessions with the Black Hills Bluegrass Band. During those Tuesday night sessions, he moved from the fiddle to the banjo, and soon settled into picking the guitar in the bluegrass style called flat-picking.”We didn’t play anything really fast, but we played all the traditional tunes,” Jackson says.”It’s kinda how you know someone’s got their old-time chops: If you walk into the room and say, ‘Hey, let’s play Sally Goodin,’ and they know how to do it.”

In 1998, he met banjo player Trappor Mason, bassist Dave Curington, and mandolin player Dan Cross, which led to the formation of his Spearfish based band, Six Mile Road. Twenty years of playing together has refined their progressive bluegrass sound, and given Jackson an outlet for his songwriting.

While he’s not one to sit down and intentionally try to write a song, they seem to find him just the same.”If it doesn’t happen for eight months, then it just doesn’t happen. It’s important to just let them come on in their own way.”

For our Dakota Duets collaboration, we chose Jackson’s original song”Once in Awhile.” Like most of his songs, it was conceived and finished within 30 minutes. It showcases Jackson’s straightforward style of writing, easygoing tenor and that workhorse of a guitar.

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

Mike Linderman

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Naming Jett

Story By Roger Holtzmann

Photos by Keith Hemmelman

A tipi was erected atop Snake Butte near Lake Oahe for the traditional Lakota naming ceremony of Mike and Donna Stroup’s son, Jett.

Children are guided along paths laid out by their parents. That is the natural order of things, but for one Lakota family it may not be the only way.

Donna and Mike Stroup, of rural Pierre, welcomed a son, their second child, into the world on Sept. 25, 2013. They named him Jett, and he was about a year old when Donna was approached by Violet Catches, her close friend of many years.

“Violet had seen Jett after his birth and always commented on how he was a ‘real’ Indian baby,” said Donna.”She said, ‘He needs a spirit name.'”

Sometime later,”Violet told me she had a dream in which she came upon an old-time Indian camp,” said Donna. Their tipis were gathered in a circle, with children playing all around, and when Violet entered the circle she saw Jett.”He turned and saw [Catches] and ran to her with arms outstretched, and said, ‘Grandma! I’m so happy you’re back in my life!'”

Clark Zephyr (left), a Fort Thompson medicine man, officiated at the naming ceremony for Jett, shown being held by his father, Mike.

Catches grew up on the Cheyenne River Reservation, in a traditional Lakota family, one in which the old ways were her first ways.”My first language was Lakota,” said Catches.”My first teachings in life were in the Lakota culture. My grandmother told me stories about our culture, and it wasn’t just for my ears. It was for all the kids in the house — my older sister and younger brother, and a cousin we called older sister.”

Lakota kinship is different,”more complex,” than the American system, said Catches. Relationships include the bonds between immediate and extended family members, but they can be equally close and meaningful beyond those traditional ties.”In life, you feel really connected to certain people,” said Catches.”That’s how I feel about Donna and Mike and their children.”

That connection to the Stroup family, and her Lakota background, moved Catches to see her dream as more than a simple dream: it was an invitation to help her friends recover a pearl of great price.”I asked Donna and Mike if they would permit me to have a naming ceremony for Jett,” said Catches.

Native children receive a given name at birth, as Jett did, but naming ceremonies — in which another name is bestowed and celebrated — have long been a part of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota traditions. Names sometimes pass from parent to child, or within a tiospaye (extended family), according to Mike. This may happen when the christened is young, but they can be conferred at any time from the teenaged to gray-haired years.

Names can also be original to an individual, as when they reflect a unique spiritual vision, or recognize some significant achievement or service.

“My wife and I didn’t seek out a name,” said Mike.”Violet saw Jett early on, and had a connection with him. She didn’t know why.”

Donna, Mike and Violet prepared for the naming ceremony by visiting the sweat lodge at Wakpa Sica Reconciliation Place outside of Fort Pierre (Jett would have participated if he were older). In that place of purification and prayer they offered thanks for the honor accorded Jett and their family, and asked for guidance.

The inside of the ceremonial tipi.

On the appointed day, friends and family gathered at the Stroup home 5 miles north of Pierre, near the top of Zuze’ca Paha (Snake Butte) overlooking Lake Oahe. Clark Zephyr, a medicine man from Fort Thompson, performed the ceremony. Chris Mexican, of Pierre, served as the drummer and singer.

Mike had erected a ceremonial tipi, adorned with sacred symbols, which will be Jett’s to keep throughout his lifetime. The naming ceremony began inside, with Jett, Zephyr, Mexican, Donna, Mike and their older son Spencer present. (Violet was unable to attend because of family obligations.)

A naming ceremony can vary somewhat from one medicine man to another. Zephyr began with three traditional songs, sung to the cardinal directions; these served as the ceremony’s foundation for they appealed to Jett’s living and dead relatives to guide him in the coming years.

When they emerged from the tipi Jett was placed on a buffalo robe. Zephyr tied an eagle feather into his hair and Mike and Donna proclaimed his name for the first time: OyÈ Aku,”One Who Brings Back Tradition.”

“Jett’s spirit name came to Violet while she was at Sun Dance before the naming ceremony, and it was a pretty fitting name,” said Donna.”When I was pregnant Mike and I discussed ways to expose Jett to as much of our culture as we could after his birth.”

Purifying sage smoke wafted around the sacred circle while the assembled company lifted their voices in an honor song for the family. Mike and Donna served water and wasna — a mixture of dried chokecherries and buffalo meat — to their corporeal guests, and left some on a nearby butte for those of the spirit realm. These elements have been used in naming ceremonies”forever,” said Mike,”reflecting that water and the buffalo have been around since the beginning.”

Webster Two Hawk, an Episcopal minister from Pierre, offered a prayer of thanksgiving over the feast that followed. This brought the ceremony to a close, and began the many years of patient teaching it will take to help OyÈ Aku understand the significance of his name.

“For us to accept that name, to allow him to accept that name, is a great honor, but a great burden as well,” said Mike.”It kind of sets the direction of his life because it becomes his responsibility to bring back tradition.”

Jett was just 2 when he received a Lakota name meaning, “One Who Brings Back Tradition.”

Before they can teach and guide their son, Mike and Donna must first reconnect more deeply with their own pasts. They are both Lakota, enrolled tribal members on the Lower Brule and Cheyenne River reservations respectively, but they didn’t come of age in traditional families, where their ancestral culture and language were woven into daily life.

“Neither one of us is fluent [in Lakota],” said Mike.”We know a lot of common words, but not much more.” Like many Lakota their age, the Stroups’ grandparents were all native speakers. For a variety of reasons the essential language link between old and young was never made during their formative years, making them part of what Mike termed”a lost generation.”

They do have one decided advantage going forward: both of the Stroups have extensive experience in education. Mike started his career teaching at Flandreau Indian School, then moved on to White River, Rosebud and Sinte Gleska University, before returning to his hometown of Pierre as the high school principal and district superintendent.

After graduating from college with a degree in psychology and early childhood development, Donna’s first position was with the Pierre Indian Learning Center. Stints with the Department of Social Services Child Protection Services and Department of Human Services Division of Developmental Disabilities followed; she is currently the Director of Indian Education for the Pierre School District.

OyÈ Aku and his siblings could hardly be in better hands. They will grow up in a home where education is valued, with parents who will be learning about their treasured Lakota heritage as they teach it to them.

“Our responsibility will be to give OyÈ the opportunity to dance, to sing, to learn about and carry on those traditions,” said Donna.

In this task they will, fortunately, have Catches to support them.”I am going to be helping them learn some of the larger concepts of Lakota culture,” said Catches. One of those is mit·kuye oy·s’in, a sacred term that should be used only in prayer,”at the right time and the right place. What it means is we are all related. Not just to other human beings, but to the earth, the sky, the water, the animals.”

And our precious past.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Cultivating a Listening Culture

Mike Linderman and Jami Lynn record the third installment of Dakota Duets.

Mike Linderman was growing up in Greybull, Wyoming when he and his friends — soon to be seniors in high school — ordered instruments from a Montgomery Ward catalog and started a band.”We learned ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and played those two songs like a hundred times,” Linderman says.

It’s safe to say Linderman’s songbook has grown substantially since then. He’s established himself as one of the Southern Hills’ most recognizable musicians, and is featured in the third installment of Dakota Duets, a statewide tour featuring folk singer Jami Lynn and an assortment of South Dakota singers and songwriters.

Linderman fell in love with the landscape around Wind Cave National Park following a stay at a friend’s cabin and hiking adventures around Custer and Fall River counties. That led to his move to Hot Springs. He used his musical talents by performing and booking other artists at venues like The Songbird Cafe in Custer. The bi-weekly concerts and open mic nights were modeled after similar events at The Bluebird Cafe, a 90-seat music club in Nashville that features acoustic performances by nationally known artists and receives more than 70,000 visitors annually.

“Cultivating a listening culture as a music organizer is no small feat,” Jami Lynn says.”It doesn’t surprise me, however, that such a driven and focused individual as Mike could accomplish this.

“One of the first things I learned about Mike is that not only does he keep his guitar in a high quality hard case, but that case then goes inside a guitar cooler, or thermal case. I imagined someone who valued their instrument so much must also have mastery of it. I was not disappointed. His melodic finger-style accompaniment to carefully chosen or written songs not only thrills me, but brings me to a more focused listening space than usual.”

Linderman chose”One Lone Rowan Tree,” for this installment of Dakota Duets. The song by Kim McKee tells of the Celtic tradition of the burial of lost souls.”During a certain period of time in Ireland, if an individual was cast out of the church for any reason, a churchyard burial was also forbidden,” Jami Lynn says.”People started burying these loved ones under lone standing trees, believing the trees would watch over them. The story and song have a haunting quality that highlights Mike’s delicate finger-style arrangement and unadorned vocals. It was a pleasure to lend my voice to a carefully crafted arrangement of this beautiful song.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets

Paul Larson

Thomas Hentges aka The Burlap Wolf King

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Jami and the Wolf King

Thomas Hentges’ first gig involved four songs played in front of the Chester High School student body before they were dismissed for Christmas vacation.”I got pulled out of the place by my ear by the principal because he thought I was using profanity on the stage,” Hentges recalls with a laugh.”I assured him that I wasn’t and that he needed to get his hands off me.”

It was a rough start to what became a successful musical career. Hentges now performs solo and with a band, both under the unique moniker Burlap Wolf King. The Sioux Falls artist is the second musician to be featured in Dakota Duets, a summer-long, statewide music tour in which South Dakota singer Jami Lynn performs with artists in a variety of genres. All six installments will be featured on our South Dakota Magazine website.

“Though our beginnings look very different, time and musical evolution brought Thomas and I to almost the same place at the same time,” Jami Lynn says.”Many consider him one of the best songwriters in the state. And just as we’ve finally fallen in the same folky singer/songwriter genre these past few years, Thomas is already morphing into his next musical state.”

For the second installment of Dakota Duets, Jami Lynn and Hentges perform”If I Needed You,” by Townes Van Zandt, a songwriter perhaps best known for his country hit”Pancho and Lefty,” recorded in 1983 by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Van Zandt has been a source of inspiration for Hentges.”What I didn’t know what that around 2006, he watched the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me for the first time,” Jami Lynn says.”It inspired him to ‘pick up that crappy acoustic guitar in the corner of my apartment and get into three chords and the truth.’ I think you’ll find the truth in Thomas Hentges’ voice and lyrics in any genre. While listening to our version of ‘If I Needed You,’ I hope you’ll agree that three chords are exactly the right amount.”

Click below for previous Dakota Duets.

Paul Larson

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A Song for the First of May

Even the heartiest of South Dakotans might mutter a nasty word or two under their breath at the sight of snowflakes on May 1, especially after a particularly long, cold winter. Eliza Blue, however, wrote a song about it.

The Perkins County singer/songwriter is releasing her newest single today. “South Dakota, 1st of May” is a beautiful rendition of that period when spring struggles to gain control over winter.

“I wrote the opening verse for this song the first spring I lived in South Dakota after it snowed on May 1,” Blue says. “I am from Minnesota, so I am no stranger to long, cold winters, but that May 1 dusting, combined with the endless wind, made me realize I was in for something pretty different here.”
“This winter has been similarly epic. Christian Begeman and I had to delay our filming date for the video after a spring snow storm in early April. You can see the remnants of it in the background. We’d hoped to go out to the pasture to film, but the drifts made the road impassable, and we had to settle for the yard.”
“The bottom line: There is no doubt, you have to be pretty tough to be a Dakotan!”
Blue grew up in Minnesota, went to college on the East Coast and has lived in New York City and Portland, Maine. She now lives on a ranch in Perkins County with her husband, Max Loughlin, children Wesley (2) and Emmy Rose (1), a herd of sheep and some chickens.
“South Dakota, 1st of May” is the title track of Blue’s new CD, which will be released in July. You can read more about that in our upcoming July/August issue, but for now, listen as Blue conveys, like no one else can, the changing of the seasons.