Tag: sioux falls

Posted on by — Leave a comment

If Our Trees Could Talk

Story by John Andrews

Photos by Paul Schiller

A pair of oak trees known as the Twin Oaks are among the trees chronicled in Paul DeJong’s book on the Sioux Falls urban forest.

“Have you been here before?” asks Paul DeJong as we sit around a small conference table inside Touchmark at All Saints, a senior living community in one of Sioux Falls’ most historic buildings — the former All Saints School. The massive, four-story granite building in the heart of the city was finished in 1884 under the direction of William Hobart Hare, the first Episcopal bishop of South Dakota. The all-girls boarding school was designed to serve the daughters of missionaries who were serving the sparsely populated Dakota prairies.

But that’s not where this conversation is heading.”Some of the most majestic trees in the city are right outside,” DeJong says.”There’s a catalpa and a ginkgo tree on this property that were probably planted in the late 1800s or early 1900s.”

It stands to reason that the trees would be at least as old as the building itself, and of course DeJong would notice them. He worked at Landscape Garden Centers for more than 30 years, first as an employee and then its owner. He’s had a hand in selecting trees for nearly every neighborhood in Sioux Falls, an accomplishment made even more impressive considering the city’s rapid growth.

He seems to know every inch of soil beneath South Dakota’s sprawling metropolis. His quick and encyclopedic knowledge of trees allows him to tell you exactly why an American sycamore would thrive in one neighborhood but not another.

The book publishing team includes (from left) Jeremy Brown, Paul Schiller, Paul DeJong, Heather Kittelson and Mike Cooper.

The urban forest of Sioux Falls became his passion, and now, with help from friends, he’s finishing a book that he hopes will inspire future generations to appreciate the diversity of the city’s arbor culture. If Our Trees Could Talk: Discovering the Urban Forest of Sioux Falls is a 172-page coffee table book, completed in collaboration with the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, that traces the development of several historic Sioux Falls neighborhoods and the trees that give them life and character.

The idea for a book has been in the back of DeJong’s mind for at least 10 years, but it’s coming to fruition at perhaps the perfect moment. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at age 53. He retired from ownership at Landscape Garden Centers in 2018, though he continued to work part-time until 2022. Eventually, he sold his home and moved to Touchmark.

The urgency of such a diagnosis led to the creation of a team to help make the book a reality. Heather Kittelson is the self-described”connector” of the team. She met DeJong in March of 2023, while both served on the board of directors for the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, a 155-acre greenspace tucked next to the Big Sioux River just off Highway 42 on the east side of the city. As she learned about DeJong’s health challenges (which included a serious car accident and a bite from a brown recluse spider earlier in life), she was inspired by his drive to persevere.

DeJong was equally impressed by Kittelson’s energy and positive attitude. She subsequently invited him to be a guest on her podcast called”Fortitude,” in which she interviews people who have overcome adversity. DeJong’s is among the most listened-to episodes.

After the podcast, Kittelson asked DeJong if he had any dreams he would like to see fulfilled. The answer was a book about the trees of Sioux Falls.”It really was a dream,” she says.”He just needed someone to help execute it. I love being resourceful and a connector, and I wanted to see Paul’s dream come to fruition.”

The rest of the team quickly formed. They include Mike Cooper, the arboretum’s executive director and a retired city planner for Sioux Falls; Jeremy Brown, the head of Throne Publishing; and well-known regional photographer Paul Schiller. Cooper and DeJong drove many miles around Sioux Falls, identifying neighborhoods and trees, and Schiller captured them throughout the year.

McKennan Park in spring.

DeJong wants the book to be an educational tool and hopes it will direct more attention to the arboretum. It could also be the culmination of a life devoted to the outdoors.

DeJong grew up on a farm between Sheldon and Hospers, Iowa. He got an associate degree in business and marketing from Northwest Iowa Community College and then headed to Sioux Falls, looking for opportunity. He stopped by Lakeland Nursery and noticed they were hiring.”Having grown up on the farm, I had a general knowledge of trees,” DeJong says.”They were taking applications and I needed money fast, so they said I could start working there the next day. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and in a couple weeks’ time I had found my passion working with trees, landscaping and outdoor living areas. You’re enhancing everybody’s opportunity to spend more time outdoors with their families as opposed to sitting in the house.”

He threw himself into the work, getting to know our native and non-native species and talking with both residential and commercial customers about the trees they wanted and the trees they needed — which were not always the same thing. DeJong is a huge advocate for tree diversity, and that can be challenging in South Dakota.”We can beat up on ourselves for not diversifying, but we are a prairie state with a mix of prairie grasses, so we’re limited in what species thrive here,” he says.”Trees weren’t necessarily by God’s hand meant to grow in South Dakota.”

An American larch in McKennan Park.

When settlers first arrived in Dakota, they would have seen a nearly treeless landscape, other than the occasional willow, elm, ash, box elder and the cottonwoods growing in the river valleys.”Cottonwoods are so towering and large, and they’ll grow in wet, boggy areas,” DeJong says.”They could be several miles away and see these stands of cottonwood trees in the distance and know that there was likely water nearby.”

As railroads moved into Dakota, it became easier for those settlers from Europe or bigger eastern cities to order the trees they knew and loved. Maybe that’s how the catalpa and ginkgo trees ended up in DeJong’s new backyard.”Ginkgos are a very slow growing tree, but this one’s probably 80 feet tall,” he says.”They originated in China and are disease and pest resistant. They’re actually prehistoric trees. They’ve got fan-shaped leaves, very distinctive. The catalpa has a large plate sized leaf. It largely remains silent except one week in June when it gets a hydrangea-like flower. That’s its one week of glory for the year.”

One of DeJong’s favorite neighborhoods is McKennan Park, which is filled with historic homes and majestic trees. Among them is a big bur oak planted after World War I to honor the returning soldiers. It’s also home to the largest silver maple in the state and a stand of American larch.”When I was a kid, they quite often planted windbreaks with American larch,” DeJong says.”I didn’t realize what they were at the time. In the winter all the needles were gone, so I thought they were dead. But they come back in the spring and turn a brilliant golden color in the fall. Then in the winter they go dormant again. They’re mysterious or haunted looking trees.”

The American sycamore in McKennan Park is an example of being in the right place.”There are microclimates in Sioux Falls, like McKennan Park and the Cathedral District,” he says.”There’s good soil; it’s not only cold hardiness. You get on the edge of town where the winds are more abrasive, you’ve got about two inches of black dirt and the rest is excavation clay, and you’re more limited in what species you can use. I would never recommend an American sycamore anywhere other than the core area of the city.”

Other trees stand out for different reasons, such as a concolor fir in the Riverview Heights district north of the Veterans Administration hospital.”I would say it’s 100 feet tall. The first time I viewed that tree, a deer and a turkey came running out at the same time. I bet the bottom branches spread 40 to 50 feet across.”

A stately cottonwood at 57th and Minnesota.

A cottonwood tree near Covell Lake is notable because its lowest branch is probably 50 feet off the ground. Another at the corner of 57th Street and Minnesota Avenue has been growing for more than 100 years and towers over other neighborhood trees. Black locusts in the Cathedral District shine in spring, when they blossom with droopy, lilac-colored flowers.

A stand of hackberries along South Cliff Avenue accents a neighborhood that began as a place for the city’s more affluent citizens to build second homes. A blue beech in the Maplewood District is rare for South Dakota.”It has very smooth bark and looks like an elephant’s leg because it flares out at the bottom. The smooth bark prevents insect infestation. If a tree has rough bark, it’s easier for insects to burrow into it, but the blue beech evolved over time. Trees are constantly under evolution. They’re just like human beings; they have to adapt.”

Everyone involved sees the book as a starting point that can lead to continuing education in K-12 classrooms and at the arboretum. DeJong envisions an”urban forest university” that encourages young people to get outdoors and learn about the trees surrounding them — not just because they might be pleasant to look at but because of their benefits for the environment and our health.”I spent a fair amount of time recovering from surgical procedures at the Mayo Clinic. I remember going through the gardens once I was able to get outside. The trees seemed to soothe my physical pain. It is true that trees reduce stress and promote physical and mental healing.”

Working with DeJong on the book has been rewarding for Cooper and Kittelson.”We’re all so busy going through life that we tend to forget how beautiful our surroundings are,” Kittelson says.”Paul has helped me to stop and be present and take in what’s around me.”

May we all slow down and learn to appreciate both the forest and the trees.

Editor’s Note: DeJong’s book is available from the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum in Sioux Falls. This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Musical Bridge

By John Andrews

Bryan Akipa is a self-taught red cedar flute player who also makes the instruments in his home near Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Akipa has joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for several performances in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Delta David Gier was among five finalists to be the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s next music director in 2003. When the search committee asked why he was interested in moving from New York to Sioux Falls, he said,”I’m looking for someplace to build something significant.” Gier won the job, and his innovations have elevated the orchestra to national prominence, elicited praise from the nation’s most respected music critic in the pages of The New Yorker and earned him the 2022 Ditson Conductor’s Award, presented by Columbia University to conductors who demonstrate an extraordinary passion for advancing American music.

But perhaps his most important contribution to the people of his new home state has been the Lakota Music Project, an endeavor that seeks to heal relationships between Natives and non-Natives through music. Since the idea germinated in early 2005, it has blossomed into multiple performances, recordings, workshops and, most importantly, relationships that might never have developed had music not served as the bridge between two cultures that have long been mired in mistrust.

‚ÄãGier arrived in Sioux Falls with a solid musical background. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to begin a career in professional conducting in Europe. He completed an apprenticeship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then spent 15 years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the last five years dovetailing with his appointment with the South Dakota Symphony.

‚ÄãAs Gier planned his inaugural 2004-2005 season, he also wanted to gain a sense of how the orchestra fit into the fabric of Sioux Falls and South Dakota. “The one thing that was an unknown for me was how the orchestra was really serving its community and what the potential was for that,” he says.”During my first year, I was assessing — other than just playing concerts in the Pavilion — what else the orchestra was doing and what else could be done.”

‚ÄãAt a reception one evening, Gier met a young African American woman who was involved in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.”I suggested to her that maybe we should do something together, because a lot of orchestras have MLK concerts and bring in Black composers and Black artists,” Gier recalls.”She smiled and nodded and said, ‘If you really want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, you should be talking to the Native Americans.’ After 20 years of living in New York, my jaw hit the ground.”

‚ÄãThe seed was planted for what became the Lakota Music Project. The SDSO hosted a lunch for about a dozen Lakota and Dakota leaders at the Falls Overlook Cafe in the spring of 2005. Gier remembers the undercurrents of mistrust that seemed to waft through the room as he spoke.”I came in with all kinds of ideas on ways we could collaborate, and that was my first lesson in learning to shut up and listen,” he says.”They didn’t need yet another white man’s program coming in and trying to help. That wasn’t anything that would be helpful to anybody.”

The orchestra welcomed the Creekside Singers to the Lakota Music Project. Pictured are (back, from left) SDSO music director Delta David Gier, John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear and SDSO principal oboist Jeffrey Paul and (front, from left) Brent Spoonhunter, Hanna Gasdia and Ari Black Bear.

Fortunately, Barry LeBeau was intrigued. LeBeau was a veteran lobbyist in Pierre for United Sioux Tribes, but he also had a background in theater.”I think he had an understanding for what the arts could do in terms of helping to generate understanding across cultures,” Gier says of LeBeau, who died in 2020.

The two of them began traveling to reservations across the state. Their first stop was Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, where tribal elder Robert Moore — who is also a classically trained singer — brought them into a tribal council meeting.”He gave us a five-minute platform to talk about what we’d like to try to do. That was the first stamp of approval that we got.”

They also sought input from Ronnie Thiesz, a longtime professor of Native Studies and literature at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, author of several books on Lakota music and culture and a founding member of the Porcupine Singers. Moore and Thiesz began traveling with Gier and LeBeau.”In talking with Ronnie, we really fleshed out what kind of a program would be meaningful to people,” Gier says.”Those relationships became the most important thing and helped to shape our initial tour and program.”

In the meantime, other orchestra members were doing their own groundwork. Jeffrey Paul, who is entering his 20th season as the symphony’s principal oboist, had also been traveling to reservations with the Dakota Wind Quintet, a small group of orchestra instrumentalists that performs concerts in smaller settings around the state.”My first time out with that group was in Pine Ridge,” Paul says.”It was just so clear to me that we needed to be listening and communicating and developing lasting relationships. So, we started opening the doors to other conversations. ‘What’s important to you? What kind of music do you listen to and how does music play a role in your life?’

“On some of our tours, we’d have a discussion and a jam session where we might talk and learn about the function of music in each other’s traditions and play some of the music that fits these functions back and forth. As you might expect, there was a lot more commonality than difference. It was kind of serendipitous that David took an interest in that as well.”

Paul was uniquely situated to help develop the Lakota Music Project. A native of Thousand Oaks, California, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, earning two degrees in oboe performance while also playing and learning piano, saxophone, guitar, bagpipes and even Irish whistles. He also developed a strong interest in the folk music of other cultures, likely because of trips he took as a boy to visit his grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.”Back in the old days they used to say that Scottish culture was more preserved in Nova Scotia than it was in Scotland because there was so little traffic in and out,” Paul says.”When I was in the throes of studying classical music really intensely at one of the conservatories, a Scottish musician came in. It was just his voice and a guitar, but it really struck a chord in me. It was just beautiful music, profound in its simplicity and tradition. For me, that kind of tore down those conservatory walls because it affected me so much.”

That new perspective helped as he visited with elders and musicians, exploring the nuances of indigenous music and how it might blend with traditional orchestral music. Paul had written a piece called Desert Wind for electric guitar before moving to South Dakota. Gier heard the piece and asked him to expand it for chamber orchestra and to explore how to incorporate it into the Lakota Music Project. He performed it for Melvin Young Bear, keeper of the drum for the Porcupine Singers.”It dealt with feelings of being alone in both positive and negative connotations, and he said it went really well with a song that he had written for his granddaughter,” Paul says.”He said he had these same feelings when he held his granddaughter on his knee, and then she went home.”

Organizers spent four years traveling and talking to tribal elders, musicians and cultural leaders before the first Lakota Music Project performance in 2009. Since then, the group has staged concerts around the state, launched workshops and recorded an album.

Paul and Young Bear began working on an adapted version of Desert Wind that included Young Bear’s Harmony’s Song. That collaboration became the hallmark of the Lakota Music Project.”We were learning as we were going, how to listen to people and how we might actually build this thing together by listening to elders and musicians and cultural leaders. That building together became the key, and still is the key, to the Lakota Music Project,” Gier says.

“Orchestras are good at programming and implementing. That’s what we do. We’re not good at being flexible, and this kind of cross-cultural stuff was totally new. There was plenty of Indianist music that could be played. These are white composers who were truly inspired by Native American culture and seeking to honor that, but this is not something that was going to accomplish any kind of cross-cultural understanding. This cultural appropriation discussion wasn’t as heated a topic 15 years ago as it is now, but it became really evident that this was something that we needed to avoid, so we’ve never implemented that music in any of our Lakota Music Project tours. It’s always been original music that was created together.”

Members of the orchestra, tribal elders, scholars and musicians met, talked and played for more than four years before the inaugural performance of the Lakota Music Project was staged in 2009. The two-hour concert, featuring the orchestra and the Creekside Singers, explored how each culture experiences love, war, grief and celebration.”We would go back and forth. The drum group and orchestra would play examples of music that expressed each of the four themes,” Gier says.”It demonstrated not just the musical but the interpersonal relationship that we were developing between our orchestra and these Lakota musicians.”

The Lakota Music Project then took the show on the road, performing on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Lake Traverse reservations, Sioux Falls, Rapid City and at Crazy Horse Memorial on Native American Day in 2010.

All the work culminating in that first performance and tour is now considered the first phase of the Lakota Music Project. The second phase, spanning 2012 through 2016, included a new partnership with the South Dakota Humanities Council and the world premiere of WaktÈgli OlÛwa≈ã (Victory Songs) by American Indian composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Its five movements each honor a Lakota warrior: Red Cloud, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Strike and Sitting Bull.

There were performances at Crazy Horse Memorial, Pierre, Eagle Butte, Sisseton and Mobridge. A fourth commissioned work, Pentatonic Fantasy, combined the talents of Paul and Bryan Akipa, a cedar flute player from Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation.”We spent some time on Clear Lake near Sisseton getting to know each other and talking about the instruments,” Paul says.”He demonstrated a lot of cedar flute traditions, how he makes them, and the symbolism involved. It’s been a wonderful friendship with him for many years. I wrote him an entire concerto to play with the orchestra, but the second movement, ‘Wind on Clear Lake,’ seemed to grow legs and turned into its own piece.”

John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear (the Keeper of the Drum) and Ari Black Bear perform as the Creekside Singers.

Akipa is a self-taught musician and flute maker who began studying the instrument as a student of Oscar Howe at the University of South Dakota. He received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work preserving the flute and its music. The lifetime honor is the country’s highest award in folk and traditional arts.

He is heartened by the diverse audiences that have seen Lakota Music Project performances.”For the traditional flute, it’s relaxing music, but it’s almost like you are talking to the people,” Akipa says.”You are communicating with them and you’re telling a story with the song. You’re playing a song that could be sung. That’s for one type of audience. The orchestra has a much different style, and you’re bringing those two audiences together.

“For me, it was good to get more exposure for the flute. The traditional red cedar flute is really important to the culture, but maybe to other people it’s like a new age thing, or just a fad or something. Playing with the symphony helped other people take the music and the flute more seriously. The flute, and what it can do and the sound it can produce, really gets their attention. Some people might even have a spiritual experience. It’s just the way they interpret or feel the music.”

The third phase, from 2017 to 2019, included a chamber music program series of concerts in Washington, D.C., featuring Akipa and Emmanuel Black Bear, a traditional singer and drummer from Pine Ridge and two-time winner of a Native American Music Award. Jerod Tate (the orchestra’s composer-in residence in 2017) also launched the Music Composition Academies, week-long workshops every July in Sisseton and Black Hills State University in Spearfish open to students of all musical skill levels. They work with three composer mentors — Jeffrey Paul, Michael Begay and Ted Wiprud (composer-in-residence in 2018 and 2019).”It’s maybe one of the most important things to me that I do musically in life,” Paul says.”We do maybe a little bit of teaching but that’s not the primary focus, which is to draw out pure musical ideas from students.”

In September, when members of the orchestra are back on contract, they return to Sisseton and Spearfish and perform the world premieres of the pieces written by the young musicians. Gier says the experience can be cathartic.”These kids are dealing with deep emotional issues. They’re writing pieces of music about suicide because they lost a friend in school, or about missing and murdered indigenous women because this young woman lost an auntie. They’re processing this through the music they’re writing.”

Unfortunately, while the student academies have continued operating in Sisseton and Spearfish, other aspects of the Lakota Music Project have temporarily fallen silent. Like many initiatives in the arts world, much of the symphony’s programming is reliant upon grant funding, and in 2022 there has been little to none. But Gier and the other musicians who have invested 17 years into the one-of-a-kind endeavor are hopeful for brighter days.

“I went into it maybe crazily but with the idea that this is something that the South Dakota symphony should be doing. There are nine Indian reservations here, there’s a history of racial tension to put it mildly, and so rather than ignore it we could embrace it. My hope was that it would become so much a part of the fabric of who we are as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra that when I’m gone it would continue, that the relationships between us and the Native community across the state would be so rich and meaningful on both sides of the equation that there would just be no question that this would continue, that this is who we are.”

That would certainly be something significant.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Screenshot
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Ship in a Bottle

By Lance Nixon

German prisoners of war were put to work harvesting beets on Jack Rathbun’s farm near Nisland.

The war hit home for the Lungrens on a Sunday in December.

“I can remember the Sunday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,” says Don Lungren of Pierre, who grew up in a German-speaking home near Vale.”We went to church. We came home, and on Sunday, Dad always turned on the radio to hear what the markets were going to be on Monday morning in Sioux City. Most of the time we didn’t have anything to sell, but he had to know what the markets were.”

On that Sunday in 1941, his father tuned in the set, as always; but he might have let it stay on longer than usual.”They were making a lot of noise on that radio, I can remember that — yelling and stuff,” Lungren recalls.”Dad shut it off and he told Mom he was going to see Grandpa.”

Lungren’s father returned with a strict order:”Henceforth, we don’t speak German anymore.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war against Japan and its ally, Germany. Perhaps because of the mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the U.S. during World War I, and perhaps because of fears that Japanese and German speakers might be suspected of harboring sympathies with the enemy, the family stopped speaking German then and there.

That Sunday the Lungren children also realized Germans were on the other side of the war. And if they had any doubts that Germans were the adversaries, there was more proof. South Dakota would be one of the places where German prisoners of war were stationed as World War II dragged on.

The first prisoners of war arrived in America in May 1942. Historian Arnold Krammer, who has written extensively about the era, notes that not only Germans but also Italian and Japanese soldiers would spend time in American internment camps before the effort ended in July 1946.

“It is remarkable how many people don’t realize that we held nearly 425,000 German POWs (as well as 53,000 Italian and 5,000 military Japanese prisoners) in some 550 camps across the country. They worked in factories, hospitals and brought in the crops since our boys were overseas fighting in the war,” Krammer told us.

In South Dakota, German POWs ended up in parts of Meade and Butte counties doing fieldwork; in Yankton doing bank stabilization work on the Missouri River; in northeastern South Dakota; and in the Sioux Falls area.

“Every farmer in the valley here used German prisoners for a couple years,” says David Rathbun of Nisland, who was about 9 and 10 at the time his family benefited from POW labor in the fields. His brother Grove, four years older, would drive the truck when they went to fetch prisoners from the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Orman Dam.

The Rathbuns transported prisoners in their 1937 Ford beet truck. An American guard followed in the family’s Model A pickup.

“It was an old CCC camp in the’30s, and the government turned it into a POW camp. It had machine gun towers and barracks and the whole works, big fence,” Rathbun says.”We’d go up in a truck, get a load of German prisoners, maybe 20 at a time, and haul them back to the farm and they’d work. They had to do so much in a day. I’ll give them credit, they were hard workers.”

During threshing, the German soldiers gathered bundles of barley, oats or wheat into wagons. In that era before combines were common, they also pitched bundles into the threshing machine.

With the sugar beets, the POWs took on many tasks: thinning the beets, hoeing them when they were bigger, pulling them and taking the tops off, loading them on trucks for transport to the railroad, where they were loaded on cars and taken to the factory for processing.

There were also prisoners stationed at nearby Fort Meade. The prisoners came from different sectors of the war, Rathbun recalls.”North Africa was the first ones we got. They came in’43. That’s when we got Rommel’s Afrika Korps prisoners, and they were ornery bastards,” he remembers, referring to the German expeditionary force that fought in Africa under Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s favorite generals.”They were the old Nazi type. They stabbed one of their own prisoners, killed him with a butcher knife, up at Orman Dam at the prison camp because he was too friendly with American guards.”

Krammer says such incidents weren’t uncommon, though often concealed by the prisoners.”Almost every camp held a minority of die-hard Nazis who often terrorized the others and sometimes murdered one or two, listing the deaths as suicides.”

The prisoners stayed for growing season, and after harvest were moved to other parts of the country.”They shipped them all out, I don’t know what they did with them,” Rathbun says.”And then in’44, we got prisoners from Normandy. They were just run-of-the-mill German soldiers. They were different. They were damn glad to be out of that war. They didn’t mind working in the beet fields.”

Krammer cites studies saying about 40 percent of German POWs were pro-Nazi. Eight to 10 percent were considered fanatics in their devotion to the Nazi cause, while another 30 percent were”deeply sympathetic.” But just as Rathbun suggested, many of the German POWs were not Nazis.

The prisoners were given small breaks to split up the hours of labor.”Our place had the Belle Fourche River running through it. If they got done early in their work, the guard would let them go swim in the river, and they really liked that,” Rathbun says.

There were even stories that the guard would take a dip with the prisoners now and then.”He did, actually,” Rathbun confirms.”I saw that happen. The guard went swimming and left a sergeant, German sergeant, sitting on the hillside looking for the colonel.”

Locals would often practice German with the prisoners.”There’s a lot of German around here. Our neighbors were Low German, I think, and the prisoners were High German, but they could understand each other. They’d talk all the time.”

Another mode of communication was the universal language of food and drink. Don Lungren recalls that his parents and grandparents, Germans themselves, coaxed extra labor out of the POWs.

“They would make a big 2- or 3-gallon pail of chicken noodle soup, and man, I’ll tell you, they could pick cucumbers twice as fast. And Grandpa, he made better than that. His bribe was that if they would look at the end of the trees, by the hog house, there would be some beer there if they would get those cucumbers picked today. They had them done by noon, I think.”

After long days in the Butte County beet fields, prisoners sometimes enjoyed a swim in the Belle Fourche River.

Lungren said other locals would do favors for the POWs.”My family and most of the German families always gave them a treat — chicken noodle soup from the old roosters and that sort of thing and beer at the end of the grove in the trees. The guard would come. Grandpa would loan the guard his shotgun and the guard could go shoot pheasants. And because the guard couldn’t get the pheasants home, I suppose Grandma cooked the pheasants and fed them to the prisoners.”

Sometimes the farmers got more than they asked.”Grandma told one of the prisoners she wanted some little cucumbers because she wanted to make baby dills,” Lungren said. His grandmother had business to tend to, but when she got back to the field, the Germans had picked two bushels of tiny cucumbers — far more than she needed.”We had baby dills for years.”

Marian Ruff added that for German-speaking families, even though many of them had immigrated to America from German communities in Russia, it was awkward having German POWs work in the fields.

“My family, like the other German families, was looked down on because of the war — because they were Germans,” she said.”With the POWs, I think we felt sorry for them because of the way they were treated. They would bring this truckload of guys out to the Vale area and they would have two armed soldiers with them with rifles in case they tried to escape. They were supposed to shoot them.”

The guards weren’t just for show, Krammer says.

“There were escapes aplenty, but most were caught within three days,” he notes. But, he adds that many prisoners quickly figured out they would be treated decently in America.

“Those assigned to American farms were well-treated and modern flea markets still have POW-made handicrafts which they gave to the children of farm families,” Krammer said.

That was the case in South Dakota, too, Marian Ruff said.”They were just really happy to get out of the prison situation and do something. Several of them put together some ships inside of wine bottles. We have one of those. One was given to my grandpa. Several of the families that these prisoners worked for ended up with one of these ships inside of a bottle. It always fascinated me because I had no idea how they did it. Someone said to me recently, ëWell, they sawed the bottom of the bottle and put the ship in and sealed the bottom back on again,’ but I don’t know if that’s what they really did or not.”

And no one knows what it meant to a German soldier, either — building a ship inside a bottle in a prison camp to give to a German farmer in landlocked South Dakota.

David Ruff of Spearfish, Marian’s husband, grew up near Nisland during the war. He spoke German well enough to understand the German POWs who worked for his father and some of the neighbors.

The Rathbun family dog often provided canine companionship for Germans working the fields.

“I often wondered if they didn’t have feelings knowing that they were in a country so far from their homeland and had people there that could speak their language. I think many of the prisoners were quite pleased to find that there were German-speaking people here. They were appreciative of the extra food that was given them and the friendliness of the farmers that they worked for.

“I don’t know if I personally asked one of them or what, but somehow or another in conversation, I learned from them that they were quite pleased with the treatment they were receiving here. I’m not sure exactly where they became prisoners of war, but they mentioned that when they were in France, they were required to drink out of the troughs that the livestock drank out of.”

POWs also made an impact on the other side of the state. Yankton-area historians Lois Varvel and Kathy K. Grow reflected on the German POWs stationed in Yankton in their 2001 book, The Bridge We Built: The Story of Yankton’s Meridian Bridge. They noted that the Yankton Press & Dakotan reported on April 3, 1945, the arrival of the first contingent of German POWs from the Afrika Korps to take part in Missouri River bank protection work. Officials wouldn’t tell the newspaper how many German POWs would come to Yankton, citing policy on POWs, but the newspaper understood they would make up”a sizable force.”

The POWs worked on a project to make sure the main flow of the Missouri River steered clear of the city of Yankton’s water intake. The work had side benefits for the Meridian Bridge.”We had prisoners of war trucked in from Algona, Iowa, and they did revetment work on the Nebraska shoreline. That was their contribution to protecting the Meridian Bridge,” Varvel says.

After the war ended, most of the 375,000 German POWs went back to Germany — but not all stayed there. Some liked what they had seen of life in America. The United States didn’t track the number of former German POWs who ended up immigrating to the land of their captivity; but it was substantial. Krammer notes that John Schroer, a former POW who immigrated to America after being held as a POW in Alabama, estimated about 5,000 POWs made a similar move. Some reportedly returned to South Dakota, too, where the enemy they had fought showed them decency and kindness in victory.

Editor’s Note: The tally of German prisoners of war in South Dakota at any one time during World War II was a floating figure because they rotated in and out of different states depending on the local harvest and other demands. Curt Nickisch, a South Dakota Public Broadcasting journalist at the time, wrote a story for South Dakota Magazine in 2001 in which he reported the number at more than 1,200 POWs through 1944 and 1945. There are also several books available, including Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer. This story is revised from the March/April 2018 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A Living Drink

By John Andrews

Jacob Fokken was 20 and drinking maybe one or two sodas every day. Soon, he began feeling that something wasn’t quite right with his health, so he decided to eliminate those sugary drinks.”I quit cold turkey, which isn’t how a lot of things go,” he says.”I substituted with tea, black coffee and at the same time I found kombucha. The nature of the kombucha satisfied everything that I ever craved in a soda, plus it was low in sugar and had probiotics.”

That life change eventually turned into a family business called Songbird Kombucha, though it took some time to get there. Fokken drank kombucha for about six years before he tried making it. Kombucha is an ancient food that dates back more than 2,000 years. It’s a fermented drink made with tea, sugar, bacteria and yeast, and then infused with different flavors. Kombucha’s probiotic benefits include promoting a healthy immune system and relieving stomach and intestinal ailments.

Fokken found himself working at the Sioux Falls Food Coop, where he revived its dormant kombucha line.”I just dove in and experimented for a year and really enjoyed it,” he says.”Plus, I was able to serve it to people at the register. People were trying it, and I had this growing confidence in brewing it. It just grew and grew.”

In February 2020, Fokken and his wife Elsa launched Songbird Kombucha. Their rotation of about 20 flavors features a variety of fruit and herb combinations, such as blueberry lavender, orange licorice anise and rhubarb cinnamon. Find Songbird Kombucha on tap in Sioux Falls, Vermillion, Yankton, Hartford, Jefferson and Mitchell or visit the Fokkens’ storefront at 1712 S. Minnesota Avenue in Sioux Falls.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

This is Our Family

By Rebecca Johnson

Rosana Jamous helps her daughter Sarah choose from traditional Thanksgiving foods and Middle Eastern fare. Photo by Bill Goehring.

Sioux Falls is South Dakota’s melting pot, with over 120 languages spoken in its schools. Moving to the rural Midwest can be a shock for immigrants trying to learn a new culture and new traditions. Thanks to restaurateur Sanaa Abourezk, the city’s Middle Eastern community has fully embraced one of America’s most loved holidays — Thanksgiving.

Abourezk and her husband James, who served as South Dakota’s U.S. congressman and senator in the 1970s, met while Abourezk was working at the Embassy of Qatar in Washington, D.C. Once married, the couple moved to Rapid City, but Sanaa was lonely so they relocated to Sioux Falls where she quickly befriended other immigrants from her home country of Syria and neighboring countries.

“We used to get together and the kids played,” Abourezk says.”Then it dawned on us that the kids go to school and they hear about Thanksgiving. ‘My grandma made this. My aunt made this.'” So the friends decided to celebrate the quintessential American holiday together to give their children that communal experience.

Farid Kutayli and his wife Salwa hosted the first few gatherings in their home about 15 years ago. But the celebration quickly relocated to the Abourezks’ restaurant, Sanaa’s 8th Street Gourmet, in downtown Sioux Falls.”If we know somebody who moved to town we also invite them because we want them to have Thanksgiving with us as a family,” Abourezk says.”Last year I think we had about 60 adults and we have kids running all over. That’s why no house can fit us anymore.”

Khalil Yousef photographs the growing group each year. “They’re not blood relatives, but for us this is the family,” he says. “That’s really the key. It makes you feel like you belong and that you’re not alone. The good food is a bonus.”

Abourezk made all the food when she first hosted the Thanksgiving party in her restaurant but she was too exhausted to enjoy the party, so now the gathering is potluck. Abourezk still provides the turkeys and American staples like baked breads, mashed potatoes and corn. It is common for platters of green bean casserole and sweet potatoes to sit beside Arabic delicacies like kibbeh (bulgar wheat mixed with beef or lamb, topped with pine nuts), kanafeh (a cheese pastry soaked in sugary syrup) or hashwet ruz (a rice pilaf that the group prefers over bread stuffing).

Raed Sulaiman, a pathologist, dons an apron to carve the turkeys.”My little one is always excited to see it,” says Rosana Jamous, a stay-at-home mom to three daughters.”The kids, their eyes are so big watching.” The bird isn’t unusual to the adults; it’s commonly served on Christmas in Lebanon and on Easter in Syria. A prayer follows the carving, sometimes spoken in Spanish because students study it in high school”and if you say the Thanksgiving prayer in Spanish at your Thanksgiving you get extra credit,” says Alya, Abourezk’s daughter.”Usually we end up doing it in English, especially for the kids because none of us speak Arabic well.”

Christiane Maroun, a pediatrician, recalls introducing herself to a newcomer last year as she waited in line for food.”She was expecting a baby and she said, ‘Oh, I’m so happy that somebody here is from Lebanon so I will be more comfortable bringing my baby to you,'” Maroun says.”She was so relieved she wouldn’t need a translator.”

Riyad Mohama, a cardiologist, and his wife Rima, a pharmacist, moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago. The transition wasn’t easy; they came in January to a lot of snow.”I told my husband, ‘I don’t think I’m going to be staying here for a long time. We should move somewhere else,'” Rima recalls. But she loves Sioux Falls now.”Thanksgiving reminds me of my country because that’s how we live there. It’s very social,” she says.”It’s hard that we don’t have any relatives here, but when we do this, the kids can see that this is our family.”

Vegetable Almond Rice Pilaf

(Hashwet Ruz)

1/2 cup olive oil

1 medium onion, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon finely shredded fresh ginger

2 cups basmati rice

1 cup sweet peas, fresh or frozen

1 cup diced carrots, about 1/2-inch cubes, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries

2 tablespoons finely chopped candied orange peels or orange marmalade

1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted

1 teaspoon turmeric

dash of red pepper

sea salt to taste

Heat 1/4 cup olive oil and sautÈ onion for 4 minutes. Add garlic and ginger, then stir for 1 minute. Add 4 1/2 cups water, salt and turmeric and bring to a boil. Add rice and stir, returning mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Then turn off heat and rest on the stove for another 15 minutes.

While rice is resting, heat remaining olive oil on medium heat in a sautÈ pan. Add the vegetables, stirring for 2 minutes. Stir in cranberries and chopped orange peels or marmalade. Season with salt and red pepper, then cook another 2 minutes. Turn off heat and set aside. Spoon rice into deep serving platter, spoon vegetable mixture over the rice and sprinkle toasted almonds on top. Serves 6.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Tournament Time

By Christian Begeman

This column has been almost exclusively dedicated to outdoor and nature related photography. This month that changes. I have good reason to do this. First, I haven’t been able to get out into the great wide open much over the last month and second, I HAVE been able to get back into a couple of our premiere conference basketball championships held in Sioux Falls and fire off thousands of photos. Part of my job at Midco is to support the Midco Sports crew and one of my favorite aspects of this is to document the team pulling off their superb live coverage of both the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Tournament and the Summit League Conference Tournament. The team pulls out all the stops for this coverage including upwards of 30 staff each session, a pre-game and post-game show, extra cameras (like the one attached to a 24-foot jib) and special graphics.

In addition to shooting time lapses of the venues to be used on air and behind the scenes photos and video of the hard-working crew, I also get to capture action photos to support player shot charts used on air and Midco Sports’ overall social media presence.

From my grade school days through college, basketball was first and foremost on my mind. As soon as I couldn’t play anymore, I started learning to take action photos. When I lived in Mitchell in the 2000s, I started a side hustle before side hustles were a thing, taking photos of high school athletics and providing images to parents who would rather enjoy the game than bother with pictures. From that gig, I learned all about wrestling, hockey, volleyball and soccer, all sports of which I had very little knowledge. But my first passion has always been, and likely always will be, basketball.

Over the years, I have learned a few pointers to get better action imagery. First, bench celebration shots usually make the best photos. They are fun, full of passion or angst and really tell a story, particularly the bigger the game gets. Generally, a photographer tends to think that the better action photo is getting as close to the action as possible. I fall into that rut as well. However, I’ve often had to relearn that shooting wider, particularly in the biggest games, tends to be the way to go. For example, late in the Summit League Championship game between North Dakota State University and South Dakota State University, Zeke Mayo, a true freshman for SDSU, drove baseline and floated a high arcing jumper over the defense. The Jacks were up by one and needed to score to stave off a hard-fought Bison run. When shooting this play, I stayed wide enough to see the bench about to react and the crowd watching intently to see if the bucket would go in. It did, by the way, but capturing that frozen moment of intense anticipation is something that helps cement why we love the drama of basketball around these parts come March. I’m already excited to do it again next year.

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Finding White in a Brown Winter

By Christian Begeman

Winter has been mild in southeastern South Dakota. There hasn’t been much snow and temperatures have been above normal. I seem to remember far more brown winters happening when I lived West River than in the Sioux Falls area. Even though no snow means fewer travel headaches, I do miss the snow. As a photographer, the way the light can strike fresh snow early or late in the day is breathtaking. That is, if the subzero wind doesn’t take away your breath first.

The paragraph above is a poor attempt at complaining about how I haven’t felt motivated to get outside the last month to make photographs. Realizing this is a”me problem” and not the weatherman’s doing, I decided to do something about it. Where can you find snow, frost and ice even during a”brown” winter? Around here, it is our parks and public land along the Big Sioux River. So, I made it a point to get off my warm couch and get out there.

On three different occasions, I found myself wandering along the banks of the Big Sioux and seeing things that made the bundled-up journey worth the energy and effort. It was a gray day with occasional light flurries on my first trip to the hiking trails of the Big Sioux Recreation Area near Brandon. I saw a red fox scoot along the river bottom for a brief second but could not locate it again. A few woodpeckers and nuthatches entertained me for a bit after that. Once I started looking at the little things, however, things got fun. The light flurries left lone snowflakes on leaves, bark and my favorite … resting on the trail’s wooden bridges. I spent half an hour with my macro lens attempting to find the perfect snowflake.

My next excursion found me along the river near Newton Hills State Park. There is a bend that rarely freezes because of shallow rapids. I’ve seen bald eagles there, so I decided to walk down the edge of the bank and settle in to see if any birds or other wildlife would appear. On the way to my perch, I became distracted by large pieces of ice on the river’s edge that were showing due to recently dropping river levels. Then I got the scare of the afternoon as I stumbled on a well-hidden Canada goose slumbering against an old cottonwood stump. No eagles ever landed after all the ruckus, but I saw nearly a half dozen fly overhead. They likely spotted me far sooner than I saw them. Regardless, it was a nice hour spent along the river taking it all in.

Speaking of birds, winter offers all sorts of opportunities to see and photograph birds along the river. Eagles and owls as well as chickadees and finches can be spotted (or heard) quite regularly. A favorite find recently along the Dells of the Big Sioux near Dell Rapids was a pair of uniquely raspberry colored purple finches. On Super Bowl Sunday, I also spotted a Barred Owl at the Big Sioux Recreation Area, which allowed me to post a Superb Owl photo that day as well. (Groan. I know, I know, but I didn’t make that up. It is a real thing, and I will admit, I was happy to participate in the Superb Owl fun.)

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

400 Roses

By Bernie Hunhoff

Kristine Reiner’s art career bloomed with the gift of 400 unwanted roses.

Somewhere there’s a young man who probably feels he wasted his money on 400 roses. His investment didn’t have the intended effect — which, of course, was to impress a particular young lady — but the roses have led to a lot of good in South Dakota.

It all began a half-dozen years ago when Kristine Reiner was studying art at the University of Sioux Falls and politely telling a boy that she wasn’t interested. With a final flourish of hope and desperation, he called a Sioux Falls florist and had 400 roses delivered to her. Four hundred divides into 33-and-a-half dozen; her tiny college apartment was red with flowers.

Reiner wasn’t raised to throw things away. She grew up in Canistota, the youngest of three daughters of a single mom. Even though her dad was in prison for drug use and her mom struggled to pay the bills, she remembers her small-town childhood with a smile.”As the youngest, I spent a lot of time alone,” she says. But that gave her time to think and dream and draw. In high school, art teacher William Cavill encouraged her.”He told me I could make a living by being creative. He was the first person to believe in my art.”

With that confidence, she enrolled at USF in 2012 and there she met Ceca Cooper, an art professor known for challenging students on the boundaries between man and nature.”I realized I was there to learn the rules of art so I could break them,” Kristine says. In her senior year in 2016, she was seeking inspiration for her final art project, while also trying to distance herself from that persistent suitor.

That’s when the roses arrived. They filled her little apartment, both in space and scent.

With her”waste not” mentality, she couldn’t bring herself to throw them in the garbage.”They wouldn’t have fit in the dumpster anyway,” she says. At first, she and a friend went to Wiley’s Bar in downtown Sioux Falls and sold them to guys who didn’t need to buy in bulk because they already had girls at their side. She netted $180, but she still had a lot of roses.

“I just couldn’t throw them away,” she says.”I always loved roses. That’s probably why he sent so many.” She sat at home, surrounded by the flowers while also trying to imagine her final art project. It’s probably not shocking that she eventually brushed a rose against the canvas. She began to experiment with the flowers, not just as brushes but as elements within her paintings. She squished them and squeezed them. She broke boundaries.

Reiner’s work is inspired by, and sometimes made from, roses.

Kristine Reiner is now a burgeoning Sioux Falls artist. She works as a graphic designer by day, teaches evening art classes and just finished a mural commissioned by the city at Eighth and Main. She’s also a community activist.”I love Sioux Falls. It’s my favorite city,” she says, because she feels support, just as she did while growing up in Canistota.”Artists have such an opportunity here because anyone can meet anyone anytime. You don’t have to be someone to have a chance.” The people of Canistota are still helping her as well; Sue Baxa, who runs a restaurant in the historic Ortman Hotel, exhibits Reiner’s paintings on her walls.

While Reiner continues to create — with clay, screen printing and often still painting with roses — she also practices her creativity on social issues. When she learned that some South Dakota school children were”lunch shamed” (refused food because they owed lunch money) she and her sister Brandie started a nonprofit called Cathy’s Place to help families pay school debts.”We didn’t always have enough money for lunches and activities when I was a kid, and there were always people who helped us,” she says, particularly a lady named Cathy Steinmetz. They’ve created a Facebook page, and a website is coming. The nonprofit also helps teachers buy school supplies.

When the pandemic of 2020 forced Reiner to cancel her art classes, she used the free time to sew designer face masks. They became a hit with friends, and now she sells them on her website, kristinereiner.com.

The coronavirus also interrupted the corporate food chain, and she lamented the dilemma of farmers without a market. The crisis crystallized when her boyfriend, Damon Brown, learned that his family in Minnesota had been approached by the federal government for land to bury livestock that couldn’t be marketed. Together, they founded Cash Cow Co-op, an online directory that links farmers with families who want to buy local foods. They’ve already made connections across the Dakotas, Iowa and Minnesota.

All who like happy endings are wondering if Brown is the same guy who gave Reiner the 400 roses. He is not, but he shares her passion for making South Dakota a better place through creativity. What could be happier than that?

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Snow Day

By Christian Begeman

On December 10, Sioux Falls received its first major snow of the season. Upwards of 10 inches began falling in the morning and by late afternoon I couldn’t take it anymore. One of my favorite things to do is shoot first snow photos. Some of it has to do with the first snow bringing holiday cheer, but a lot of the joy comes from memories of past snow days as a kid. We didn’t always have snow, or at least much snow out on the prairies of Ziebach and Dewey County, but when it did arrive, we kids took advantage. Sledding into the crick, slipping and sliding on frozen puddles and stock dams were simple pleasures that would fill our non-chore hours. Afterwards, we’d come back to a house warmed with a wood burning stove and Mom’s famous caramel popcorn balls, still warm from the oven.

But I digress. This is supposed to be a column about photography. And more particularly, making images in the snowfall. A few years back, I discovered birds were often easier to photograph in a snowstorm. Like us, they prefer to stay out of the wind and snow. You can often find them with fluffed up feathers on perches inside sheltered tree canopies. With this in mind, I left work early on Friday and headed to Terrace Park next to Covell Lake in northern Sioux Falls, where I can usually spot a Northern Cardinal or two. Sure enough, just as I was about to turn back from a fruitless search, I heard the familiar metallic call and found a half dozen cardinals hunkered down in evergreen branches not far off the walking path.

After taking a few portraits of a male and female cardinal, I headed downtown. I was thinking Phillips Avenue with its decorations and busy-ness would make for interesting imagery. I wasn’t disappointed. However, I almost got snowplowed in while parking near the KELO Radio building. Tis one of the hazards of being out and about in the snow. The other is keeping your gear dry. I always try to keep a bath towel with me while shooting in the snow. I keep it over the camera and lens when not shooting and then use it to dry the lens and body after composing and taking a shot.

I had never been to Falls Park during a heavy snow in December. I believe I was one of maybe five souls tramping around the park at dusk. Three of those were city workers busily cleaning the sidewalks. The heavy snowfall was likely in the eighth or ninth inch by then, so cleaning the sidewalks was not particularly easy. The mood and ambiance of the park, however, was wonderful as music played and lights twinkled through the snowfall.

Saturday dawned clear and the blue skies and prairies blanketed with freshly fallen snow beckoned. I heard there was a snowy owl sighting near Volga, so I headed that way. I did not find said owl, but I did see myriad raptors and stopped for a small hike at Oakwood Lakes State Park. As evening fell, clouds appeared in the southwest and soon the setting sun painted them in exquisite tones. All these scenes helped to bring me a little closer to finding that holiday spirit. To all reading here, please have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Christian Begeman grew up in Isabel and now lives in Sioux Falls. When he’s not working at Midco he is often on the road photographing South Dakota’s prettiest spots. Follow Begeman on his blog.