Dakota by Kathleen Norris
"Dakota: A Spiritual Geography" by Kathleen Norris is a profound exploration of the landscapes and communities of western North and South Dakota. This nonfiction work blends autobiography, religious reflection, and social history, painting a vivid portrait of the region's sparse yet striking beauty. Norris delves into the lives of European American immigrants who shaped the area, highlighting the unique cultural identity that sets the western Dakotas apart from their eastern counterparts. Through her experiences as a lay member of a Benedictine monastery and a lay preacher in a Protestant church, she offers insightful reflections on spirituality and community in a rural context.
Norris challenges the perception of the Dakotas as lacking in beauty and culture, instead revealing the hidden richness within their isolation and harsh climates. The book serves as a meditation on how external landscapes influence internal identities, suggesting that the physical geography of a place profoundly shapes the spiritual and communal lives of its inhabitants. In a tone that conveys both nostalgia and awareness of the challenges facing these communities, "Dakota" ultimately invites readers to reconsider their understanding of identity and belonging in relation to the geographical places they inhabit.
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Dakota by Kathleen Norris
First published: 1993
The Work
In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes about the stark, scarcely populated landscapes of western North and South Dakota. Norris writes of a harsh and beautiful country, of small towns rich in immigrant traditions, of a Benedictine monastery as sacred as the grasslands surrounding it, and of her journey toward constructing a literary and spiritual life.
Dakota, a nonfiction work, is part autobiography, part religious meditation, and part social history. The book captures the specific character of the European American immigrants who settled and still inhabit the western Dakotas. The western Dakotas share a terrain and an identity different than their eastern counterpoints. These isolated places share particularly barren winters and fierce summers. The people who live there are insular and fiercely independent. According to Norris, the western Dakotas are often presented as lacking physical beauty and culture.
Without ever leaving the landscape behind, Norris subtly inverts what is commonly regarded as lack and reveals the area’s hidden plenitude. What others might call deprivation—isolation, lack of airports and symphony halls, small town life, harsh winters, monastic discipline—she reimagines as privilege. Norris’ definition of spiritual identity and conversion is hard-won and perhaps unsurpassed in contemporary American letters. Norris writes about being an oblate, a lay member of a Benedictine monastery in western North Dakota, offering a rare and honest glimpse into American Catholic, monastic spiritual traditions. Norris also writes about her work as a lay preacher in a small, Protestant church in South Dakota, affirming the importance of such communities. Dakota is almost an elegiac work, written about communities that have survived rigorous demands of weather, landscape, and the changing American culture. She writes with an awareness, however, of what the threatened loss of western Dakota communities, and perhaps communities like them all over the country, might mean.
For Norris, external geography shapes internal geography. One’s external landscapes shape one’s internal senses of time and place, influence one’s view of material goods, and shape one’s ways of talking and acting. The landscapes of the western Dakotas are different from any other American landscapes—so, too, must be the inner landscapes of those who live there. Dakota speaks of an American need to construct a sense of soul or identity somehow at peace with the geographical places and the human communities where one lives.
Sources for Further Study
America. CLXIX, August 14, 1993, p.23.
Belles Lettres. VIII, Summer, 1993, p.37.
Chicago Tribune. January 10, 1993, XIV, p.3.
The Christian Science Monitor. April 27, 1993, p.11.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Prairie as an Act of Devotion.” Review of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. The New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1993, 8.
Los Angeles Times. December 31, 1992, p. E8.
New Yorker, The. Review of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris. March 15, 1993, 123.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, December 7, 1992, p.52.
Utne Reader. May, 1993, p.113.
The Washington Post Book World. XXIII, January 24, 1993, p.3.
Women’s Review of Books. X, May, 1993, p.20.