A visit to North Dakota: The Siberia, or Scandinavia, of the West

After months away from this blog, I have returned from the dead, if the afterlife consists of writing a book. I recently wrapped up the first draft of a manuscript on the geopolitics of the Arctic with Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics and dean at Royal Holloway University, London.

Since my last post in November, it seems the entire world is now having its say on the region, especially when it comes to Greenland. Just yesterday morning, when I scrolled open the digital Financial Times, I noticed one of the lead stories was by reporter Rana Foroohar who spent 10 days with the U.S. Coast Guard in the Arctic. With the top of the world getting crowded, I have to go elsewhere to get a fresh take on cryopolitics.

So, the other day, I headed for North Dakota. I called my dad and told him about my plans. He chuckled with a mixture of bemusement and complete understanding once I explained that the trip would help me to reach my goal of visiting all 50 states. “Ah, yes, that quest you began when you were 11,” he chuckled. He was probably thinking back to the time we visited Duluth, Minnesota, when I asked or rather begged him to drive us across the border to Wisconsin simply because it was so close. He was reluctant, but we made it in the end. So began my career as a geographer, and my entirely arbitrary odyssey, which is now 88% complete.

To reach North Dakota, I had intended to take intermodal transportation all there all the way from my place in Seattle and stop in Montana for a couple days of skiing. On a Wednesday afternoon, I made my way from my front door to the city’s King Street Station via two public buses, onto which I hauled my skis – a bag lady with steez, if you will. These bus drivers have seen it all, so I figured it would be no problem to bring a bag taller than myself onto public transit. They barely blinked.

Surprisingly, Amtrak’s daily Empire Builder service from Seattle to Chicago departed on time. In the dining car, I enjoyed a three-course dinner with a couple who couldn’t have been much more than ten years older than me, but who were already grandparents. Their son, they told me, had “met a woman who loves the lord, and that’s a blessing.” I prayed I wouldn’t say anything heretical as we tucked into our reheated but remarkably delicious salmon and spicy pilaf.

The train was three hours late arriving in Whitefish, Montana due to a standoff between police and a person outside Portland, Oregon wielding a two-foot machete on the rails for several hours. “It’s always Portland,” the conductor groaned on the platform to passengers waiting for their luggage to be taken off the train in Whitefish. “This is a daily occurrence,” he added. On the plus side, I got to sleep in for an extra few hours and enjoy a leisurely breakfast of French toast and unlimited coffee, one of the few things Amtrak actually gets right. While having a samovar of hot water in every car on the Trans-Siberian Express is a comfort, an amphora of coffee is a godsend.

After a few days of skiing in Big Sky Country, my Saturday departure to Minot, North Dakota rolled around the corner. But Amtrak had other plans for me – or rather, it had no plans at all.

My onward service to Minot was initially delayed by 10 hours, which is a typical delay for long-distance rail in the United States. Then, it was cancelled altogether, with no service planned for 48 hours. I mentioned this to the receptionist at my hotel, and she asserted, “Amtrak only works for people who are retired.” I had been having this exact thought about the beleaguered passenger rail company. Though I confess to daydreaming about retirement, I did have to be back on campus on Monday to teach. That meant that my only way of reaching Minot in good time, as across so much of the circumpolar north, was by flying. This seemed like cheating, but I already had made several plans in North Dakota’s “Magic City,” so into the air I went.

A few hours after being driven to the airport in Kalispell, Montana by an Uber driver from Jamaica who had visited nearly all 50 states by car, I found myself in a small regional plane descending over the snow-covered Dakota plains. Beacons of light shone out from the occasional farm. As we were flying in from Denver, I missed the gas flares I was hoping to see over the western portion of the state. There, the Bakken Shale formation pumps out enough oil and gas to make North Dakota the nation’s third-largest oil producing state, behind Texas and New Mexico, which has pipped the Plains state in recent years. The prevalence of fossil fuels is one reason North Dakota is sometimes compared to Siberia, as this lovely photo essay juxtaposing slices of life from Fargo and Novosibirsk illustrates.

For all the association that oil has with Alaska, the state falls in a measly fifth place among U.S. oil producers. Artificial intelligence doesn’t even think Alaska is the nation’s most “Arctic” state. Instead, that title goes to North Dakota. In a fit of polar hallucination, Google AI told me that the Roughrider State “is often thought of as the most Arctic state in the United States.”

This might seem far-fetched, but after spending hours walking through a bitter, windswept cold that I hadn’t felt in years, I found myself agreeing. Nobody else appeared to, though. At the airport arrivals hall, while I was putting on my facemask and gloves to walk outside to the curb, where it was around -3°F/-20°C, a woman walked outside in shorts, where she waited, unbothered, for a good five minutes for her pickup.

When I woke up in the morning in my hotel, I headed down to breakfast. The dining area was filled with kids’ hockey teams and their parents, along with roughnecks and truckers who were trash-talking Wichita, Kansas. This was exactly the assortment of people you would expect in other cold, remote environments. “You goin’ to Wichita, you know it’s goin’ to be bad,” one of them quipped. Remarking on the plane that tragically crashed after flying from Wichita to Washington, D.C. last month, another trucker wondered aloud, “I saw a TikTok, that plane crash in DC, plane was comin’ from Wichita. Well, why was a girl on that plane on vacation in Wichita, huh?” I suppose they might have also been wondering what in god’s name a single woman might have been doing with a few days off in Minot.

After struggling to enjoy a breakfast replete with single-use plastic, oversized coffee stirrers, scrambled eggs miraculously divined from powder, and Oreo Cookie pieces, Heath Bar pieces, and “strawberry” topping as condiments for grits and oatmeal, I ventured out onto Minot’s grand boulevards. The temperature was a bone-chilling 0°F/-18°C. Pick-up trucks with huge grills blasted by me. I walked for about 45 minutes down towards the river and the railway, trying not to slip on the ice. At least there were sidewalks, though not a single pedestrian was in sight. I didn’t even see anyone walking their dogs. Perhaps it was too cold for even North Dakotan canines.

I walked through a bit of the desolate downtown, where a bar advertised “SOUP OF THE DAY: TEQUILA WITH LIME SALT.” North Dakota, as it’s said, is the only state where a town of 200 people can still support two different bars. The state has one of the highest levels of alcoholism in the nation, another sorry statistic it shares in common with much of the Arctic.

I continued strolling and tried to check out the Islamic Center of Minot, which had popped up on my Google Maps. I was hoping to be reminded of the mosques I’d seen in northern places like Iqaluit, Canada or Yakutsk, Russia. However, no minaret was visible once I reached the address. Flummoxed, I decided to carry on to my other cultural destination, which was the Scandinavian Heritage Park in Minot.

To reach it, I had to amble up a large hill with a sidewalk several feet deep in snow. My attempt at keeping a low profile was aided by having to crawl on my hands and knees at certain points. Once I reached the top, I came across a man who was trying to get his dogs into his truck. I said hello, and he ignored me, seeming uncomfortably perplexed by the sight of a pedestrian. Little did he know that despite my appearance (not that he could really see much given my face mask, to be fair), we might share some of the same ancestors.

Between 1870 and 1920, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Finns immigrated to the Upper Midwest – some of my forebears among them, which is how I had ended up in Duluth with my father decades ago. With an unforgiving climate that reminded them of home and more fertile farmland than could be found in Scandinavia, many Norwegians settled in North Dakota.

To this day, the state has the country’s highest percentage of Norwegians, who make up over 30% of the population. Sondre Norheim, the “father of modern skiing,” was born in Morgedal, Telemark, Norway in 1825 and died in North Dakota in 1897. Ski jumping champion Casper Oimoen immigrated to Minot from Norway in 1923. While he couldn’t compete in the Olympics in 1928 because he wasn’t a US citizen, by 1936, he was captain of the US ski team. I suppose it was a good thing for the nation’s medal count that he wasn’t deported.

All of this random trivia I learned at the Scandinavian Heritage Park, which is an impressive site that hosts a stave church, giant Dala horse, Finnish sauna, and Norwegian cabin, among statues of Norheim and Oimoen and other testaments to the state’s Nordic heritage. Each fall, Minot hosts the nation’s largest Scandinavian festival, Hostfest, which I have been wanting to attend for years. For now, visiting in February will have to do. I suppose it was a good way to continue my cold-weather training, following in the footsteps of the brilliant but controversial Arctic explorer and ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson. One Canadian author claims that he was “the most important figure to explore this country’s Arctic regions” in the 20th century, noting that he was also distinct in his adoption of Inuit technology and survival methods.

One year after Stefansson was born across the border in Manitoba to parents who had immigrated from Iceland, he and his family moved to North Dakota. In time, Stefansson would come to recognize the Arctic credentials of his home state. In an essay he wrote called “The American Far North” for Foreign Affairs in 1939, he noted, “As for Alaska’s climate, certain facts may surprise most readers. For instance, Point Barrow, at the extreme northern tip, has a minimum winter temperature slightly above that of Montana or North Dakota, while in central Alaska the maximum heat in summer is about equal to that of New York.”

After leaving the Scandinavian Heritage Park, and after nearly three hours outside interrupted just once by stopping inside a gas station store, it was time to find some food. I walked down a few more quiet streets, including a huge lot with more pick-up trucks for sale, and crossed the main boulevard back into downtown. I was making a beeline for Charlie’s Diner, which the internet told me had mouthwatering blueberry pancakes. I walked inside, my glasses fogging immediately. I was surprised to be greeted by an Asian-American host, who seated me at a booth. A photograph at the till under a jar asking to “Tip your chefs!” showed an older Asian couple. Who would have expected that they could potentially be responsible for my masterfully cooked “bluecake,” as the fluffy, juicy stack of dough was called on my bill?

As I discovered during my time in Minot, many residents have moved from elsewhere, whether attracted by jobs in oil and gas, at the local Air Force base, or just within the wider economy that these activities support. The receptionist at my hotel, who was from California, had been in active duty Air Force for ten years, and decided to stay in Minot after leaving, as it had been her last station.

The region’s population has been steadily growing for over a century. Minot is called “Magic City” on account of exploding to 5,000 people in just a few months when the Great Northern Railway was being built in the 1900s between St. Paul and Seattle. This is the very infrastructure that laid the foundation for Amtrak’s ailing Empire Builder a century later. Over eight decades, Minot grew “from a hastily platted railroad town of tarpaper shacks…into one of the principle service centers in the Great Plains Area,” one study from 1971 observed. The prominence of migrants who had quickly descended to build infrastructure in the harshest of places, the diversity of the population, and the presence of the military as well were yet more factors that reminded me of the Arctic, and particularly Siberia.

Minot Air Force Base is home to the 91st Security Forces Group, which oversees a vast network of missile alert and launch facilities spread across 8,500 square miles. Missile silos around Minot and in Wyoming and Montana together house the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile weapon system, which is the “land leg” of the U.S. nuclear triad. The country’s submarines and strategic bombers represent the other two legs. When asked to choose one word to describe the men and women serving in the 91st Security Forces Group, U.S. Air Force Colonel and commander of the group James Slaton offered the Finnish word sisu.

“It originated during World War II to describe the Finnish resistance to Soviet invasion, due to the harsh environments they had to operate in,” Slaton remarked in a Minot Air Force Base article published by its public affairs division last month. “Our Defenders operate in one of the toughest environments that Air Force security forces members are placed in, outside of an active combat zone; and they do it day in, day out, ready to respond at a moment’s notice.”

In many ways, North Dakota is where Scandinavia and Siberia meet. Continent-crossing railroad tracks run across lands settled by Nordic migrants who had fled hardship back home, ferrying oil and gas to distant destinations. Buildings lay abandoned in the center of town as relics of a prior boom time. What is often left out of this story, though, is how Nordic settlers displaced Indigenous peoples and dispossessed them of their lands.

Though growing attention is being paid to the atrocities of colonialism in the Arctic within Scandinavian countries and within the U.S. and Canada, less examination has been made of the fact that some of this violence was carried out by people who were fleeing one part of the North for another. As recounted in Encounter on the Great Plains by Karen V. Hansen, Norwegian homesteader Helena Haugen Kanten admitted, “We stole the land from the Indians.”

Norwegians saw themselves as worthy settlers and capable farmers. Scandinavian language press at the time described Indians as the “Red Race” and reproduced vile, racist attitudes towards the people whose lands they were taking. None of this history was on offer at the Scandinavian Heritage Park, where it seems as if skiers and farmers arrived as pioneers to prairies touched only by the grace of god.

As I headed out of downtown Minot back towards my hotel, I came across an independent bakery called Prairie Sky Breads. Inside, free glazed mini scones were being offered to the first 100 customers to celebrate the establishment’s fifth anniversary. The were also selling Nordic baked goods like pillowy cardamom buns and more, shall we say, North Dakotan cuisine like “coke lattes” and pizza topped with tater tots and gravy. Seeking to avoid heartburn, I opted for the former. The bakery also hosts Aurora Nights, where people gather to celebrate their Norwegian heritage through history lectures on World War II, lessons on how to paint “Telemark Rosemaling” style, and cooking classes. It is all a very quaint, cinnamon-scented slice of North Dakota’s checkered history.

As I made my way back across the bridge over the flood-prone Souris River, I finally saw my first pedestrian, destination unknown. Perhaps he, too, was checking off his 44th state. One can never be too sure.

Underneath the overpass, a freight train headed east, hundreds of boxcars barreling across the lands of the Dakota. To the west, around North Dakota’s Williston Basin, roughnecks were wrestling oil and gas out of the frozen ground. Their products, once burnt, will hasten the melting of the last remnants of the Laurentide ice sheet that covered the prairies during the Pleistocene. To find the Arctic, one sometimes has to go away from it. But to the south, it seems, lies the source of so much loss.