In my short bio, I note that I’m part of the Dakota diaspora, but
what does that actually mean?
According to the venerable Merriam-Webster, diaspora (lowercase) is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland.”
But what it actually means is that I was looking for a term that
wouldn’t lay me open to the accusation of bragging, an activity heavily frowned upon in the Dakotas.
The term I discarded is one familiar to many Dakotans who have pursued advanced education and left to find professional work not readily available in our homeland: The Great Plains Brain Drain. But using that term would not only swell my own brain beyond its (demonstrably small) capacity but insult the many bigger brains who remained.
So I coined the term Dakota diaspora as a way of saying that I
was too stupid to figure out a way to stay in the Dakotas and make a
living.
Only in researching this article for my blog did I find out that there’s actually a book out there, published in the 1980s, called Dakota Diaspora: Memories of a Jewish Homesteader by Sophie Trupin. Being neither Jewish nor a homesteader, perhaps I need to find yet another
term.
But right now that's too big a drain on my plain brain. Back to work on Dead Dreams...
what does that actually mean?
According to the venerable Merriam-Webster, diaspora (lowercase) is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland.”
But what it actually means is that I was looking for a term that
wouldn’t lay me open to the accusation of bragging, an activity heavily frowned upon in the Dakotas.
The term I discarded is one familiar to many Dakotans who have pursued advanced education and left to find professional work not readily available in our homeland: The Great Plains Brain Drain. But using that term would not only swell my own brain beyond its (demonstrably small) capacity but insult the many bigger brains who remained.
So I coined the term Dakota diaspora as a way of saying that I
was too stupid to figure out a way to stay in the Dakotas and make a
living.
Only in researching this article for my blog did I find out that there’s actually a book out there, published in the 1980s, called Dakota Diaspora: Memories of a Jewish Homesteader by Sophie Trupin. Being neither Jewish nor a homesteader, perhaps I need to find yet another
term.
But right now that's too big a drain on my plain brain. Back to work on Dead Dreams...
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