Cowboy Country

Leaving behind the Great Lakes region and its swing states, we entered the so-called red zone, a block of central states that traditionally vote Republican. The first two that we crossed are North Dakota and South Dakota.

In the space of a hundred kilometres, everything changes, from the way people vote to the landscape. The earth flattens to the point that while driving you get the feel that you are rolling on top of a giant billiard ball; at times, when behind the wheel, I even believe to see the curvature of the earth. It is an optical effect produced by a sky which today is crossed by very long streaks of white clouds and the earth.  We are crossing the great prairie but today it is not green, it is yellow, most of the crops have been harvested, a few corn fields are still waiting for their turn, but it is really not much. And in fact, the dust flies all over and the air is so dry, the soil it is exhausted, there are 3 to 4 rounds of crops from spring to autumn here and the land is ready to rest, needs to rest.

 Here too, autumn is struggling to advance, it is unusually hot, but agriculture - all extensive and mechanized - one of the main revenues of the two states, is ready for winter. Every night, I am told, is good for the first frost, it will come and the cold weather will bring heavy snowfalls and the polar winds.

In the north of the state of North Dakota, near the Canadian border, the land is not farm. It perforated by thousands of wells. This is where natural gas and oil are extracted thanks to fracking, a questionable but highly profitable technique. And so on the highway we continually encounter on the opposite direction large trucks carrying long pipes made of steel, they are used to pierce the earth. We also encounter huge tanks with Halliburton's mysterious liquid (they own the patent and have never revealed what is in it) that mixed with water is pushed into the holes in the rock.

North Dakota is a rich state thanks to the energy industry, it is precisely here that almost twenty years ago the fracking technique was tested for the first time with great success. It is also like South Dakota, an agricultural, mining state and not densely populated state.

This is the America of other times, very far from the large metropolises of the east coast but also from the industrialized towns of the Great Lakes region, here you breathe the same air as Texas, Wyoming or Montana, it is the land of cowboys and Indians.

Yes, there are also Indians, or Native Americans as they are called today. North and South Dakota host several Indian reservations, but some of the land given, like the Black Hills area, was later taken away from the tribes. Of course, the integration between whites and Native Americans did not happen anywhere in the US, but among local people a timid attempt to mix the two races has taken place, certainly in these two states seems more serious than in any other state we have visited so far. The Indians and the reservations are everywhere, what has disappeared is the coloured population, blacks are no longer to be seen, from the Great Lakes to California the skin colour of the Americans is predominantly white, red and Asian.

This is Donald Trump's land. And this is why there is no need to put posters in his favour outside the houses, the American flag that flies everywhere is enough to make it clear which candidate and party the population of the two Dakotas will vote for. In North Dakota, in 2020 Donald Trump got 65 percent of the votes against Biden's 32 percent and in South Dakota he won with a margin of 26 points.

I spend an afternoon with a group of knitters in Hot Spring, South Dakota, about fifty kilometres south of Mount Rushmore where the images of four presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, have been carved into the rock in the Black Hills originally an Indian reservation. Between one knit and a purl they talk about their land. They are all white, however, one lives with a Lakota partner, he has been her companion for 15 years. There is no racism towards the Indians, on the contrary I realize that there is pity for those trapped in the reservations. Pity because the reservations are abandoned to a tribal destiny that prevents them from modernizing, pity because they are the first victims of the wild immigration that, according to my interlocutors, the Biden presidency has produced, a migration that has brought an increase in criminality.

“The Maras arrived at Eagle Ridge, the Indian reservation southeast of Hot Spring a few years ago. The M13 arrived about three years ago and set up its base of operations among the Indians. Some of the gangs have married Indian women to infiltrate the tribe and turn it into a social outpost for their business. From the reservation they sell fentanyl to the surrounding states. They started selling it on the Indian reservations first, to men to neutralize them, there is now a real epidemic on the reservations and from the reservations they moved to the cities, to Rapid City, for example, where today there are many addicts.”

In a bar in Hot Spring a couple playing pool explains to me why this is Trump’s land.

“The spaces are immense but here you live like in a village, everyone knows each other, grows up together, gets married and has children, people do not move away. You go hunting, you work the land, it’s a simple life, unchanged since our ancestors arrived. We have lived with the Indians for centuries; they are also part of our way of life. Trump respects this way of life, Biden, and now Harris, they want to change it. We don’t care what happens in New York or Washington, we care about protecting our society.”

Two are the hot topics in these two states: the immigration and the economy.

“We are literally swamped with migrants, among those who want to work and integrate into our society there are gangs of criminals. We did not have problems with the opioid until the migrants arrived”, says the couple. Who let them in? they rhetorically ask me? Biden.

During Covid the state launched the initiative Feed South Dakota, the governor opened the access to the free distribution of goods’ centres to everybody, since then anybody can get inline and get food there,” explains one of the knitters. “There is a widespread abuse and we are paying for it. In the reservations they have the same system and abuse is even bigger. We are feeding the gangs with our money! And in the meantime inflation is very high and each time you got to the supermarket your heart sinks”.

                  Will Trump solve these problems? I ask. Who else could do it? They answer me. He is the last hope.