Newsletter | Store | Mail List | Contact Us

Clay Jenkinson
2009 Regional Fellow
Social philosophy

Insider/Outsider:
The quest for authenticity in and around North Dakota
 
Our society, perhaps all of humanity, is described in terms of kinship and groups. But inquiry – the search for knowledge and for the answers to our deepest questions – is supposed to be universal. That at least was the Enlightenment’s conviction. The cultural studies movement and post-colonial discourse have challenged the assumption that there are universal questions or that one culture can fairly investigate another.

As the 21st century begins, how do we negotiate this tension between our desire to examine the world as if virtually everything were fair game and our increasing sensitivity to questions of appropriation and representation?

Clay Jenkinson’s current project faces the question head on. He is currently beginning to write a novel about an improbably friendship between a Native American girl and a white boy on a reservation border town, in the hopes of examining the flash points between the two cultures of North Dakota, cultures that frequently collide but seldom communicate in any mutually respectful way. But Clay Jenkinson is a self-described Anglo-German left-brained scholar. Does he have a right to intrude upon North Dakota’s Native American world, even as a respectful guest, and what credibility could he possibly bring to a world he reads about and observes, but in no significant way “lives?”

At the same time, as a regular newspaper columnist, he offers suggestions and observations about North Dakota and its future. Yet while he was born and raised in the state, he spent a large portion of his life outside of it. Has he lost the authority to make claims and recommendations and if so when and why? Is he still a North Dakotan? Do you have to be a North Dakotan to observe the habits of the heart of the North Dakota community? How long can you be gone without losing your citizenship? And how long do you have to be back before you have regained it, if ever?

In his work with the Institute, Clay will examine these fundamental questions and others. What makes an outsider? Does true criticism require insider status? What are the consequences of temporary separation from the group in terms of identity and trust? In essence, his research will examine the question of authenticity and what it means to North Dakota and the peoples who reside in it. Do we want our young people to leave and come back or do we not them to leave at all? If they come back bearing new perspectives and ways of seeing North Dakota, shall we embrace them or shun them? What are the nature and limits of cross-cultural communication between those who live here, even those who live next door to each other? His fellowship is timely and important, locally-based but with universal importance.

Clay’s personal mission is “to help start the conversation we need to have about our identity, our values, our past, our future, continuity and change, heritage and opportunity, land and people, community and history, landscape and resources, North Dakota as a unique place and North Dakota as a typical place, North Dakota as platform or North Dakota as place.” He is well aware that, like all invitations to conversation, this one may be declined.

Clay Jenkinson is most famous for portraying Thomas Jefferson in the long-running and always inspiring public radio show The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and is one of the most sought-after Humanities scholars in the United States.

A cultural commentator who has devoted most of his professional career to public humanities programs, Clay Jenkinson has been honored by two presidents for his work. On November 6, 1989, he received from President George Bush one of the first five Charles Frankel Prizes, the National Endowment for the Humanities' highest award (now called the National Humanities Medal), at the nomination of the NEH Chair, Lynne Cheney. On April 11, 1994, he was the first public humanities scholar to present a program at a White House-sponsored event, when he presented Thomas Jefferson for a gathering hosted by President and Mrs. Clinton. When award-winning humanities documentary producer Ken Burns turned his attention to Thomas Jefferson, he asked Clay Jenkinson to be the major humanities commentator. Since his first work with the North Dakota Humanities Council in the late 1970s, including a pioneering first-person interpretation of Meriwether Lewis, Clay Jenkinson has made thousands of presentations throughout the United States and its territories, including Guam and the Northern Marianas.