Episode 1: Former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp explains why rural and urban America should care about each other
Once we see each other, once we listen to each other, once we're exposed to life stories, the barriers go down. It's really easy to demonize a whole group of people when you don't have to spend time with them.
Ellen Wolter:That's former senator of North Dakota Heidi Heitkamp talking about why rural and urban Americans should care about each other. In our first episode, Senator Heitkamp talks about growing up in North Dakota and her work building connections between rural and urban students at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, where she now serves as the executive director. She also took time to reflect on the recent conference, Bridging the Divide, that was put on by the Institute of Politics. And shameless plug, she also talks about her love for extension.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started just traveling along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the first episode of the Side by Side podcast. Well, senator Heitkamp, we are so excited to have you on today. Welcome.
Heidi Heitkamp:Thank you so much, and thank you for doing this podcast. I look forward to hearing about many more sessions. What a what a great idea and certainly something that is up my alley and, explores kind of my post senate major interest.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That's why we were so excited to have you on Senator Heitkamp is to really hear about how you're thinking about rural and urban, and this important relationship. As I mentioned before we started recording, I graduated from high school in Bismarck, North Dakota, when you were attorney general. So for those folks who aren't necessarily familiar with the realities of real life and and living in a place like North Dakota, can you just share a little bit about where you're from and what your home looked like when you were growing up?
Heidi Heitkamp:I love telling this story because I always get shocked expressions in many national audiences. I say I grew up in a small town of 90, then they look at me and go, no, not 90,000, 90, 90 people. My family was 1 tenth the population. You know, there were 9 of us. And it was, in many ways, just an idyllic, you know, if you were going to, you know, write a book about small town America and small town life and what kids do when they're growing up there when they don't have the Internet.
Heidi Heitkamp:And, there's only 3 channels on television. They go outside and they play baseball and they play softball and their parents try to figure out a way to keep them busy. But, you know, when you grow up with a baseball team, which was my 7 siblings, it it's a different kind of connection that you have because the connection then becomes what the family does. My father was involved in everything in our small town. He was chief of the fire department, the volunteer fire department, which was right across the street from our little house, our little arts and crafts Sears house.
Heidi Heitkamp:And the whistle blew right there on that tower, and we'd have to cover up our ears and scream and run and be home. They blow it at 9 o'clock, and that's that was our time to get home. My dad was the commander of the VFW post. He put together enough resources to build the ballpark, softball park. He was clerk of the school board.
Heidi Heitkamp:We had just a school that was 1st grade through 8th grade, and then we went to high school in Hankison. So it was living with a large family in a small town and what you would imagine, people kids riding bikes, kids playing baseball, parents heavily engaged, all the things that I think, formed our relationship with our small town, but also with our classmates. I went to high I went to school for, 12 years with the same people. So, I mean, I think that is so rare today, and it really creates a sense of community, a sense of place.
Ellen Wolter:So, of course, you were a US senator for the state of North Dakota from 2013 to 2019, and you are co-founder of the One Country Project and director of the the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. Could you tell us a little bit first about the One Country Project?
Heidi Heitkamp:Yeah. When I wasn't able to secure a second term, in the United States Senate, I had leftover campaign money. I mean, to put it bluntly, there you couldn't spend the amount of money people sent me across the country to run a campaign. And I thought, why did all these people give me this money? And I think it was to basically broaden the horizons of how people look at people who come, especially if they're Democrats, who come from places like Manard or North Dakota, and what that looks like in the body politic.
Heidi Heitkamp:And so I I frequently say, I formed One Country project to reintroduce rural America to Democrats and Democrats to rural America, believing, and as I believe today, that, a one party system in any major voting block or group in in our country is not good, and because ideas stagnate, I think there tends to be greater levels of corruption, when there is no checks and balances if in the 2 party system. But it's it's symptomatic, not just of our politics, but of kind of a a sense of othering of people. You know, rural America being someplace where in in a lot of people's eyes in urban America is racist. Is backward. It's uneducated.
Heidi Heitkamp:And then in in, looking back at an urban American, a rural American believing they're all godless, they don't believe in raising their families, You know, they're not working. They're not creating any kind of wealth for the country. And and my statement always is, look. I've existed in both places. I went to law school in Portland, Oregon, and I said, guess what?
Heidi Heitkamp:I always knew my neighbors. I always found community no matter where I've been, whether it's rural America or urban America. And what I firmly believe is what we all want as Americans is so much more similar than our disagreements or what we don't want. Now if I believe that, urban Americans wanted something different for their family than rural Americans, I think we'd have a bigger problem. But, you know, it's good health care.
Heidi Heitkamp:It's quality education. It's opportunity. It's safety. That those things are ubiquitous. They're ubiquitous dreams for our families, and they don't just exist in one part.
Heidi Heitkamp:And I think that if we look at how we can kind of reconnect, it it is building a greater sense of awareness. Most of rural Americans have been to urban America, if you think about it. And and you grew up, you know, in North Dakota. There's no one that I grew up with who didn't go to the cities. Right?
Heidi Heitkamp:I mean, Minneapolis was only about a 3 hour car drive, and we all went there to watch the twins or the vikings or whatever. So so rural Americans, you know, it's rare to find someone that hasn't had an urban experience, but it is really not common for, urban Americans, as a large group to have a rural experience. And so we're trying in some way to create that, without having to load up buses and bring people out.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And and and that brings me to your work at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics where you are the director, where you are working to bridge across rural and urban spaces. And and we'll talk about the conference in just a second, which, I attended, which was fantastic, by the way. But there's a seminar that you lead, and it's called forming a more perfect union, policies and politics to heal America's regional divide. So I'm just gonna read a brief description from this seminar.
Ellen Wolter:"This seminar will explore the economic insecurity, cultural values, and political tensions underlying America's regional divide." So the first session of that seminar was called, "Who lives in rural America and why should you care?" So to your point about, you know, most folks from rural America going into urban and and not as much urban folks going into rural spaces, why should urban folks care about rural America and what's happening there?
Heidi Heitkamp:I think, number 1, you think about where does wealth get created. It doesn't get created when people go and shop retail. That's just moving money around. It gets created when we extract things from the ground, when we grow crops. It gets created when we use our innovation to, develop new ideas and new products.
Heidi Heitkamp:So it it comes from the mind. It but mainly, my longtime theory is, wealth in this country, and I think founding fathers believed it and still true, comes fundamentally from the ground. It's where we get the raw materials that we apply, you know, our god given brains to that really create wealth. And to me, you ought to be worried about where your food is growing. You should be worried about where your energy is created and transmitted.
Heidi Heitkamp:You should worry about where your doctors are being born, your doctors of the future. There is so much that rural America does, provide to America, not just, in food, but in ideas and in, energy that can't get ignored. And so when I did this seminar, that's actually how I ended up at the University of Chicago. My friend David Axelrod called because he had been intrigued by what we were doing at One Country. And I was a fellow at Harvard where I did a seminar that was labeled, the, the real state of the union and Gary Cohen, former economic director for Donald Trump, and I did this together.
Heidi Heitkamp:We picked 10 topics, and one was this on rural America. I think David was intrigued and said, would you build that out and come to the University of Chicago? And when I came, what I found there because of David's inspiration that this was a growing democracy problem, that we don't see each other as Americans. We see each other as enemies of democracy, that it is really important to have this dialogue. Plus, the University of Chicago is very aggressive about recruiting rural students, 1st generation students.
Heidi Heitkamp:So the the thread here was really taking some students, a lot of whom who attended my seminar, grew up in Austin, Texas, or they grew up in LA, or they grew up in Manhattan, and saying, okay. I want you to meet Luke Voigt. Luke Voigt is a boilermaker. He works at a power plant in North Dakota. He is a labor organizer, and this is what he does.
Heidi Heitkamp:He grows his own food. They don't buy anything in the grocery store. He and his wife, who happens to be a nurse practitioner who worked with my husband, you know, because that's North Dakota. As you know, everybody knows everybody. You could just see the kind of bells go off when they heard Luke Luke talk about the challenges of, you know, the stress that he feels, making sure that the people he represents in his labor union have work and have good wages and have the opportunity to, go on vacation and get health care for their families.
Heidi Heitkamp:And, you know, then we introduced him some ranchers and farmers and Native Americans. And so to me, all of this gets solved with proximity. What do I mean by that? I mean, once we see each other, once we listen to each other, once we're exposed to, life stories, the barriers go down, and, you know, it's really easy to demonize a whole group of people when you don't have to spend time with them.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That I think that is so true, Heidi. And, you know, I I spent a lot of time in urban spaces just for school and, you know, out on the West Coast and Seattle, whatnot. And one of my favorite things was when people would say, I've never met anyone from North Dakota before. I got that all the time.
Ellen Wolter:And to your point about proximity, right, it was so fun to share our different experiences and and kinda share about North Dakota because so few people had had experienced that or knew what it was like to live there. So I wanted to move on to the conference. And, you know, for those of us who have been thinking about this issue of rural and urban and the connections across rural and urban for some time, it was just so exciting to see it discussed on a more national stage in a way that I have I don't see this topic discussed very often on a national stage. So I'm curious what you were hoping would be achieved through this conference, and do you feel like you did that?
Heidi Heitkamp:Oh, absolutely. We started out, thinking about the economics and because the people who approached us, Benya, who was instrumental in pulling this together, actually is a graduate student at the Booth School, which is a very prominent nationally known, business school that is driven heavily by economics. And Benya, who had been doing a lot of work in rural America, said that that the people that she was with at Booth were hungry for more practical applications of what they were talking about. And so, she came to us because she knew that we run this program called Bridging the Divide. Only it was confined to 3 schools in Illinois and and 10 students from each school.
Heidi Heitkamp:So the impact was 30 students, but it was a year long program and pretty expensive. So we were looking at the same time that Benya was looking for a partner in some of her ideas. We were looking for something that would have more impact for more students. And, Benya tells this story that she came to the IOP, and we started talking about what we wanted to do. And she reached down into her backpack and pulled out an outline.
Heidi Heitkamp:I'm not kidding you of exactly what we had been thinking about, and it was like, let's just get it done. And so, we partnered with her and and many of the rural students to get their ideas, and then we looked around to see if there was anything like that that was happening throughout the country that wasn't maybe have a big p politics to it or, you know, just rural economic development. You'll see a lot of that kind of work, but just something that really talked about rural life, rural culture, rural opportunities kind of wrapped around and what some of those challenges are and what some of those myths are. We have subtitled this project interconnected because I am not someone who says people in urban America think that we're in rural America, that we're all stupid and that they disrespect us. I'm sure there are going to be people who disrespect rural Americans in urban America.
Heidi Heitkamp:Guess what? There's going to be people in rural America who disrespect people who live in cities. And so I said, this is a two way street. This isn't just, you know, poor me in rural America. You just don't understand.
Heidi Heitkamp:And so we tried to integrate as best we could those issues where there were shared and problems and commonality in terms of the struggle, the struggle of building a middle class lifestyle, the struggle of providing for your kids and making sure that they have good quality education or health care. Our first dialogue was between an urban American and a rural American where they had just a a fantastic conversation about, image and about what people think. And Rhyme Fest, who is a rapper, who has been an, a fellow at the IOP, who kind of opened up and talked about his experience in Cody, Wyoming as an African American man, living there for the summer. He kind of set the tone because they asked him when he felt that sense of distrust and otherness when he would be going for a run-in a park in Cody. And, you know, what did he do?
Heidi Heitkamp:Or when he heard something that was tone deaf in terms of his life, like, everybody must get shot, you know, right in front of you in Chicago, or how do you live in that horrible city, which is his hometown. Right? I mean, think of if somebody said to me, how do you live in that horrible place, Manor, Hankinson? I mean, how that would make me feel? And so he said something that I thought was so, gracious in a way.
Heidi Heitkamp:He said, I give them grace. I don't assume that they know, you know, how how that impacts me. I try and kind of explain how that impacts me, but I don't automatically cut off the conversation because I feel like I have not been seen for who I am. And I think that formed kind of a whole theme going through what we did. And pretty much all the panelists stayed in the audience, listened to what was said before, built on what was said before with the common theme of seeing each other and seeing the problem and being realistic about the problem, then building infrastructure or building ways that you can solve the problem.
Heidi Heitkamp:We had one on the deaths of despair, which have hit rural America particularly hard. But as we know, suicide is not a problem that is limited to rural America. It is something that happens. It it's not limited to any family. It happens in every family and what that means and, people really coming up with creative ideas on how you can build back individual self worth, but also do that by recognizing the value of the place that you live.
Heidi Heitkamp:And so I think that even though we covered economics, we covered philanthropy, we covered, agriculture, you know, we covered the statistics of rural America, what do the demographics look like, I think that the common theme was we need to build relationships where we see each other, and that will help, solve this problem of this cultural slash political divide that we have in this country that we identify as the urban world polarization.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That first session that you mentioned, with Rhymefest and Sarah Smarsh was among my favorites, and and listeners will be sure to link to that so you can watch that. And it really hit on what I think was one of the major themes of the conference, which you just mentioned. And I'm just gonna read from some of the conference materials. So urban and rural communities nationwide perpetuate alarming caricatures of the other that poison our discourse and weaken our democracy.
Ellen Wolter:And you've already talked a little bit about that. And one of the themes that came through in the conference was this idea of storytelling and how we need to do it better, and how marginalized rural and urban communities, they often have stories that are told about them, but not for them. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on, you know, ways that you have seen people better telling stories. How can we invest in telling better stories so that we can get away from these caricatures?
Heidi Heitkamp:I think the first thing that we need to do is people always say, well, how do we fight this disinformation? I'm like, with real information. That's why a podcast like this is so important. We have a 100 different ways to communicate without travel that we don't do very well. And the opportunity, it seems to me, to have a conference like this, but the next step, it wasn't, you know, here we're gonna admire the problem.
Heidi Heitkamp:We brought in from 20 different schools, Bible schools, tribal schools, community colleges, community schools, universities that don't look like the University of Chicago. We invited them to send ours their students. University of Delaware came. And and to me, you say, how do we begin that process? That's what we were trying to do.
Heidi Heitkamp:And and the most important people in that audience were not the academics or the authors or all of the people who came to present and talk. They were the students that we were talking to that, when they came here, on Wednesday before the conference really started, we took them to the trauma center at the University of Chicago. We took them to a homeless shelter here in Chicago. We we basically loaded up all these students and then drove them around Chicago, meeting with people who were doing really great work in food security, really great work in in health care and, housing. And just having that exposure begins a sense of curiosity that I think then the next time they read something about Chicago, maybe they'll say, oh, I I wanna read that story that's in the national news because I I know a little bit about this.
Heidi Heitkamp:And the real hope was the relationships that they would create with each other that would be lasting, that my recollection will be, oh, I met this person who told me this, and now I know something that I didn't know before. And that not only adds to our lifelong learning and our lifelong curiosity to learn, but our ability to see each other a little differently. So when when it's shouting and anger and finger pointing, that doesn't resolve issues. Anytime you say all of those people are this, you are saying something that is wrong, and that's what we wanna get at by by bringing people together by convening. It's really the dialogue, and, you know, now we have to decide from this great, exposure, what I say, exposure to the divide programming that we did.
Heidi Heitkamp:How do we follow-up? And all the follow-up with student collaboration across colleges, but, also, one of our great hopes is to raise enough money to create a whole different internship program label at the IOP, which will be back home. You know, so many of our students wanna go work in Washington, or they wanna go work for a think tank in New York. They they don't see the opportunity that the work in rural America presents, and so we wanna create a real concerted effort to build hometown internships. Now that hometown internship could be in Manchester or I mean, it it doesn't have to be in a rural area, but we have a lot of rural students that we wanna say, if you're concerned about homelessness among youth or trafficking, go work in the trafficking program in Bismarck, North Dakota.
Heidi Heitkamp:Go work in the housing office in Fargo, North Dakota, or in Jamestown, North Dakota. Yeah.
Ellen Wolter:What would folks who don't know rural America be surprised to learn about rural America?
Heidi Heitkamp:That is much more diverse, that it is in many ways a manufacturing hub for small manufacturing that, it's not all agriculture. I think they think when they think rural America, they think agriculture. In fact, in in many, many rural counties, agriculture doesn't lead as number one. Economic development, it's certainly critical, but it's it's not everything that happens. And there is a growing diversity, in rural America.
Heidi Heitkamp:You take Iowa, almost all of Iowa's population growth has been, minority. And so the stereotypes, anything that you think is a stereotype that people are racist, people are unfriendly, people don't won't trust you, people are scared, they're ignorant, they're uneducated, All those are wrong. Are there people like, there are you know, it's a microcosm of the rest of the country. Would people fit that same bill, in urban America? The answer is yes.
Heidi Heitkamp:There are people who I I just define, but that's not the majority of Americans. I was with a group of, rural students here in Chicago, and I was pitching our hometown internship. And this young woman said, oh, I can't do that. I've gotta do something different. My dad told me to go and never come back.
Heidi Heitkamp:There is nothing in my hometown for me. And the self image that we have in rural America tends to be a challenge as well, and there's a lot of pride. There's no doubt about it. A lot of people very proud of where they live, proud of their hometown, proud of the national softball championship that they won. Like we did.
Heidi Heitkamp:And Hag had said, you know, so so, you know, you have your points of pride. But many times, when you listen to parents as they talk to students, they're not always encouraging about living back home. And so that goes to the economic investment that we need to make in rural America, creating opportunities so people who live there can, in fact, return home. You know, we have this experiment in North Dakota. We were losing doctors.
Heidi Heitkamp:We couldn't find doctors to work in more rural places, and the medical school built a brand new medical school and made a concerted effort to recruit from class b schools in North Dakota language. That's smaller high schools, and found students who really wanted to go back home, didn't necessarily need an economic incentive to do that. And in fact, I think I just read a statistic in their annual report that 75% of their graduates now are practicing in North Dakota because we changed the image of the practice of medicine in North Dakota. And we recruited students who may already have been interested in staying where we live, where they grew up. And so to me, we spend a lot of time talking about how the other perceives rural America.
Heidi Heitkamp:We need to take a look at how we in rural America perceive ourselves and maybe think about how how we can retain more of our young people and and encourage more of our young people to come back by being more open about our thought process and more open about who we are I talk frequently to mothers and this will be a maybe a more controversial topic. I talked to a woman, very prominent, lawyer, and their daughter just got married to a woman in New York. She's practicing law. She said she'll never move home. She doesn't find the community welcoming for her.
Heidi Heitkamp:And and so I think part of that is, the messages that we're sending, to good people who would wanna come home because we're putting some kind of judgment on people, and that needs to change. And, you know, we are the Institute of Politics, so we look a lot at political dynamics, but the state legislators are way more conservative than our state population, and so I mentioned that because frequently what the state government does or the state legislature does defines who we are as a population in North Dakota. So it's not only are those jobs important to kind of create opportunity in education, to fund higher education and extension, which I'm a huge fan of, but they're they're really important because they set the tone for what your state believes. When your elected representatives say hateful things, they think the state's hateful, and that's not true. The population's much more embracing and welcoming, but we need to understand that just like any kind of branded product, rural America has to be careful that they don't let people represent them who don't represent good community values.
Ellen Wolter:What would folks in rural America be surprised to learn about urban America?
Heidi Heitkamp:That there are many conservatives. Don't believe me. Just strike up a conversation with an Uber driver or a cab driver, many of whom, you know, they're they're working 2 jobs and, not just politically conservative. They're they're fiscally conservative, and they're working hard. And I think this caricature that, number 1, everybody doesn't appreciate what's done in rural America is not true.
Heidi Heitkamp:That people don't wanna know about rural America. That's not true. People are curious about rural America. That's why you get what you get, which is I've never met anyone from North Dakota. Oh, you're doing this, and you're from North Dakota.
Heidi Heitkamp:They're curious, and then the conversation is, what was that like? What tell me about how you grew up and what your parents did. And and so I think if you were looking at breaking down a stereotype, it would be that urban and rural America care deeply about their families, and it's a uniting factor. They care deeply about their children, and they're not godless. They're not uncaring people.
Heidi Heitkamp:They help take care of each other, that these are common American and human values that are shared by all Americans, and that this idea that urban America is this cold place that if you step outside your house, you get shot. That is not what happens in urban America. And so we need to build the interest and the curiosity to do the work of getting to know each other a little bit better.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you, Heidi. I really appreciate you being on today in this conversation, and looking forward to to hearing more about the work of of IOP down the road and all the ripples that will happen from the student interactions. Right?
Heidi Heitkamp:Well, can I can I just do a shout out to extension? I love extension programs. You know, and people think about it as teaching farmers how to farm, maybe new conservation policies and processes and, you know, new seed varieties coming, marketing. I mean, all of that that that I think people would see. What part of that they don't see is the work that is being done in nutrition, the work that's being done in educating.
Heidi Heitkamp:And my one of my favorite visits when I was senate was a nutrition NDSU nutrition program, where, we had the disability community that is permanently on foods food assistance, SNAP benefits, AKA food stamps. And, they had put together a group of these folks who were living independently, a lot of them, but still needed a little help. And they had cooking classes on how to take those SNAP benefits, make them last for the whole year, and and provide nutritious food. And there was a woman there. When she started this program, she was eating absolutely crap.
Heidi Heitkamp:You know? Because you can buy that with SNAP. You can buy frozen pizzas. You can buy high salt, high calorie food with SNAP benefits. But through this program, she had lost £60 and she was diabetic and no longer needed medication for diabetes.
Heidi Heitkamp:That's extension. And I asked her. I said, oh, that's just so amazing. So and she said, well, my mother was diabetic, and I didn't wanna go through what she went through. But yet extension provided that tool, number 1, to help her live more independently on that small benefit she got, but also to live more healthfully.
Heidi Heitkamp:And so, yay, extension. I love it. It's great great programs.
Ellen Wolter:It's just been a pleasure to work for extension, and the work we're doing right now is focusing a lot on how to have dialogue and conversations across difference because it has become such a huge issue in our society. So, this conversation is, of course, so pertinent, and I just really appreciate your time today. So thank you.
Heidi Heitkamp:Thanks so much. It's been fun.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebysideumn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jekyllah, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is Side by Side.
Music (Jim Griswold):Singing a song side by side.
