This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Seth Tupper is our Dakota Political Junkie today. He joins In the Moment to discuss and analyze Gov. Kristi Noem's memoir, "Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland."
What can we uncover about her politics and leadership style from the lessons and stories in her book? Tupper has an analysis.
Plus, we discuss the Black Hills' water supply. Can a good thing last forever?
Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight. Read his full commentary on Gov. Noem and her father.
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Lori Walsh:
You're listening to In the Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm Lori Walsh.
South Dakotans are most likely familiar with Gov. Kristi Noem's political origin stories, from the death of her father, to her studies at SDSU, when she served in Congress and simultaneously sought her bachelor's degree, to the hardworking women in her life who worked and hunted alongside the men. The nation, however, learned more of those stories when Gov. Noem spoke at a recent NRA gathering. And readers can learn even more by diving into the pages of her 2022 memoir. It's called "Not My First Rodeo."
Well, Seth Tupper heads South Dakota Searchlight, and he wrote about Noem and her father online at southdakotasearchlight.com. We're going go talk about that for today's Dakota Political Junkies conversation.
Plus, you can not sustain community growth without access to an adequate water supply, and in Rapid City, that supply is not something to be taken for granted.
Seth is with us now from SDPB's Black Hills Surgical Hospital studio in our Rapid City offices. Seth Tupper, welcome back. Thanks for stopping by the studio.
Seth Tupper:
Hey, Lori. It's great to be here. Coincidentally, I just came from a press conference that Gov. Noem had out here at Reptile Gardens.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Any good stories or anecdotes?
Seth Tupper:
They tried to get her to hold the giant snake and she wouldn't do it.
So however, the tourism secretary, Jim Hagen, he did jump right in there and had a giant snake wrapped around his shoulders. So the governor did meet some other reptiles and raptors and other things, so yeah. And they announced a tourism grant program.
Lori Walsh:
That's Travel and Tourism Week, and Gov. Noem is not going to say something that she doesn't want to say and she's not going to do something she doesn't want to do.
And that hearkens back to how she was raised, although she did many things she didn't necessarily want to do because of her father, so that's grit in her definition of the wrote. You wrote about this after hearing her NRA speech. Tell me a little bit about why you wanted to specifically talk about Gov. Noem and what she has told us about her father.
Seth Tupper:
Well, it started out, she published her memoir last year. And it was in Mitzi's Books here in Rapid City, I think it was last summer. It's a great little bookstore in downtown Rapid City, and was in the South Dakota section and saw her book. And I thought, "As a journalist who covers the governor, I should read this book."
I think it's unfortunate because I think a lot of people who don't like Gov. Noem or didn't vote for her probably ignored the book. And those who do like her and voted for her read it through their lens. And those two sides don't talk to each other often.
But when I started to read it, I was really kind of amazed. I think a lot of people would expect a political memoir would just be all sort of political puffery. And certainly, there was some of that in there, but it was very, very revealing. And she told a lot of deeply personal stories from her childhood, probably spent by my guess 80 or 90 pages talking almost exclusively about her father, who happened to die in the 1990s in a farm accident.
And so that was on my mind, and I had read the book and had it on my shelf. And then when she went to the NRA event last month and spoke about her father and told the story specifically about him that I thought, "Okay, I need to write about this now."
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. He is a tough man. He is in pain. He's got a lot of physical problems from the work that he's done in his life as a farmer and rancher. But he walks fast and those kids run to keep up. You've got to sprint if he tells you to get something, you've got to spring full force.
And she loves it. She says at some point in the book, "You would think that I wouldn't want to be anywhere near any of this, but that was where the action was."
What did you find about how much she wants to learn lessons from him, even if those lessons to some of us would be not how a father should treat a child, not safe in some ways?
Seth Tupper:
Well, and that's exactly it right there. I think a lot of people who grew up in rural places on farms and ranches recognize the type of parenting that's described in the book, and expecting an awful lot from kids and giving them a lot of responsibility, and expecting them to do a lot of work at a very young age.
And Gov. Noem certainly experienced that. But as with everything with her and the ways she's kind of a lightning rod and for praise and for criticism both, there's two different ways to view the story she tells about her dad in the book, one being the way she views it, which is he made her a hardworking, independent, responsible, high-achieving person. And certainly, that's true.
But the other way to view it, as some people who've read the book do, is that this guy was also somebody who was very stubborn, who was impatient, sometimes to the point of recklessness, and who sometimes put his kids in situations that were kind of dangerous. And I reference a few of those examples in the commentary that I wrote.
And she referenced one in her NRA speech, where she talked about going elk hunting with her dad and being out in the wild somewhere. She said it was in the Big Horns in Wyoming, and him turning to her and saying, "Okay, hunt your way back to camp." And I think she said she was 9 or 10 at the time, and her having to do that. And she said she found out years later that her mother told her that he was at a safe distance the whole time watching her, but apparently also making growling noises and trying to make her think that a bear was following her.
Again, lot of laughter at the NRA, and then about that, and then appreciation of a father who made his daughter tough. But then on the other hand, as people watch that on YouTube, some other people cringed at that and said, "Wow, that's kind of strange."
Lori Walsh:
He puts her behind the wheel of a semi at 12 or 13 and says, "Drive home." She's never done this before. And his advice is like, "Take the corners wide."
I mean first of all, in some ways, you have to ask yourself, "Did this happen?" I'm not saying she fabricated it. But it is a childhood memory, and it seems it's one of those stories that again, if you grew up in South Dakota, you might be like, "Yep, that's exactly what happens." But somebody that grew up in New York City might doubt that.
This could end horrifically. This could end in terrible tragedy, but she makes it home.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. And I think you're right. I think people who didn't grow up in rural areas have a tough time believing it. This is how I learned to drive. Luckily, it wasn't in a semi, but when I was 13, my brother threw me the keys when we were walking out the door and said, "You're driving."
Lori Walsh:
Take the wheel, yeah.
Seth Tupper:
So a lot easier to handle a car than a semi. But yeah, and the book is just full of stories like that. And there's another one that was really striking to me, where her dad, whose name was Ron Arnold, instructed her and her brother to get an ornery cow into the barn, or maybe it was out of the barn. I don't remember which. But anyway, they were supposed to move this cow and it wouldn't cooperate. And they came back to their father a couple times, "We just can't do it." The way she tells it in the book, he lost his temper and ran over to the cow and put a headlock on it and started punching it in the nose. And then the cow got him pinned down to the ground. And they had to jump in and get the cow's attention and rescue him. And again, okay, there's one way to view that story is, this guy was rough and tough and everything. But another way is, wow, that's some pretty reckless behavior.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. She says he gives her boots to the backside. She says at one point, her mother probably kept them alive. I don't read in the book a true reckoning or, I mean, when she talks about how she parents, you can hear the difference in how she talks to her kids, of course. But there doesn't seem to be a moment where she says, "I wanted to do things differently." She takes the positive lessons out of everything. My favorite one is because it does remind me of my dad, is if you're working with him and he needs a tool, you're supposed to somehow anticipate what he needs before he needs it. And I won't do the voice, but my brothers and sisters have a voice where if you would say, "Dad," he'd be like, "What?" And he would just shout it back at you, and you would jump three feet in the air.
Now I maybe have a more nuanced adult perspective of my dad's behavior, which is in some ways, it's funny, and it taught us things. And other ways, it was an unnecessary way to deal with your children, and probably indicated something else was going on in his life. This man is under an incredible amount of pressure to stay economically viable on the farm.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. And experienced some really tough times in the 80s, as a lot of farmers did, I'm sure, during the farming crisis, and foreclosures happening all around. And so yeah, and that probably came out in some of his behavior.
But you mentioned kind of when you grow up and you think back to your parents and you consider what was good, what was bad. And what do I want to emulate, and what do I want to do differently? That's kind of what's interesting about it. You mentioned she seems to take the approach that it's kind of a dual approach where in the book, there are parts where she seems to recognize these were sort of the bad things about my dad's character or the not so good things. And she seems to recognize that she's inherited a lot of those traits, but she seems to basically embrace all those traits as, well, that's what made me who I am. And I'm running with that and I'm going forward.
Lori Walsh:
And it's her role of government, that's how she uses this strict father mentality in how it's good for you if someone does not come and solve your problems for you. And that is how government should be run, like a strict parent in some ways.
Seth Tupper:
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there, yeah. Just today at this press conference, when Secretary of Tourism Jim Hagen was introducing her and when others were talking about her, there was mention that she left our decisions to us, and she encouraged independence during the pandemic, and that was good for tourism to be open. That really permeates the way she governs, the way her politics, personal responsibility, which was obviously deeply, deeply ingrained in her by her experience with her father.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. So fascinating. I did reach out to the governor's office and asked for an interview just about "Not My First Rodeo." I have not heard back from them.
But before I let you go, Seth, I want to make sure I talk about another piece of commentary that you have on South Dakota Searchlight, which is about water in Rapid City and just how much, you've been covering this for a long time, and there have been big changes in the time, in a short time of coverage. Tell us an update and a summary of that, if you would.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. When I moved out here in 2014 and worked for The Rapid City Journal, one of the first stories I actually covered was the dedication of a gauging station on Rapid Creek that had been really important in measuring the height to the flood in 1972, and I think they rebuilt or refurbished this gauging station. But anyway, a lot of dignitaries gave speeches, including then-Mayor Sam Quaker. In his speech, I just remember him saying that, I have the tape of it still of him saying that unlike a lot of cities in the West, Rapid City doesn't have a water problem and we've got plenty of water for 100,000 more people or whatever it was he said at the time. And I thought as a new resident of Rapid City, "Well, that's good. Check that off the list. No water problems here."
Fast-forward about five years, and the West Dakota Water Development District, which is publicly elected board that covers Rapid City and the surrounding region, they worked with some team at South Dakota Mines to do a study on the water needs in the area. And that study said that, well, yeah, there's plenty of water. But if we were in a prolonged period of drought, actually, we could be facing a water shortage, that there's plenty of water in normal conditions, but not in a prolonged drought. And so that got a lot of people's attention and sparked an effort to form a non-profit. Some people are leading that effort here in Rapid City and work to perhaps get a water pipeline from the Missouri River to here. But the update was, there was a hydrology conference out here in Rapid City recently, where a retired US Geological Survey employee, Mark Anderson, gave an update on aquifers, which are the source of all the creeks that rise up from sprigs and run out of the Black Hills.
And he basically said that back in the early 2000s, he looked up the data, and kind of unnoticed by most people, all around the Black Hills, the levels of wells dropped pretty precipitously. And the moral that he took from that was if we think we're going to count on groundwater, which is really the ultimate source of Rapid Creek and Pactola Reservoir and everything out here, we'll be sorely mistaken if we think that's going to carry us forward 20, 30, 40, 50 years into the future.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Well, you can read that at southdakotasearchlight.com. Seth Tupper here for today's Dakota Political Junkies conversation. We'll see you next time.
Seth Tupper:
Thanks, Lori.
