We have what visitors want to see: the REAL America
By Pat Boyd, Executive Director, South Dakotans for the Arts

 

    We have what visitors want to see: the REAL America

As the Prairie’s iconic cultural ambassador to the world, Garrison Keillor once defined cultural tourism for us at a gathering at the White House. “We need to think about cultural tourism because really there is no other kind of tourism. It’s what tourism is…People don’t come to America for our airports, people don’t come to America for our hotels, or the recreation facilities…They come for our culture: high culture, low culture, middle culture, right, left, real or imagined—they come here to see America.”

This defining statement does not deny the importance of excellent transportation, lodging and fitness centers, but it underscores their supportive roles in a way that warms the heart of the arts advocate. We often seem to have our sensibilities on backward and inside out, constructing endless roads looping back on themselves, and calling the airports destinations. If we keep thinking this way, we can’t complain that people fly over us or drive speeding past us on their way to somewhere else in America, somewhere interesting, somewhere more, well, American.

Does it get more American than South Dakota?

When friends and family come to visit, we know how to entertain. We know how to be interesting. We go to Jazz Fest and the Black Hills Powwow. We take them on the Sculpture Walk in Sioux Falls and to the Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse mountain monuments. We tour the South Dakota Art Museum, Washington Pavilion, the Red Cloud Summer Art Show and Sale, or the Dahl Art Center. We take in a performance of the South Dakota Symphony or the Black Hills Symphony, or a play, maybe Prairie Rep or the Black Hills Playhouse. We visit the National Music Museum, the Dacotah Prairie Museum and the Journey. Those are just a few of the really big entrees on South Dakota’s cultural tourism menu, and they are really, authentically, quintessentially America at its best. We have, accordingly, made it very easy to get to them and very comfortable to stay nearby. We did not build them so the tourists would come, although we have done some of that, too, and some of that is great fun.

The most fortunate visitors to South Dakota really are treated as friends and family. They are the ones who experience the live music, film festivals, arts festivals, ethnic festivals, powwows and wacipis, quilt shows, fairs, the community theater productions, the galleries and coffee houses, the street dances and the parades…this American life we lead in South Dakota. We invite them to enjoy it with us. It is not a show we put on for others, although we are more than happy to share. Because we value these experiences so personally, so intrinsically, and enjoy them so much, we tend to forget the meaning they hold for those who have to travel far and work hard to discover them. These smaller items on the cultural menu are home-cooking at its best, often literally.

Whether we can or even want to infuse them into the popular imagination of authentic American experience is up to us. They are still shielded from view by the miles of state highways and county roads between Interstate and town, still invisible from the jet window, but increasingly accessible through the great open eyes of the Internet and dashboard GPS. In many ways, the continued existence of our deeply rooted cultural experiences is dependent on our ability and willingness to share them with people who can afford to pay for them. To do it right and with dignity, we need to get our sensibilities on with the patterned side out and the label in the back--show your stuff and remember where it comes from, South Dakota!