On Being A Flatlander

by Brent Lannan
Saskatoon Report
October 1990

Joni Mitchell believes a childhood on the prairies tends to scrape away artificiality, replacing it with an openness that reflects the vastness of sky and plain.

Painter, poet, singer - and flatlander. That's how Joni Mitchell describes herself in the image-rich, perfectly sculpted sentences that embody her lyrics.

"My creative drive is based on a series of powerful images. The royal blue moment of morning, the fury of a hailstorm that I watched in wonder as it completely devastated a friend's father who watched his crop, all his work, torn and shredded. The train rolling around the curve at Maidstone, with the sun flashing in deep pink from the elevators across the road. That is all part of me. I am a flatlander."

A flatlander, a plains person. Mitchell says a childhood on the prairie tends to scrape away artificiality, replacing it with an openness and curiosity that is perhaps a reflection of the intense, clean light and surrounding vastness of sky and plain.

"There's a stride to a flatlander that I know is part me, part of walking across fields for hours. A long kind of stride that you can identify in another flatlander. I can hear this groove in Neil's (Young) music. It's not that all the music sounds the same (but) it has this long, country walk gait."

The potent imagery for which Mitchell's albums are noted is, she says, the result of every lifetime experience but the core essence is distinctly prairie. As a child with polio, she says she was forced into isolation and became an inward person, an observer of self. Though she recovered, that one unhappy episode forever altered her perception.

"I wasn't lonely but I was a lone person. But that is part of being an artist. Long walks across the prairies, the colors always changing, sitting in a bluff of trees, becoming very aware of the subtle shapes and tones. I've talked with other flatlanders about this, Sam Sheppard from the Taxes plain, and there is a distinctly prairie point of view."

But although she admits she has retained her innocence, Mitchell notes her childhood was not some idyllic dance through wildflowers. One cut from her forthcoming album - which she plans to call either "Night Ride Home" or "Radio Poetry" - is decidedly unhappy, her introduction to bigotry. Called "Cherokee Louise," it recounts the occasion when a 13-year-old Indian friend was forced to flee the foster home where she was a victim of sexual abuse. Mitchell and another friend hid the girl in the narrow tunnels under Saskatoon's Broadway Bridge. The lyrics speak of flashlights slashing through the dark, handprints left in the piles of soft dust and the frustration Mitchell felt when Cherokee Louise was eventually discovered and taken into custody.

"Saskatchewan was where I was shaped, where I first learned about bigotry. I remember my first reaction seeing Indians, how interesting and beautiful their clothing was compared to what we wore." It remains a source of immense disappointment to her, she says, that the native culture - a treasure of lore and tradition - was viewed as something primitive or uncivilized.

"It always mystified me at the museum when I would see these intricate beadworks and robes and headdresses … which were replaced by the new and improved artifacts from the Eaton's catalogue. The ditzy tin buckets. I remember thinking what was called civilization didn't appeal to me very much," she laughs.

It is another of the Saskatchewan, the flatlands, memories she recalls as being somewhat contradictory. One painting in an upcoming exhibition at Canada House in London is of a prairie hailstorm, a mix of grey-blue-purple, deep amber and pale grey. Lovely to watch, she notes, but she witnessed such a storm at the farm of a friend and watched "a man being destroyed.

"It was such a mix of emotions, so many contradictions. The wild colors, the hot pink in the middle of the afternoon, the trembling at the fury as hailstones pounded down, and then the despair on the face of my friend's father as all his work was wiped out in minutes. It was a source of wonder that the sky was capable of such beauty and cruelty."

Similarly, she recalls a Winnepeg coffeehouse during which the audience cleared out in mid-performance when the skies exploded in a cloudburst. "The plains," she laughs. "The only place where I've been upstaged by the rain. But I understand. When you are of the prairies, you know that there's something very natural about that."

And when she returns to the plains, Mitchell says she generally chooses to drive because "it is all part of me, I want to see it all. I feel very comfortable in all that openness. A flatlander knows what that means."