Recently our high school student council members held their third Community Cultural Fair alongside parent-teacher conferences. The large field house typically used for open gym and youth volleyball and basketball practices was lined with tables and décor from over twenty different countries that are represented in our community. And behind those tables stood students and community members serving samples of food from their respective cultures. For months the students and their advisers have been gathering cooking supplies and ingredients and making kitchen schedules so they would be ready to serve the hundreds of community members who would show up, some right on the dot, to make sure they were in time to sample everything from Italy’s tiramisu to the Philippines’ famous egg rolls and everything Gloria cooks from Ghana.

And it’s here I’ll confess that for the past few weeks I’ve been feeling a little burned out and uneasy. Between a confusing a volatile news cycle and a packed schedule of events that kept me working long hours, to managing that annoying chronic pain that tends to flare up in the most inconvenient times to helping our daughters navigate the not-so-fun parts of friendships and girlhood, I found myself questioning, as we all do sometimes, if the good parts truly outweigh the hard parts. 

This can be a slippery slope to walk down. You dip one toe into the well of overwhelm and it’s pretty easy to drop right in over your head. Lately, I feel like I’m floating with one semi-deflated water wing that refuses to give up and I’m pretty sure there are plenty of us who could use an air pump or a life vest right now. 

Which brings me back to the Cultural Fair.  I don’t think anyone in that room would disagree when I say the event was that life vest. I stood on the stage in the middle of the room ready to introduce the MHA Nation Cultural Dancers and on every side of me were people I knew and loved and people I have never met, all ages, all backgrounds, some whose grandparents homesteaded this place and some who just took a new job here yesterday. At any given moment you could walk by a booth and hear members of our community speaking Spanish or Italian or catch a student on Facetime speaking German, showing their parents across the ocean what they’re up to tonight in their exchange program. 

I called the dancers up on stage and they took it from there, welcoming and thanking everyone, introducing the Prairie Chicken Dance and then the Fancy Dance and then the Grass Dance and how Native Americans used to dance to stomp down the tall grass in order to flatten a spot for their teepees. You can only imagine a world like this in history books and movies now, unless you get the privilege of hearing that history flow through the drum beats of men in Nike sneakers and hoodies, or watch it move through the body of a twelve year old boy in traditional dress and moccasins, lifting and sweeping his legs over the imagined grass on the center of the stage. 

“We invite all of you to dance with us now,” our host’s voice boomed from the speakers. He stood by his grandson who wore a matching headdress, leggings and colors. I grabbed my daughters’ hands and we took him up on his offer. The six-year-old dressed in her pretty fancy dance shawl grabbed my hand and along with a dozen or so others from the crowd, more joining as the drums started,  we formed a circle and walked to the beat of the drum.

I don’t know what we think we want America to be if we don’t think it’s this. And I know it’s complicated and I know it’s nuanced and I know it’s political and I’m not as naïve as I used to be, fortunately and unfortunately. And I know one cultural fair in the middle of nowhere North Dakota isn’t going to fix what we all seem to think is broken in wildly different ways. 

But from 4-7 pm central time on March 25, 2025 during Watford City High School’s parent teacher conferences I felt like we had it right. And it was simple. Shaking hands. Saying hello. Asking “What’s this now? What is it made of?” and then bringing it back to our tables and trying it and saying “It’s too spicy for me, but it’s good.” Or “This reminds me of the pudding my grandma used to make.” Or, “You have to go check out Brazil’s cake.” 

And there’s so much more to say here, but, well, I just wish all of American could have been in that room.