GRAND FORKS — There are a few constants in life for North Dakotans: the sky is blue, 30 below keeps the riff-raff out, and, cross-border hijinks aside, people generally wake up in the same state they fell asleep in. But for a people not known for radical change, North Dakotans flirted with the unprecedented 35 years ago when the state Senate seriously considered a proposition that could have changed the state’s name, 100 years after statehood. In March 1989, the North Dakota Senate shot down the second and to date most recent attempt to drop the “North” from North Dakota.
The idea — a sort of perpetual “what-if” that peaked in influence in the 1980s —collected an eclectic band of support until the last attempted revival by business leaders fizzled in 2001. (A proponent of the idea, now-Gov. Doug Burgum, chatted extensively with the New Yorker about it in 2002.
) A few people are still holding out for it. ADVERTISEMENT “We will be Dakota, a simple, warm, and friendly name someday,” wrote state Sen. Tim Mathern of Fargo, in an email to the Herald.
Mathern served as the primary sponsor for the 1989 resolution, which would have put a statewide referendum on the ballot in 1990. Congress would have then been asked to allow the state to change its name. He remains a proponent of the name change four decades later.
To Mathern, the word has an “intrinsic beauty.” Dakota, he notes, means “friend” or “ally” in the Dakota language, a variety of the Sioux la.
