Port: On the demise of an important cultural bridge to North Dakota’s past

MINOT — It’s hard to describe how important a cultural event the Norsk Hostfest was.

I say “was,” using the past tense, because news this week is that the annual event, which had just completed its 46th year, is coming to an end.

The event was important to me as a descendant of Scandinavian immigrants. My maternal great-grandparents came to America from Norway, and homesteaded a farm near the Ryder area. The Hostfest was a way for me to connect to their cultural traditions, from food and music to the history of the Norwegian diaspora.

The event was also important to my family. We spent years attending and working at the event. We were a host family for Scandinavian performers who traveled to Minot to entertain at the event. We even got some local media coverage in 2004 about four generations of my family volunteering.

I have so many memories from the Hostfest. For a while, when I was a paperboy for the Minot Daily News, I would go out to the festival early in the morning to sell newspapers door-to-door in the RV campgrounds. My grandma would tell me stories about her immigrant parents.

And the food! I once ate so much

rommegrot

— a Norwegian dessert pudding — that the resulting gastro-intestinal pyrotechnics are still a thing of family lore.

I even met famed political consultant Karl Rove at the Hostfest one year.

He was there to be inducted into

the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame,

and was being escorted around by former Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem. Apparently the two of them were friends from their College Republican days. They ran across me working at a booth. I was a part-time political blogger then. I hadn’t yet begun my full-time writing career.

I have so many happy memories from the Hostfest.

Now, it’s over.

“In recent years, the festival has faced significant increases in the cost of nationally recognized performers, as well as insurance, facilities, labor, and logistics,”

a press release from the Hostfest board said.

“At the same time, attendance levels have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, creating ongoing financial challenges that cannot be responsibly overcome.”

The pandemic certainly didn’t help the festival, and I think we can fairly blame some mismanagement, too. As the generation the event originally catered to began to die out there was little effort made to draw the interest of younger generations. It was expensive, too, making it cost prohibitive for younger families to begin the traditions of attendance that cultural event like the Hostfest depends on.

But it’s hard to ignore the involvement of Epic Companies,

which took over management of the event

for a couple of years post-pandemic before the company’s spectacular financial collapse prompted its exit from the arrangement. Epic had tried to take the event in a new direction, away from its cultural roots and toward some sort of a modern music festival, and it just didn’t work.

After years of failing to adapt to modern audiences, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and poor management by Epic Companies, Minot and North Dakota are losing a treasure.

A bridge to our past.

A preservation of an important part of our state’s history.

I’d like to think that the Hostfest will be replaced with something new that will continue to preserve Scandinavian heritage in our area, but it probably won’t be. To be clear, some preservation continues. The

Scandinavian Heritage Association,

which maintains the Scandinavian Heritage Park in Minot, will endure, and that’s a good thing. They do wonderful work.

It’s just not the same.

It feels like we need things like the Hostfest now more than ever. So many in our society, nearly all of them descendants of previous waves of immigration, have adopted a pronounced hostility to new generations of immigrants. They’ve committed themselves to making it clear that those new immigrants aren’t welcome. Which is why it’s important for us to remember our own immigrant past. The joys and the struggles and the warts.

The Hostfest was a part of that. Now it’s gone. So it goes.