AMERICA LOST

53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016 and 55 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2020.

Interstate 35 runs from Texas to Minnesota, passing through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa along the way. A landscape I have traveled since I was a child – it is deeply steeped in memory and still holds remnants of an America that existed before the Internet. In my youth, my mom drove my sister and me along this corridor twice a year to visit family in a small, rural oil town in northern Oklahoma where hard work, faith, and family values seemed to yield a simpler life, and a sense of community I admired. Less than a mile from my grandmother’s house was a statue called “The Pioneer Woman”. She steps proudly ahead while holding her young son’s hand leading him to a better future. As a child, the statue represented feminine strength, perseverance, and grit that helped create this country but, as an adult, I now question at what cost? Who’s water did the pioneer women carry, what atrocities did they willingly participate in to settle this country, and as an eighth generation American, how have I benefited from these injustices? In the series America Lost, I retraced those road trips alone, exploring the familiar byroads and landscapes with a mature understanding of the region’s complicated history of oppression, segregation, and greed with a focus on women’s role in this history. While drivers of change abound, “traditional” values still wield power and win elections along an interstate that attests to an America with opposing views.