One young boy was at school when his father and the county sheriff came to tell him that he was going to be institutionalized at the North Dakota Developmental Center at Grafton. Another boy was sent to the institution with siblings, a cousin, and his mother after his father, the family breadwinner, died. The state determined that the whole family was incapable of supporting itself due to cognitive disabilities and sent them all away. Another boy said he liked having a chance to get out and work on the farm at Grafton because being cooped up on the ward with other residents was so boring.
A new DVD on sale by the North Dakota Center for Persons with Disabilities at Minot State University puts a human face on the institution at Grafton, where some 20,000 people lived over its first 100 years.
100 years
Brent Askvig, executive director of the MSU center, wrote a book in 2004 called "One Hundred Years: The History and Chronology of the North Dakota Developmental Center" that chronicled the history of the institution using documents and old records. People often asked him if he'd conducted interviews with people who had lived at Grafton, but Askvig said he hadn't because he wasn't quite sure where to end. The potential number of people to interview was huge. Then Askvig started collaborating with some Norwegian researchers who had done a similar project on the history of institutionalization in their country. Norwegians Jan Meyer, Bjorn-Eirik Johnsen, and Leif Lysvik produced a DVD called "Coming to Trastad" that included interviews with Norwegians who had been institutionalized. They encouraged him to do a similar project with North Dakotans.
Askvig used the same format as the Norwegian researchers and their questions to produce his DVD. He located interview subjects through Second Story in Minot. The six subjects came from Minot, Williston, Stanton, Center, and rural Minot.
He needed to find people who had their own guardianship, who were articulate, who remembered their early experiences, and were willing to be interviewed about how they came to be institutionalized at Grafton. Askvig gave his interview subjects a great deal of control over the process. They had a chance to watch video footage and had veto power over whether certain parts of their interviews were included in the final documentary. Askvig said only one of the six asked for about half a minute of footage to be removed. Most of the interviewees said they didn't think they should have been institutionalized.
Askvig edited about seven hours of film footage down to 25 minutes for the DVD, which he produced himself.
Askvig, who has gone to Norway each fall for the past two years to collaborate with Meyer, said eventually he and his Norwegian colleagues plan to publish a scholarly paper comparing the experiences of institutionalized residents in Norway and in North Dakota. The time periods discussed in the two DVDs largely coincide and the cultures are similar, since many of the North Dakotans come from a Scandinavian background, Askvig said. Askvig said that the mentally handicapped are no longer institutionalized in Norway, while there are still more than 100 people institutionalized in North Dakota at Grafton. Many people were moved out into the community beginning in the 1970s and especially after the landmark North Dakota court decision to deinstitutionalize in 1980. Askvig said it was important to interview people about their experiences now, since many of them are in their 60s. One of his interview subjects has since died.
Askvig said the Norwegian researchers are also producing a DVD including interviews with people about what life is like for them now living in ordinary communities. Askvig wants to do a similar project with North Dakotans.
Both the DVD and the book are available through the center.
