Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Writing a memoir was not in the plan for Jill Swenson. Originally trained in journalism, Swenson figured she would stick to her trade when it came to writing the history of the Kakaygeesicks, a displaced Indigenous family near her late mother’s hometown in rural Warroad, Minnesota. But upon developing a friendship with a member of the family, she learned that erasing herself as a white person from that history – and erasing her family of white homesteaders – would not be telling the whole story. Swenson’s new book The Land of the Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods reckons with the complex, tragic, intertwined histories of the picturesque landscape where she grew up.
Enjoy our conversation about memoir as a way to tell history, white guilt and Indigenous land displacement, and history’s role in times of political polarization.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to write this memoir?
Jill Swenson: I lived in North Minneapolis for my early childhood, but we always went up north to spend time with my mom’s side of the family near Warroad, Minnesota. I had the fondest memories up north: picking wild blueberries, seeing a moose, watching the Northern Lights, swimming in Lake of the Woods, going to the trading post.
One day I accompanied my grandmother to the nursing home and met a man called Kakaygeesick, who was a local legend, almost like a rock star for our generation. The day after I met him, I bought this postcard in the trading post with his picture on it. I kept that postcard for 50-some years, and it was hanging on my fridge when my sister called to say, ‘If you want to say goodbye to mom before she dies, you need to get on the road now.’ After her funeral, I discovered that the Kakaygeesick family had been displaced from their home to build the Seven Clans Casino, which opened in September of 2014, months after my mom died.
I didn’t start out writing memoir. I actually thought I was going to be writing more like a journalist, writing the story of how this land was taken from the Kakaygeesick family by Red Lake Reservation. It was [through] coming to know Don Kakaygeesick (the great-grandson of Kakaygeesick, the man I had met in the nursing home decades earlier) and remedying my lack of education about treaties and the history that I began to figure out that white people were a part of this story.
DY: How did you view your personal story as intersecting with Indigenous history?
JS: It was me understanding my role as a white person that I began to feel a little bit more comfortable thinking about myself as part of the story. Because I had established a friendship with the Kakaygeesick family, I trusted myself to be true to their story and to learn about Red Lake Reservation and Red Lake Nation’s history, which I did not know or understand beforehand.
That’s how I was able to begin to make the connections between reservation land and homesteads, and how that connected to the Kakaygeesicks’ allotment. Then I began to think, ‘now I have to write this as a memoir.’ It meant not just looking at, say, my great-grandparents, but also looking at where they fit into larger structures. Homesteaders were used by white wealthy men who controlled our government at the time to move Indigenous people off the lands on or around the Mississippi River and push them even further west.
In learning Don’s life story, I realized I didn’t have to deal with obstructions to my life in the same way that Don did. There’s so much that had been invisible to me that I felt like I could be a surrogate for readers who need to know this history because it’s theirs too. There are so many Americans who are descendants of homesteaders and white settlers–not just in Minnesota, but across the country. I thought that telling my story might be a better way to get people interested in this history.
DY: In the book, you delve critically into your families’ and your own orientations towards race when you were growing up. What did you want your audiences to take from those reflections?
JS: There were so many instances where I see things in a totally different light now that I’m older. I think many people experience this when they look back at things from their childhood. For example, looking through a boy scout handbook from the 60s and 70s and realizing that it’s a guidebook on the romanticization of cowboys and Indians in our culture. Now, we’re embarrassed about it. We like to put that history behind us. I’m suggesting that we get over the embarrassment and shame we might have about our ancestors and really dig into it.
The pursuit of anti-racism never ends. I think many folks who think of themselves as liberals like myself don’t think they need to do any of that critical self-reflection, and they too often stand in judgment of others about their political behavior. I find that one of the reasons we end up in these very partisan, very divided times is that we can’t accept that we make mistakes. Owning our mistakes is part of the process of growing up, maturing, doing better. But saying you were wrong is very hard for most.
DY: Much of your memoir is framed from the perspective of your younger self, including many moments where you didn’t quite understand what you were feeling. Why did you choose to write from the perspective of your younger self and include those confused thoughts along the way?
JS: It was an editorial choice. Memoir requires critical self-reflection. Without that reflection, it’s just a chronicle. The narrator has to be changed over the course of the book. At the same time, I knew that with what I was revealing, I would not necessarily be a likable character. I wanted readers to find me to be a surrogate for themselves in this journey, and I knew they didn’t want to dislike themselves.
But with the child narrator, I could see my younger self and be empathetic with her. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better then. When you know better, you do better. But you’ll notice each time I think I’m doing better and I’m learning something, I also run into it again.
DY: The book has a lot of really beautiful descriptions of the rural landscape in northern Minnesota. What impact did the rurality of the setting have on you growing up, and what role does it play in the memoir?
JS: I felt a connection to the land and to a place where I could swim every day. There is something about the sky there. People talk about Montana having a big sky. Well, a lot of people who live in Montana came from northern Minnesota. The lake itself is like an ocean, except with no waves. It’s flat, still, calm, but yet you can look out over it and not see the other side. And you can look from one direction to the other, left to right, and the lake just continues. It’s an enormous body of water.
There’s also something about the wind – it has just a little bit of salt to it. It was Lake Agassiz, a pre-glacial lake, so there’s a lot of loamy soil there, a lot of fir trees, a lot of pine, larch, and tamarack. The magpies, the wildflowers, the lady slippers in bloom. Rurality has always appealed to me, from an early age. It’s peaceful.
DY: How do you situate your memoir in the larger story of the land near the Lake of the Woods?
JS: I think a lot of people, when they’re interested in family history, are only interested in their own tree, and maybe what rich or famous people might appear in their tree. Nobody seems to be interested in the forest.
But everybody is related to one another. And yet a lot of people up here remain very divided around race issues. Beyond the Red Lake Reservation, there is a large off-reservation community of Red Lake Indians in Warroad. And about 17% of the local population in Warroad is Laotian, since many Laotian refugees came to the area in the 90s and became farmers. My motivation in writing is that we need to know the history behind these communities because it’s our ignorance that becomes more dangerous as we’re trying to move forward in an increasingly polarized community. Those partisan ties have nothing to do with the history.
The local newspaper in Warroad used to do a lot with local history, but it shut down in 2019. Now that there’s no newspaper, other locals are stepping up to fill that void. The Warroad Heritage Center puts out a history newsletter. The restaurants have weekly history trivia nights. They have a two-week history camp. All of a sudden history’s the only bipartisan issue people can agree on, and they’re beginning to embrace this stuff and really start to reckon with it in new ways. Much of that has happened in the last two years. Don and I have worked together to ask some important questions and become involved in the community to raise consciousness around these issues.
In July, Don [Kakaygeesick] and I had community conversations in public libraries and the county museums in Warroad, Roseau and Baudette, the three big cities along Lake of the Woods. People who know this history really want to come together because it’s never been written down, they want to have a book about the place they live in, and they want to add to that story. And I’m just all ears.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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