Overview

For fans of the series Finding Your Roots, a compelling memoir about how land connects us all—and how, if we are to mend our relations to each other and the earth, we must first reckon with our past, no matter how distant, shameful, or tragic. When Jill Swenson returns to her mother’s hometown after her funeral, she finds a new Seven Clans Casino under construction in Warroad, Minnesota, on Lake of the Woods. There, she learns, Red Lake Nation has recently dispossessed descendants of Ojibway spiritual leader Kakaygeesick from their land—land where the family has lived for the last two centuries—and has also denied them tribal membership.  In searching for answers, Jill meets the great-grandson of Kakaygeesick. Over weeks, months, and years, a friendship forms between them, and Jill gradually discovers what allotments, blood quantum, and the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs have to do with her, the great-granddaughter of immigrants who homesteaded on reservation land. Estranged from her father, still mourning the suicide of her husband and the loss of their farm in upstate New York, and now grieving her mother’s death, Jill has spent decades trying to put the past behind her—but discovers the only path forward is to reckon with history. Clear-eyed and yet deeply personal, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling exploration of the history we inherit and our relationships to land and each other.

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Reviews

""The Land of Everlasting Sky--quite literally--takes readers down a narrow road to the deep north. It's an emotional and spiritual journey into the heart of a family's history, as well as the forgotten history of a uniquely rugged and remote geography. A compelling and affecting tale.""--David McGlynn, author of Everything We Could Do ""A lamentation for sacred places on land and in the heart.""--Carolyn Porter, author of Marcel's Letters ""If a young Jill Swenson breathed in Kakaygeesick's spirit, this memoir is the long-awaited exhale--a guided meditation blending research and memory, facts and dreams, history and hallucination.""--Laura Jean Baker, author of The Motherhood Affidavits ""Swenson writes with the hope that remembering might not exactly offer legal justice, but perhaps can offer a bit of historical justice.""--Elizabeth Rynecki, documentary filmmaker, podcaster, and author of Chasing Portraits ""To make sense of her personal losses and the losses of the Ojibway people of Minnesota, Jill Swenson takes us on a uniquely absorbing journey into the past, through her own deeply meaningful relationships to people and place as well as through painful, painstaking research. Like two rivers flowing to the same sea, these twinned stories feed a larger American story--one of grief and hope--of how we carry each other's histories within us.""--Eleanor Henderson, author of Everything I Have Is Yours

Author Information

Jill D. Swenson grew up in the Twin Cities and moved to Wisconsin in high school. She graduated from Lawrence University and earned an MA and PhD from The University of Chicago before going on to teach journalism and media studies at the University of Georgia-Athens and earn tenure at Ithaca College. For a decade she lived off the grid on a small-scale sustainable farm in upstate New York; now she lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she works as an editor and literary consultant, belongs to a curling club and a poetry group, and enjoys walking her dog. 

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