Jill D. Swenson is the author of the new memoir The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods. She is an editor and a literary consultant, and she lives in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?
A: It felt more like I was obsessed than inspired. After my mother’s funeral in 2014, I visited northern Minnesota where she grew up. My fondest memories of Mom were from my childhood vacations spent with her family in Warroad—picking wild blueberries, swimming in Lake of the Woods, seeing a moose, meeting an old Indian man named Kakaygeesick at the nursing home.
When I returned to Warroad and discovered Kakaygeesick’s great-grandson, Don, and his elderly mother had been forcibly removed from their allotment land by Red Lake Nation to build a new casino, I thought it was an outrage. I wanted to know how and why this could happen in the 21st century.
The answers to my research questions kept leading me back to what happened a century earlier when a wave of white settlers like my great-grandparents arrived to stake claims on what had been Indian land.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The Ojibway name of Kakaygeesick means Everlasting Sky in English, and the land where he and his family lived for more than two centuries is at the center of this story. The Land of Everlasting Sky is also an apt description of this place to which I have formed a fierce attachment.
I give full credit to the team at She Writes Press for coming up with the title—and the beautiful cover design.
Q: The author Carolyn Porter called the book a “lamentation for sacred places on land and in the heart.” What do you think of that description?
A: A lamentation is an expression of profound grief, often in song or poetry, and serves as a bridge between suffering and solace. I’d like to think my memoir fits this description. But I think it is more than mourning what has passed away; it involves looking toward the future to heal our relationships to the earth and each other.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: After I met Kakaygeesick in his wheelchair in the lobby of the nursing home in 1968, I purchased a postcard at the trading post with a portrait photograph of him wearing a headdress. I kept that postcard, and it was still hanging on my fridge when my sister called to tell me if I wanted to say goodbye to Mom I’d better get on the road home.
Meeting the descendants of Kakaygeesick and learning from them about their family history gave me a new perspective, and a decade later I saw that same postcard quite differently. Writing had required me to critically reflect and analyze my own life experiences and family history, and that changed me.
My hope is that readers reflect on where they came from. Learning about our ancestors and the relationships they had to land changes the way we make sense of who we are.
Go beyond filling in the family tree to see the forest—the history of the places your relatives called home. 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.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I had more questions when I finished writing the book than when I started. And not all of my research ended up in the book. I had gained a lot of local knowledge and established a network of reliable sources.
I broadened the scope beyond my family and Don’s, and started a Substack weekly newsletter in which I publish new discoveries from my ongoing research efforts into the history, culture, and people of Lake of the Woods.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m looking forward to meeting with readers and hearing their stories this summer as I’ve booked a lot of in-person events at bookstores, museums, and public libraries. A full schedule of events can be found at my website.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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