In 2014, shortly after her mother Arlene died, author Jill Swenson drove up to Warroad, Minnesota, her mother’s hometown, to visit her aunt and research her family history.
As memories of childhood vacations spent in Warroad returned to her, Swenson remembered meeting famed Ojibwe elder Kakaygeesick in the local nursing home the summer she turned nine.
She recounted, “My sister and my cousin and I were standing in front of him and he reached over towards me in the middle and held my head in his hands and started speaking to me in a language that I didn't understand and didn't speak…I somehow understood at a spiritual level that he was delivering something to me, forewarning, perhaps.”
Inspired by this memory, Swenson went on to include in her research the family history of Kakaygeesick (whose name means “everlasting sky”), which led her to Kakaygeesick’s great grandson, Don Kakaygeesick, who lived in the Warroad area. Swenson was surprised to see a billboard announcing the opening of a new casino in the area and soon learned from Don that Red Lake Nation's Seven Clans Casino was to be built on land that had been allotted to Kakaygeesick and passed down to his descendants. However, Red Lake Nation had claimed the land as its own.
Swenson soon saw similarities in her own family’s history with what she learned from Don Kakaygeesick. What had started as a memoir detailing Swenson’s own family history eventually took shape as a dual story in The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods.
The book moves back and forth between Swenson’s early life in the Twin Cities, her life off-grid on a sustainable farm in upstate New York, the suicide of her husband, the loss of their land, and the death of her mother. The Land of Everlasting Sky also delves into the Kakaygeesick family, Red Lake Nation’s claim on their land, blood quantum, and ancestry.
The land dispute eventually went to court where the ruling determined that the Kakaygeesick family were not Red Lake Nation Indians and ineligible to inherit Kakaygeesick’s land.
“And these bring up very troubling issues about blood quantum and who is and who isn't Indian,” Swenson summarized.
Swenson explained further how the two stories in The Land of Everlasting Sky connect.
“So as an adult coming back after my mother's funeral to her hometown and meeting Don [Kakaygeesick] and reflecting on my own life, I began to realize that this is really a story about recognizing the history I inherited and what my complicity is as a white person in this society to understand. There's a great deal of misunderstanding in Minnesota about our history. Many things have been erased,” she said.
Learn more about Jill Swenson and The Land of Everlasting Sky here.
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