A Revealing Memoir of Lost Legacy on Lake of the Woods
A review of the new memoir by Jill Swenson
Small towns have secrets. Families have secrets. Long-time residents, politicians, and historians struggle over the decision to reveal or revise history. In this era of historical revision, Jill Swenson, author of The Land of Everlasting Sky – A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, chose revelation. It is a brave choice by Swenson and her publisher, Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, to resist the trend of historical revisionism. Readers of The Land of Everlasting Sky get an unvarnished look at the political and legal machinations that change the author, one Native American family, and the landscape of a remote Minnesota town forever.
From the 1960’s to the 1980’s, I was a frequent visitor to Warroad, Minnesota to see my father’s extended family. They’d run a commercial fishing operation, a mink farm, and even a small cigar factory, in Warroad since the early 1900’s. During my trips to Warroad, it was impossible not to hear about a local Ojibwe chief named Kakaygeesick, who was over 120 years old by the late 1960’s. His picture, in full color headdress, appeared on a postcard stocked in every store in town.
I made a few visits to the WPA-built Warroad Municipal Hospital due to various childhood mishaps but never encountered Kakaygeesick. He’d taken up residence in the care center at the hospital in 1963 as his health declined. However, author Jill Swenson did meet him there in June 1968, shortly before his death in December at age 124. That encounter serves as the starting point for her fine multi-thread memoir in which Swenson struggles to contend with her family’s past, the consequences of Kakaygeesick’s death for his descendants, and the arduous process to determine what was true and what was false.
The title of Swenson’s memoir comes from a rough translation of the Kakaygeesick family name from Ojibwe to English, which means ‘everlasting sky.’ It’s a title loaded with meaning and irony. To look out at Lake of the Woods, the center of life and sustenance for the region’s Ojibwe people for thousands of years, is to see an everlasting sky. It’s a grand pale dome of light blue with wispy clouds. Yet, the main thread of this memoir is about land – the acquisition, the destruction, and the mourning over the loss of a remote Minnesota landscape remade by greed, deception, pollution, and brute force.
This transformation is witnessed by the lake’s everlasting sky and its namesake family – who pay the highest price of all for ‘progress’ – which takes the form of a Red Lake Nation operated casino on the south shore of the lake. In fact, Swenson chose an epigraph from Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood that aptly sets the tone for the book.
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.
The second thread in the book begins with the author’s family in North Minneapolis, and the transformation of the neighborhood where her father operated a furniture store. As the social unrest of the 1960’s permeates their neighborhood, her father loses the furniture store. He takes the family on a series of destabilizing relocations in search of work. When it comes time for Swenson to go to college, her father tells her she’ll have to fund it herself. This sends her on a path through low-wage labor, academia, and to a regenerative farm in upstate New York. Along the way life throws figurative and literal punches that years later leads Swenson to Warroad in a quest to understand her past - and how The Seven Clans Casino got built on what was once the Kakaygeesick family’s land.
Swenson’s prose evokes the expanse of Lake of the Woods – clear, bright, breath-taking. She tells the complex story of how she comes to understand what happened to herself and the Kakaygeesick family in a largely alternating chapters structure. Family trees at the front of the book make keeping track of the key players easy. In addition to the threads of her own story and the story of the Kakaygeesick family, Swenson describes how she determined the facts - while she’s telling the story. This is an extraordinarily difficult feat of authorial control that Swenson makes look easy. It brings a depth to the material that many works of non-fiction lack. Knowing how we know what happened is as important knowing what did happen. It lends a credibility to the history stronger than a list of citations.
To discover that where you come is gone can unmoor your life. To find the truth of why it’s gone takes determination, and to write the messy truth of what happened takes bravery – qualities which Swenson’s memoir displays in abundance.
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. She taught journalism and media studies at the University of Georgia-Athens and earned tenure at Ithaca College.
For a decade she lived off the grid on a small-scale sustainable farm in upstate New York; and has spent the past fifteen years working as an editor and literary consultant.
Jill lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she belongs to the curling club, a poetry group and enjoys walking her dog.
I will be in conversation with Jill at the Nokomis Branch of the Hennepin County Library on June 18, 2026 at 6:30 pm. I look forward to our conversation!
An excellent review and thanks Christopher.
Thanks for the generous review and I'm looking forward to our conversation next month.