Reviewed by Susan J Tweit
Posted on: May 19, 2026
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What happens when you lose everything you thought you had, and have to start over? When what you thought you understood about your family and history turns out to be wrong?
Those questions propel The Land of Everlasting Sky, a haunting memoir that braids Swenson’s life and her family’s story as European immigrants to the far north edge of Minnesota with the lives of the descendants of the Ojibway spiritual leader Kaykaygeesick. Both stories are tragic: Swenson’s great-grandparents homesteaded what was part of the Red Lake Nation’s reservation; Kaykaygeesick’s descendants are dispossessed from the family allotment to make way for a new casino and also denied tribal membership.
Swenson, a journalist and college professor before becoming a small-scale sustainable farmer, is living in upstate New York and still reeling from her husband’s suicide and the loss of their farm when her sister calls her with the news that their mother is dying. Swenson drives through the night and arrives in time to be with her family as her mom leaves the hospital for home, where she dies later that day.
Going through the papers for her mom’s pre-paid funeral, Swenson finds her mother’s hand-written answers to questions about her life:
“She described looking out her childhood bedroom window to a field of blue flax as vast as an ocean under an endless open sky. While she couldn’t wait as a teenager to escape the empty landscape for the Twin Cities, I yearned to return to where she left her childhood behind.”
Return Swenson does, to stay with her aunt, her mother’s sister, outside Warroad, Minnesota, where she spent summer visits. The familiar landscape and people elicit Swenson’s childhood memories, including the time she and her cousins went to the old folks’ home with their grandmother to deliver fresh-baked sweet rolls. In the lobby, they met an old man in a wheelchair who drew Swenson in with “the magnetic force of his presence.”
“He leaned forward, picked up his large hands, and reached for my head. … He spoke low and slow. I didn’t understand a word, but felt his spirit enter me. His hands were warm and soft, and the heat flushed my head, neck, and shoulders, and moved down to my gut where I felt both his urgency and his sorrow.”
That old man was Kaykaygeesick, the spiritual leader, who was then 124 years old. Returning to Warroad, Swenson wonders what had happened to his descendants. Her journalist’s curiosity and research skills land her at the new Warroad Heritage Center and Public Library, a portal to a journey that results in a growing friendship with Don Kaykaygeesick, a great-grandson of the spiritual leader.
The stories that Swenson learns challenge her understanding of herself and her family, and of what it means to belong to the land. To find her way through grief, Swenson must reckon with the past as it really happened, with racism and land theft, blood quantum and bureaucratic travesty.
At once luminous and searing, The Land of Everlasting Sky reminds us that our histories are all interwoven via the land that nurtures us, and the way forward as a nation lies in recognizing our shared culpability and our shared humanity.
