Last week I drove north to Grand Rapids on the Mississippi and talked to a group of women woodland owners. The landscape of evergreens stretched out to the horizon like a Christmas card.
Over the next few days, I drove to towns in central Minnesota and talked about Memory of Trees to readers at seven libraries. Here the land was open, broad fields separated mostly by bare hardwoods. Not as much snow.
I took photos of paper mills, lumber companies, dams, and railway beds turned into RV trails. These are familiar landscapes, known to the world now from the novels of Louise Erdrich, Will Weaver, and in an earlier generation, Sinclair Lewis.
Many of the people who came out to events once milked cows. Most grew up on farms. They know the names of their plants and wildlife and watersheds. I talked to a few people relieved to be off a farm and many others with years of trying to adjust and make meaning out of the loss. People talked about trying to hold on to land they love—woods and fields.
Separation of people from land is part of the shift from agrarian life. But it's larger than that. In The Unsettling of America, written at the time of the U.S. bicentennial, Wendell Berry described it this way: "If there is any law that has been consistently operative in American history, it is that the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become 'redskins'—that is, they become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation." (1)
This week I started reading North Country: The Making of Minnesota by St. Cloud history professor Mary Lethert Wingerd. The illustrations and annotations alone, compiled and written by Kirsten Delegard, make this a book a wonder.
On page 221 is a map of Minnesota that shows Indian land cessions to the United States during the 1800s. One of the earliest was the lower triangle between the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers, where I grew up. In summer 1837, 1200 Ojibwes met at Fort Snelling. Their chiefs agreed to cede 60 million acres for $700,000 in "goods and annuities to be distributed over 20 years, along with blacksmith shops, farm implements, and a school fund if they desired one," according to Wingerd (2).
Two years later, they were still waiting to be paid. When the first steamboat navigated the St. Croix in July 1839, Wingert writes, "expectant Ojibwes gathered near present-day Stillwater, Minnesota, to collect their annuities. Instead the boat brought workmen and equipment to construct the first commercial sawmill in the St. Croix valley."
By the time the shipment finally came in November, snow made it nearly impossible to transport. Many perishable goods were destroyed and others had to be sacrificed. Starving people overate and died. Hunting season was past and they were far from home separated by deep snow. A lumberman who witnessed the tragedy wrote that the first payment became a curse rather than a blessing. (3)
For many, the 1621 thanksgiving at Plymouth, Massachusetts, has become a symbol of broken promises. I don't have to think any farther than my family's farm, gained by the United States for lumber and speculators through the bitter legacy of the 1837 cession. When that portion of land was surveyed and mapped in 1851, it showed only wetlands and waterways, no people or even trees. A century later, plat maps showed a patchwork of farms labeled with European names.
I began to learn about this large and long pattern while living on a very old agricultural landscape in North Africa during college. But I began to understand it when my heart broke as our family farm was sold.
About 60,000 American Indians live today in Minnesota, two-thirds in the Twin Cities, according to a Star Tribune article this morning. A front-page story describes ceremonies of thanksgiving celebrated by American Indians in the Twin Cities, from sweat lodges to Christian services, protests to powwows. Two things in the story stand out to me: it is important to celebrate thanksgiving year round in daily life...and it is important to be in community.
Across the centuries, can human care for all the holy places where we live become something that unites us?
I am deeply moved by the experience of talking to so many lovers of the land on my travels last week, grateful for the chance that my little book has given me to do this.
As I drove, a question kept returning to my mind: What does the land require?
1. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Wendell Berry. Sierra Club Books, 1977; p. 4.
2. North Country: The Making of Minnesota. Mary Lethert Wingerd; illustrations and annotations compiled by Kirsten Delegard. University of Minnesota Press, 2010; pp. 132-33.
3. Ibid., p. 136.
4. "Ceremonies of Thanksgiving." Rose French. Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Nov. 25, 2010; p. 1A.
Photos, top to bottom: Highway 2 west to Grand Rapids, Minn., Nov. 16, 2010; falls at Grand Rapids, Nov. 17; route west to Pierz, Nov. 18; Soo Line Trail, converted railroad bed; Little Falls, Nov. 19. Nikon digital by Gayla Marty.
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