summary written by claude.ai
We Are Documenting History of the Ordinary People
A conversation with Jill Swenson on Substack Live
Today I went live for the first time on Substack — and I did it with Jill Swenson, author of The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, which comes out June 2nd from She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster. Someone dropped Jill’s book in one of my comments and said, “You’ve got to meet Jill.” So I DM’d her. And an hour later, 35 people watched us have the kind of conversation I wish happened more often.
We connected because we are both documenting history of the ordinary people through some really significant historical times right now.
The History She Didn’t Know She’d Inherited
Jill’s book traces her journey back to her family’s roots in Warroad, Minnesota — where her Swedish immigrant great-grandparents homesteaded on land that had been part of the diminished Red Lake Reservation. As a kid, she met an Ojibwe medicine man named Kakagisik, and when she went back in 2014, she discovered a new Seven Clans casino was being built on the land that had been allotted to him. She didn’t understand the history she’d inherited, so she started learning. She met the great-grandson of Kakagisik and began hearing the stories of ordinary people and life that wasn’t written down anywhere.
When Jill first tried to share this story, the reaction was typical: “It’s in rural Minnesota. Doesn’t count. Flyover country. Who cares?” She also had to figure out why she cared so much — and that reckoning led her through her own grief, privilege, and a decade-long process of coming to terms with what it means to grow up white in a country built on stolen land. She told a story about how her parents tried to teach her privilege at the dinner table — eat everything on your plate, there are starving children in Korea — and she never thought those peas were privilege. It took her until recently to really understand how her life was relatively unobstructed because she was white.
“I Have Been Marjorie Taylor Greene”
Then Jill said she was watching Marjorie Taylor Greene yelling at President Biden and thought, “Oh my gosh, I have been Marjorie Taylor Greene.” She saw instantly how ineffective her own political protest had been. “That is not effective,” she said. “So I had to start thinking about what is effective.”
And that’s where our conversation caught fire.
OWLs, COWs, and Leveraging Privilege
The women I’ve been interviewing for the WOMN Project are calling themselves OWLs — Old White Ladies. Jill emailed me and said her group up in northwestern Minnesota calls themselves COWs — Changing Our Ways. And that is exactly it. We’re leveraging our privilege to change the ways of the world around us.
Jill described how her group has no problem calling up another white person to say, “What? Did I hear you correctly?” — using whiteness to call out whiteness so the onus doesn’t fall on the people being subjected to those comments. Her group has even created a monthly column in their local newspaper called “Towards a More Perfect Union,” because there are almost no local news outlets up there anymore. As Jill put it, “We’re not perfect yet. We know it. So what can we do to be working towards that more perfect union?”
Because We Can’t Not
I shared some of the stories from the WOMN Project — like Frances, the protest frog, who has a severe chronic health condition that has put her in the hospital five times since January. She gets out of the hospital and the first thing she does is text the signal chat of her ladies and say, “Where’s a protest I can go to?” She’s faced death in the eye many times and now she’s just like, “Fuck it, I’m going.”
And Kelly Wilson, the only non-anonymous woman in the book, who has raised $80,000 by herself — paying rents for 70 families, providing groceries, Easter baskets, supplies. She showed up the day after she got out of the hospital with pneumonia and sepsis.
It’s not just because we can. It’s because we can’t not. There’s something so in us that says this is the time to show up.
The Never Give Up Mentality
Jill drew the connection to Ukraine — this never give up mentality — and how she’s been reading and listening to stories of ordinary Ukrainians who stayed when the war came. “They weren’t rich people. They weren’t exceptional people. They were people who thought, okay, what do I do? Someone here immediately needs my help, and I help.” She sees that same mentality at work in Minnesota all the time, rooted in survival instinct. Your car doesn’t start in the parking lot? People help. You don’t have to worry you’re going to be stuck there.
Healing Through Connection
We talked about trauma, too — about Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands and how our entire nation is in trauma right now. About how human, heartful, loving connection in the midst of trauma lessens its long-term impact. About how the people coming out of Whipple Detention Center in Minneapolis are immediately received by Haven Watch, and how that act of receiving drastically reduces the chance of long-term PTSD. That’s scientifically, neurologically proven.
We need to keep having this conversation. We need to keep waking people up to the concept of being connected and speaking from community and serving from love and showing that the world needs to heal from this grief and this trauma — or we’re just going to keep perpetuating cruelty on each other. We need to find that mycelial network of community in everything we do and keep working towards that.
That’s Fierce Love.
Thanks for giving a shit. I love you all fiercely.
TeriLeigh💜
