The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods

FORTHCOMING FROM SHE WRITES PRESS JUNE 2026

For fans of the series Finding Your Roots, a compelling memoir about how land connects us all—and how, if we are to mend our relations to each other and the earth, we must first reckon with our past, no matter how distant, shameful, or tragic.

Pre-order The Land of Everlasting Sky below:

"A lamentation for sacred places on land and in the heart.

Carolyn Porter

Author of Marcel's Letters

"If a young Jill Swenson breathed in Kakaygeesick’s spirit, this memoir is the long-awaited exhale—a guided meditation blending research and memory, facts and dreams, history and hallucination.

Laura Jean Baker

Author of The Motherhood Affidavits

"Swenson writes with the hope that remembering might not exactly offer legal justice, but perhaps can offer a bit of historical justice."

Elizabeth Rynecki

Documentary filmmaker, podcaster, and author of Chasing Portraits

"To make sense of her personal losses and the losses of the Ojibway people of Minnesota, Jill Swenson takes us on a uniquely absorbing journey into the past, through her own deeply meaningful relationships to people and place as well as through painful, painstaking research. Like two rivers flowing to the same sea, these twinned stories feed a larger American story—one of grief and hope—of how we carry each other's histories within us."

Eleanor Henderson

Author of Everything I Have Is Yours

"The Land of Everlasting Sky – quite literally – takes readers down a narrow road to the deep north. It’s an emotional and spiritual journey into the heart of a family’s history, as well as the forgotten history of a uniquely rugged and remote geography. A compelling and affecting tale."

David McGlynn

Author of Everything We Could Do

"The past is ever present in Jill Swenson’s The Land of Everlasting Sky, a raw, unsparing memoir that braids together history, grief, love, and loss into a moving portrayal of identity, place, and belonging

Cathryn J. Prince

Developer journalist and author of For the Love of Labor

"The Land of Everlasting Sky is a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir that delves deeply into notions of place, identity, reconciliation, and justice. Jill Swenson achieves something devastating in this uncommonly honest and vulnerable story—bravo

Nickolas Butler

Author of Shotgun Lovesongs and A Forty Year Kiss

Jill Swenson writes a weekly column on Substack about her ongoing research into the history and culture of the Warroad area on Lake of the Woods.

The Land of Everlasting Sky

A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods

When Jill Swenson returns to her mother’s hometown after her funeral, she finds a new Seven Clans Casino under construction in Warroad, Minnesota, on Lake of the Woods. Red Lake Nation has recently dispossessed descendants of Ojibway spiritual leader Kakaygeesick from their land, she learns—land where the family has lived for the last two centuries—and has also denied them tribal membership.

In searching for answers to how this could happen, Jill meets the great-grandson of Kakaygeesick. Over the ensuing weeks, months, and years, a friendship forms between them, and Jill gradually discovers what allotments, blood quantum, and the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs have to do with her, the great-granddaughter of immigrants who homesteaded on reservation land. Estranged from her father, still mourning the suicide of her husband and the loss of their farm in upstate New York, and now grieving her mother’s death, Jill has spent decades trying to put the past behind her—but she ultimately discovers that her only path forward is to reckon with the past, no matter how distant, shameful, or tragic.

Clear-eyed and yet deeply personal, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling exploration of the history we inherit and our relationships to land and each other.

Available June 2, 2026 from She Writes Press (distributed by Simon & Schuster).

Jill Swenson

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.

Contact Jill

Stay in the loop. I welcome invitations to appear on podcasts, give a presentation, appear on panels at conferences, offer a workshop, or speak to your book club, organization, or classroom.