Postcards in the Air : TWO STORIES INTERTWINED

The beginnings of summer remind me of my family's trips halfway across the country. Most of my extended family on my dad's side lived in Minnesota or close-by states. We would take a car trip every few years across the Mohave Desert (at night so we could all survive the desert heat). Our car had a burlap bag attached to the bumper in case the radiator overheated, while inside we played car games. We drove to Las Vegas, then to St. George, Provo, through the Rockies to Salt Lake City, to Cheyenne, Rapid City, and Pierre, South Dakota, where we stopped to visit cousins and stayed at an early B&B. We went on to Sioux Falls, and over the Plains and finally, to Willmar, in the middle of Minnesota, in the middle of corn fields and lakes, loons, and north of the home of the Lower Lakota Community.

We traveled across the West's bloody history as we visited the Black Hills and Fort Bridger with the knowledge that much of the land we ventured on had been traversed for centuries by Dakota and other native tribes long before European settlers arrived. The land around Willmar had been the home of the Lakota tribe, who rose up in rebellion against white settlers (we could read an historic marker about the event near the town of Spicer), and who were eventually defeated with more than 300 men rounded up, charged, and 38 eventually hanged altogether after Lincoln denied them clemency, one of many dreadful moments in the migration expansion across our country.

When we reached Willmar, we stayed at Grandma Heimdahl's rambling house next to the railroad line and listened late at night to the haunting whistles of the trains arriving at the station and roundhouse in the center of town. Grandma's house had a basement filled full of treasures for young kids to explore and furniture in her parlor covered with doilies she crafted. A widow, Grandma offered room and board to single men who lived like ghosts while we stayed with her. We could hear them climb down the stairs and leave in the morning but never met them.

My sister Elle and I slept in the dining room next to grandma's kitchen. In the morning, Grandma prepared the first of many meals for us. Grandma, a no-nonsense woman who raised seven children, spent her time crocheting, attending church, and playing cards with her friends. She wore her long hair in a bread around her head, sipped elderberry wine in the evening, with her cheeks rosy from the wine. She was stout, wore oxford shoes, and made lefsa, a Norwegian treat shaped like a tortilla but made from mashed potatoes and covered with butter and either jam or sugar.

My dad's family arrived in Minnesota from Norway after the wars across the plains. My grandmother's mother died in childbirth. Her aunts and uncles close by helped to raise her. My grandfather came with his brother, who continued to Washington. Their family name, Olson, was so common in the United States that they changed it to Heimdahl, the guardian of the rainbow in Norse mythology. They left us with a name that most people mispronounced until the popular Marvel movies about Thor.

We visited cousins and aunts and uncles on their farms or at their cabins by a lake, listening to elders tell family stories and shared time with cousins swimming, fishing, and boating on lakes large enough to have waves. We would come inside only because mosquito evening time arrived. The mosquitoes and moths batted against the cabin porch lights, hoping one of us would be foolish enough to go outside.

One summer we drove to Bemidji in Northern Minnesota and saw the Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues that brought tourists to the town. We stood at the origin of the Mississippi, which runs through Minnesota and sometimes spreads its broad waters in floods across the plains. Near the spot are Native Tribes' burial mounds. We trespassed around them and thought of what their lives would have been like before and after the Whites arrived to push them off of their lands.

My family immersed itself in the stories of the Native Tribes of the region. We walked the same ground where people before us had lived and thrived. We read about Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud of the Oglala and Hunkpapa Dakota and Lakota. We wandered over the hills where Sitting Bull defeated Custer. We heard stories of the fierceness of Crazy Horse and his horrible treatment once he was arrested. We read about Red Cloud's victory over the U.S. Army, which closed the Bozeman Trail. We knew that these tribes had been forced onto reservations. When Red Cloud went to Washington, DC, to sign the treaty, he saw the vast number of people who lived there. He realized that his group would never drive out the settlers. He came home to be a peacemaker and activist for his tribe.

My family and everyone else who lives in the United States can enjoy a good life on land that was taken from earlier peoples. We live between the American dream of aspiration and the bitter truths of our history. We still need to have a conversation about our relationships with people who don't fit our concept of an American. During the Biden administration, the idea of national parks managed by indegenous people gained ground under the first Native American NPS Director, Charles F. Sams III. Four parks, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Glacier Bay National Park, Grand Portage National Monument, and the Big Cypress National Preserve, are now co-managed by the federal government and tribal nations. Under Trump, this progress is in danger with no confirmed head of the NPS and large numbers of employees fired. As an individual, I ask myself what I can do to support the idea of indegenous people co-managing the national parks. Small steps can grow bigger by writing my reps in Congress, donating to specific Native Tribe organizations, and being an ally as one of my cousins did during the Keystone XL Pipeline dispute or do what so many brave Minnesotans did this year in protest of ICE actions against their neighbors.