White birch, red hawthorn, a memoir, Nora Murphy
Type
Classification
4
Creator
1
Subject
4
Content
1
Author
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Other version
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Label
White birch, red hawthorn, a memoir, Nora Murphy
Language
eng
resource.biographical
contains biographical information
resource.governmentPublication
government publication of a state province territory dependency etc
Index
no index present
Literary form
non fiction
Main title
White birch, red hawthorn
Oclc number
962232285
Responsibility statement
Nora Murphy
Sub title
a memoir
Summary
""This is conquered land." The Dakota woman's words, spoken at a community meeting in St. Paul, struck Nora Murphy forcefully. Her own Irish great-great grandparents, fleeing the potato famine, had laid claim to 160 acres in a virgin maple grove in Minnesota. That her dispossessed ancestors' homestead, The Maples, was built upon another, far more brutal dispossession is the hard truth underlying White Birch, Red Hawthorn, a memoir of Murphy's search for the deeper connections between this contested land and the communities who call it home. In twelve essays, each dedicated to a tree significant to Minnesota, Murphy tells the story of the grove that, long before the Irish arrived, was home to three Native tribes: the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk. She notes devastating strategies employed by the U.S. government to wrest the land from the tribes, but also revisits iconic American tales that subtly continue to promote this displacement--the Thanksgiving story, the Paul Bunyan myth, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. Murphy travels to Ireland to search out another narrative long hidden--that of her great-great-grandmother's transformative journey from North Tipperary to The Maples. In retrieving these stories, White Birch, Red Hawthorn uncovers lingering wounds of the past--and the possibility that, through connection to this suffering, healing can follow. The next step is simple, Murphy tells us: listen"--, Provided by publisher
Table of contents
Contents -- Stranded -- Old Stories -- The Cedars -- The Crab Apple -- The Pines -- American Chestnut -- The Elm -- Conquest in the Maples -- The Maples -- Wild Rice -- White Birch -- Potato -- Coming Home -- Red Hawthorn -- The Chokecherry -- The Crab Apple -- Acknowledgments -- Resources and Further Reading
Incoming Resources
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