Linda LeGarde Grover will join the Wadena County Historical Study at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 11 for a virtual presentation and discussion of her works, including A Song over Miskwaa Rapids and The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives, as part of the Historical Society's BookEnds Online series. This is a free virtual event. Registration link to come!

Beginning with her award-winning debut story collection The Dance Boots and continuing with her novels The Road Back to Sweetgrass and In the Night of Memory, both published by Minnesota, Linda LeGarde Grover has created and explored the imaginary Mozhay Point Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota. She also wrote the poetry collection The Sky Watched and a book blending memoir, history, and Ojibwe tradition, Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Missabekong. She is professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe.

About Linda's newest book, A Song over Miskwaa Rapids:

Linda LeGarde Grover weaves an intimate and complex novel of Mozhay Point and its people with A Song over Miskwaa Rapids. Margie Robineau, fighting for her family’s long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie pieces the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own tightly held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget.

Praise for The Sky Watched:

"The Sky Watched is truly a gift of collective memory through generations broken by genocide and colonization. " —Colors of Influence

"This book of poems is much more than a collection of poetry: it is documentation of our existence as Ojibwe people, of our historical struggles and our strong resilience. Linda LeGarde Grover creates beauty, using words to form pictures and evoke emotion about our past and give vision to our future as a people. This collection is a testament to the fact that when our elders say, 'we are each given a song,' Grover was given, and gives to us, many songs. Read each word as a gift."—Marcie Rendon, author of the Cash Blackbear Mystery Series

"Remember, remember, remember, Linda LeGarde Grover’s wonderful book demands. And she does. Again and again. Old tales from the Ojibwe tradition and new stories from mission schools and relocations where ‘a tangle of children smell home in their dreams.’ She captures the taste of recipes and the feel of beading bracelets alongside injustices minor as a navy bean and major as a lost language. These are poems as sad and essential as a field of cotton flowers. You will remember them."—Jeffrey Thompson, author of Birdwatching in Wartime and Fragile