North Dakota

Camrud channels the storytelling spirit & tradition of valiant narratives, melding tones of landscapes, women, and men into a familial literary score that maps emotions on the expansive Dakota prairie. Labeled a book of songs, this poetry collection is a hymn to the adventurous European women who transplanted on the northern plains in the aftershocks of ocean and continent crossings and to their hyphenated-American daughters and daughters’ daughters born in successive generations.

Two of North Dakota's most avid hikers, Susan Wefald and her dog Sandy, share their notes on 50 of North Dakota's best day hikes. Armchair and seasoned hikers alike will enjoy exploring North Dakota's diverse landscape with Susan and Sandy. Learn the locations of spectacular vistas. Try one of Susan's picnic lunches. Expand neighborhood strolls into the great outdoors. Bring your dog!

By Susan Wefald
ISBN 978-0-911042-75-7
Copyright 2011
Softcover

More than four hundred Russian and Romanian Jewish homesteaders settled on about eighty-five farms in McIntosh County, North Dakota, beginning in 1905. After clearing rocks and boulders, growing wheat and flax, raising cattle and chickens, and selling cream from their sod houses, most were successful enough to own their own land.

Still is a history of five generations, a family we meet first as they flee Odessa and last as they make their ways as American Jews . . . and as Dakota farmers, as students and storekeepers, as soldiers and lawyers, and even as a teen in an international competition who stands face-to-face with Netanyahu. Rebecca Bender and Kenneth Bender answer the question recently posed to Rebecca by a newspaper reporter: Are you still Jewish?

Paperback, 370 pp

Denise Lajimodiere's interest in American Indian boarding school survivors’ stories evolved from recording her father and other family members speaking of their experiences. Her research helped her to gain insight, a deeper understanding of her parents, and how and why she and her siblings were parented in the way they were. That insight led her to an emotional ceremony of forgiveness, described in the last chapter of Stringing Rosaries.

The journey to record survivors’ stories led her through the Dakotas and Minnesota and into the personal and private space of boarding school survivors. While there, she heard stories that they had never shared before. She came to an understanding of new terms: historical and intergenerational trauma, soul wound.

Stringing Rosaries presents a brief history of the boarding school programs for Indigenous Americans, followed by sixteen interviews with boarding school survivors, and ending with the author's own healing journey with her father.

Hardcover, 332 pp., 41 black and white photographs, updated listing of more than 400 US boarding schools by state, appendix, bibliography, and index.

Growing from the bare prairie of western North Dakota, Schafer created an empire as familiar to Americans as the soap on their shelves, which probably was produced by his Gold Seal Company. As a philanthropist Schafer's enthusiasm and optimism brought Theodore Roosevelt's old cow town of Medora from ruin to a premier tourist attraction. And to the country's political leadership he lent a key business associate as U.S. Secretary of the Interior, and a son as governor of the state.

A wonderful story of a great American grown from the eastern plains.