Through land grabs by the US government in Minnesota, native people lost their identities and their civilizations. But through these essays, each based on a native tree, Ms. Murphy shows us that this has happened to many people, not only the native people but to the ones coming to Minnesota to live on this "taken land". Creative and thought-provoking, we can learn from this history...but will we?

Murphy's realization that her family's rise from Potato Famine Irish to comfortable St. Paul professionals was achieved on the backs of land seizures from Native Americans, then secured by the suppression of the Dakota uprising, with people stripping and abandoning the land to finance a leap to the city. This is a genuinely heartfelt attempt to research this process and wrestle with what to do with the knowledge. What really struck me about this was how removed an average person's knowledge was from anyone who has actually studied history--she makes statements about how hard it is to find the texts of treaties or the history of boarding schools, when this has been at my fingertips for thirty years (and, I would have presumed, that of anyone who cared to look). It explains some of the resentment and shock of people who don't approach it with the same attitude of humility and willingness to think about redress.