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69 nora MUrphy s The Maples Is This Land My Land? When I presented an earlier version of this essay at Saint John’s in May 2008, I told the audience (mostly non-Native folks like me) that Minnesota can never be my land, or our land, until its true story is told and we stop our state’s war against our indigenous hosts. As I spoke I knew the college was near my great-great-grandparents’homestead , but I did not realize that their township intersected Saint John’s Arboretum. In these woods, I could practically retrace my ancestors’ steps when they arrived here in 1858,the same year Minnesota became a state. Yet, I was anxious about visiting the arboretum. I feared that the legacy of the stolen land and unhealed trauma in our state’s past would haunt the woods. But something called me into the arboretum and onto a path to the past.1 I cannot clearly map my family’s trail from Ireland to Minnesota. My great-great-grandmother Katie Hughes was the third child in a family of eight, and her future in Ireland was doomed by the potato famine that struck County Tipperary in 1846. Her family had been tenant farmers who paid fees and taxes on the land—which they once nora murphy takes us into yet another aspect of memory—memory built around ideas that have changed over time. What does it mean to have grown up with one story and then to learn another version as an adult? Murphy writes, “Minnesota history is like the famous optical illusion showing two candlesticks or two women. Our brain can only see one version of the image at a time and can get stuck on one or the other.” In this case, the women and the candlesticks are the Native and non-Native stories of Minnesota’s settlement. In this very personal and probing exploration of her family’s decision to leave Ireland and settle in Minnesota,Murphy suggests ways in which non-Native people,including her own family, participated in and continue to benefit from the conquest of Native people. 70 u MUrphy had owned—to a British lord whose family received the land as a gift after the bloody British takeover of Ireland in the 1650s. Since education was denied to the Irish, children like Katie often attended illegal “hedge” schools conducted out of doors to avoid being noticed by authorities; their families had to attend Mass at secret sites because Catholicism had been outlawed.2 On a trip to Ireland a few years ago, I visited Katie’s cottage and hedge school in County Tipperary.I saw buildings where priests were jailed and where landlords decided how to distribute food during the terrible famine. I saw a sacred well that had never stopped gurgling up from the stony soil and a four-thousand-year-old court tomb where jutting rocks marked the burial grounds of Katie’s distant ancestors. For me, thousands of years of history thrived, sang, even shouted across the Tipperary mountains. Ireland’s story was bound up in the land and rocks and water, like moss growing at the base of a tree— unwilling,unable to let go.But Katie did what she had to do to survive. She joined the Irish exodus to America. Katie’s husband, John Meagher, was from the same county in Ireland . Like Katie, he emigrated to Boston, where they married, spent a short time in Albany,New York,and then headed to central Minnesota in 1858 with a group of Irish families bent on settlement.Like the other Irish in their party, Katie and John Meagher claimed 160 acres in the middle of a maple grove.They named their new community “The Maples .” Here the Meaghers, the Murphys, the Hills, and the Callahans built homes, heated them, cooked their food, and built furniture from the felled trees. My ancestors built a simple one-room structure with a loft of roughly hewn logs and cracks filled with clay. The cabin contained only a large, rough table, a cookstove, and a long bench along one wall.3 Denied schooling in Ireland, the Meaghers built another small cabin and hired a Yankee, Clara Thorpe, to live there and teach their children . A few years later the Maples opened a larger school. Because the Meagher girls had only one shawl between them,they took turns going there.When the Irish enclave arrived,the nearest church...

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