When something is put on paper, than I have come to believe that that is another form of a sacred type of teaching and learning that has gone on for many, many, many generations.

Everybody, I'm Linda Lugard Grover, and I'm a, I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Department of American Indian Studies, and I'm a member of the Boys Sport Band of Ojibwe.

And I've, written some books.

And my most recent one is called Get Your Gammy Hearts Stories and Histories from the Sabi Kong.

It's part memoir.

It's part history.

There's research in it.

There is some fiction in there, some essays.

And there's a little bit of poetry, too.

And what it is, is a portrait of the people of this part of Lake Superior on this end of Lake Superior.

Mesabi con is one of the words for Duluth.

And it's, it's a geographic type of term.

But beyond that, it is it is a spiritual term to and in English language, it means the place of the giants, and it refers to the big rock formations that are, rise inland just a little ways from the lake, from Lake Superior.

And that rock formation actually goes from southwest of Duluth over by Carleton, Minnesota, all the way up the shore, all the way up and into Canada and in some places.

And Duluth is one of them.

There's a large outcrop shaping.

And here in Duluth it's called, colloquially the point of rocks.

And so the book it talks the history of my family and the history of settlers coming in of the fur trade and Duluth kind of growing into what it is today, but also into the foundation, which is geographic and, and, and spiritual and based on religious beliefs, too, of the coming of the Ojibwe people here during the Great Migration from the eastern part of this continent and then, afterwards, then the coming in of immigrant populations.

I write in here of, the journey that my great great grandparents took, a young married couple took from the Madeline Island, community over to fond du Lac here to the old fond du Lac community on the far western end of Duluth.

Carol and I were the only people sitting at the fire, and she began to talk.

Can you see there's a house down there about a block to the other side of the bridge.

That house.

Did you know that house was your great great grandmother's house?

You didn't?

Well, she was on the verge, and she was born at fond du Lac, the old fond du Lac, not where the reservation is now, where the people got moved.

And her mother and dad came there from the point that big village in Madeline Island in Wisconsin.

Do you know about that?

Well, that was a long time ago.

You ought to know some of these things.

So I write about that journey that these that this young couple took, they came, I think, to the fur post there, the American fur post, which was pretty close to it, was not prospering by the time they got there.

And I think they went there to work.

And I know that he he too, in finding work, went all the way up the North Shore, up to the fur post, up at Grand Portage, and worked there and fished for for them for sustenance for, for the, the native a non-native people around the fur post I write in here the great impact of federal Indian policies on on families, on children.

Well, everybody, all the all the generations in a family.

And so in my family, the boarding school era had tremendous effects from like the, I suppose, around 1890 and all the way through a probably close to, to the end of, or close to the beginning of the Second World War, people in my family were removed from home and sent away to go to school, and they were going to be assimilated into a larger American society.

There were people in my family who died while they were at boarding school.

Very, very difficult.

Sad part of our history printed form.

When it's on paper, on the page, that's how it is at that time.

It actually continues to live and reform itself.

It's just that on the page it's, it's static.

It's what we see.

A lot of the stuff, in fact, almost everything is handwritten to start when I'm writing poetry, I, I usually have something, you know, written on a piece of paper somewhere that I am turning in my hands and looking at and thinking what I'll do with it, the end of it.

To me, often the way the poem looks on the page is an important part of what what the poem is.

And so it's almost like sculpting, you know, taking, taking something and, and scraping.

And I think all writing is this way scraping away and chipping away.

So this one is near Jordan, the wolf and the rabbit.

Nanna and his brother sort of life began for my Engen and his older twin, Nanna, in a sudden storm with skies and clouds that darkened to purple and near black, and an icy wind that blew down from the north on a mild day during early harvest season.

This is how it happened, and it still happens.

This way sometimes.

And I told Wendy that I wanted to wear this when I when my book would come out with hoping, hoping it would.

And so I'm just to kind.

How often does a person get to wear a crown.

And how often does a person get to wear a can of sweetgrass?

I can smell it as it's on my head here.