Today in the ArtZany! Radio studio Paula Granquist welcomes author Nora Murphy to discuss her new memoir White Birch, Red Hawthorn – a personal investigation into the multigenerational cost of immigration and genocide in the American heartland.
White Birch, Red Hawthorn: A Memoir
Nora Murphy tells the story of her ancestors’ maple grove that, long before the Irish arrived, was home to three Native tribes: the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk. That her dispossessed ancestors’ homestead was built upon another, far more brutal dispossession is the hard truth underlying Murphy’s search for the deeper connections between this contested land and the communities who call it home.
Nora Murphy is a fifth-generation Irish Minnesotan. She was born and lives in Imniża Ska, the white cliffs overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers in St. Paul. She has worked and volunteered in the Native community since 1995 and has published five previous books—children’s histories, short stories, and a memoir about women’s textiles, Knitting the Threads of Time.
