[Lifestyle] Book True stories of loss, heartache, happiness and reconciliation – Letters to the Chief by Judi Lifton By Peter Berlin
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n her memoir Letters to the Chief, author Judi Lifton succeeds brilliantly in recapturing her childhood mindset. Her recollections are documented as a set of letters to a family friend, Chief White Feather of the Sioux and Chippewa Nations. (The reader may find this confusing at first, because although Chief White Feather did exist, the letters did not; they are merely the literary device the author has used to format her memoirs.) She recounts her adventures and reflections while growing up in a small Swedish immigrant community in Minnesota in the 1950s. She is quite a feisty little redhead and gets herself into hilariously funny situations. Life is full of shocking surprises, like being told about cremation or how babies are made. Boys are goofballs at best, until one day she begins to find them interesting. At a midsummer fair in the Swedish tradition, she and her best friend shun the usual children’s games in favor of scary side shows
that their parents disapprove of. The constant banter between little Judi and her three siblings irks their parents and leaves the reader chuckling. In the following resumé of her childhood, Judi Lifton sets the scene for her memoir: Minnesota was a haven for Swedes. The climate was just like in the old country. There was lots of fishing, and the Kaffee Fest was an annual midsummer event. Vetted by other relatives or friends, Swedish immigrants arrived in droves to settle on Swede Hill in Willmar, Minnesota where I lived for the first thirteen years of my life. Other immigrants came from Norway and Denmark, resulting in fifteen different flavors of European Protestant churches plus one Catholic and one Unitarian. The relatives who emigrated from Sweden were my maternal grandfather Oscar Anderson, his wife Anna, and my paternal great grandfather August with wife Sofia. Their son, Nathaniel Franklin, my grandpa,
became a good friend of Oscar’s. Grandpa Nathaniel and Grandpa Oscar shared three things: church affiliations, fishing, and holding a sugar lump between their bottom lip and gum while drinking coffee. I was very close to Grandpa Oscar. He was my buddy, took me fishing and on errands, and always offered an orange candy slice that sat in a bag between us on the front seat of his car. He died when I was young. I sorely missed him, and his influence is noticed in numerous chapters of my memoir. When my family had to leave my town, I was devastated and really missed Grandpa because I knew how he must have felt leaving Sweden. To work through my emotions I wrote letters. They were not written to Grandpa because he was gone (although my closing words are to him). Instead, my memoir is presented as letters written by my fourteen-year-old-self to Chief White Feather, a terminally ill family friend who frequently travelled to my home town. He was an American Indian and storyteller/ singer and advocate for Indian rights. Thus, the idea of Letters to the Chief was born. In reality, they were “letters of the heart” and never written down until published now in my memoir – stories of loss, heartache, happiness and reconciliation. “Letters to the Chief ” by Judi Lifton, Wisdom Edition 2020. ISBN 978-1-950743-24-7. Available from www.calumeteditions.com and Amazon.
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Swedish Press | September 2020 21
