<p>Hinz-Penner details a history fraught with tensions between land ownership and former inhabitants, commodification of the land and love of the land, land use and management, the simple life and love of nature.\nAs Elaine Enns, Co-Author, Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, puts it, "Hinz-Penner offers an engaging personal and political narrative that explores the contradictions, myths, and resilience of what we call her landlines, bloodlines, and songlines. Her memoir includes helpful distillations of significant historical periods and patterns of Mennonite migrations and Indigenous and settler histories. I hope it will inspire other settlers to venture their own decolonial re-memberings."\nHinz-Penner delves into the history of the peoples who were on the land before her-the Plains Village farmers in the year 1000 C.E., Coronado's crossing of her corner of Kansas, the one hundred years of Comanche Empire including the land east of Liberal. She also explores the geography of the land, its soil, rivers, plateaus, and settlement story. The experiential details of 1950s farm life, the genealogy that placed her there, migrations journals of ancestors, her Oklahoma Panhandle country church settlement history give texture to the story as do gender understandings about work and play in a two-daughter family.\nMeditational in structure, the narrative includes musings, poetry, family stories, Mennonite history, spiritual yearnings, Indigenous contributions, and reflections about the author's multi-generational farming history, its privileges, contributions, transgressions on the land. Tensions between colonization hauntings and the idyllic nature of her childhood on the farm are ameliorated when author and sister return to tend the farm during Covid isolation.</p>

East of Liberal: Notes on the Land (Dreamseeker Memoir)

Biographies & Memoirs

Hinz-Penner, Raylene

Regional U.S.

DreamSeeker Books

<p>This book grows out of a white Mennonite woman's driving curiosity to know the story of nationally known Cheyenne Peace Chief Lawrence Hart, whose grandfather was born three years after the massacre on the Washita to survivors Afraid of Beavers and Walking Woman. This grandfather would raise his grandson to know Cheyenne ways and select him as his successor to become a principal peace chief to the Cheyennes. Meanwhile the author's people, Mennonites and her blood relatives, intertwine with Hart's people by arriving in Oklahoma to begin schools on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation and to settle the Oklahoma plains. "Hart is a treasure. Hinz-Penner presents him shiningly," observes Robert Warrior (Osage), Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma.</p>

Searching for Sacred Ground: The Journey of Chief Lawrence Hart, Mennonite (C. Henry Smith)

Community & Culture

Cascadia Publishing House

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hinz-Penner, Raylene. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hinz-Penner, Raylene