What it means to be a Mennonite settler

Review of East of Liberal: Notes on the Land, Raylene Hinz-Penner (Dreamseeker, 2022).

“I am only beginning to recognize what it means to be a Mennonite settler” (29)

Raylene Hinz-Penner grew up on her parents’ reclaimed sand farm a few miles east of Liberal, Kan., in the 1950s and ’60s. As a child, enthroned high on the stack of alfalfa bales purchased to feed the dairy herd that supported her parents’ enterprise (as the Dust Bowl-ravaged soil could not), she gazed across the flatlands to Oklahoma and wondered about “the first people…those who had walked the land before those who left the arrowheads” (29).

Hinz-Penner’s book is a meditation, or collection of meditations, balancing her own warm memories of a farm childhood and Mennonite heritage with her parallel consciousness of indigenous people and cultures displaced from this same land. “These notes,” she writes, “document my own wrestling with peoplehood in my tradition…I had always thought of us as immigrants helping to build a country where freedom could prevail, not colonizers or settlers” (15). The mythology of Anabaptists fleeing religious persecution had eclipsed the realities of their arrival on the land. She writes about her childhood church community with affection and sensitivity even as she notices the limits of their perspective, honoring their commitment to steward the land yet acknowledging their silence around the stories of their own migrations.

Her approach to the writing reflects the many-layered complexity of relearning to tell stories of home, place, and culture, to decolonize these sites of memory. The narrative portions – personal memories, family stories, research on the local community, recent and ancient history of the land, histories of 500 years of Mennonite immigration and exodus alongside the same period of European exploration and colonization–are interspersed with brief, thematic essays that are more critical and contemplative, interrogating subjects like the Mennonite work ethic, immigrant vs. settler identities, and the erroneous notion of “vacant” land.

Hinz-Penner uses the seasons as touchstones to guide her work, and the short pieces that introduce each of the nine parts of the book intermingle seasonal church traditions with family and farming culture, and with indigenous practices. In the opening to the first season, “Winter Solstice,” she recites the names of the Algonquin full moons, recalls how the limited light of this season meant going milking before dawn for her parents, and recites a Low German rhyme about the New Year’s cookies German Mennonites shared with their neighbors in Russia, before relating her own tradition of frying porzelchen for her neighbors at New Year’s. Many of the nine seasonal sections include a similar amalgamation of cultural and agricultural practices, the fragments of indigenous traditions neither adopted nor appropriated but collected here alongside her own, curated for our consideration, as they coexist in her own thoughts.

The land itself is another touchstone for much of this work, the wind-drifted sand of the Kansas soil near the Oklahoma panhandle. The author shares its deep history from the Inland Sea of the Cretaceous Period through the traces and histories of indigenous inhabitants to the fence-cutting wars of the 1880s. One chapter models the Australian aborigine practice of telling the stories of place at the pace of a walk through it, starting a wandering journey across the farm and outbuildings with the spot near the stock tank where the author at 12 drove the milk truck through the fence and ending, in earthy fashion, with outhouse stories. Another traces the migrations of Hinz-Penner’s ancestors from the Netherlands, through Moravia, Prussia, and Russia, and on to Kansas and Oklahoma, where her parents finally settled east of Liberal. And there is the tragic story she learns long after childhood, interviewing a former neighbor, about the cellar in her family’s own homestead.

The book serves as a model for how to begin to relate to a complicated history for those serious about memorializing their family and church histories and also dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery. It would be a good selection for discussion and book groups interested in these matters, and perhaps even more so for writers working on their own memoirs (I find myself suddenly uncomfortable with the use of the word “frontier” and newly, properly self-conscious about the ways that I have written about land).

Or it could be read lingeringly, as daily meditations (dare I say a bathroom book?) with each short satisfying segment raising questions and immersing us in rich visual detail – from tumbleweeds stuck in the barbed wire fencerow, to the “liquid mirage” of the wheat swaying, to “Uncle Albert’s watery blue eyes, glassy and milky like old marble.” You’ll learn about life in a one-room country school (one of the last holdouts in the area) and how it feels to visit the town of Liberal as a young Mennonite farm girl – it may be just three miles away from home, but you’re not from there. And now and then you’ll stumble on a story told as poem, remembered snippets of Low German doggerel, a bit of a hymn, a relevant quotation as epigraph.

I ended the book wanting to know more about how it came into being, this conversation the author has with her histories. Was East of Liberal always meant to be a memoir about decolonizing history, or did this productive tension emerge in the writing? Even as the book satisfyingly concludes the story of Hinz-Penner’s family’s time on this particular patch of land, it leaves room, and provides inspiration, for continuing conversation about how to write, speak, and rightly remember our relationship with the land.