Unsettled: A Reckoning on the Great Plains

A memoir that reckons with the high costs of European settlement and Indigenous dispossession on the Great Plains. A surprise rodeo leaves a buffalo bull dead and a cowboy gored to death. Seeing the death of the one man who was kind to him, Dawn Morgan’s father shoulders the blame and ends up dead. His sudden death, and the blundering way Morgan learns of it, forces her to reflect not only on the events in the bloodied corral, but also on the buffalo herds decimated and Indigenous Peoples displaced to make way for settlement in ranching and farming country in the prairies. Unsettled is a deeply moving work of literary non-fiction, a probing memoir examining family tragedy in relation to stories—both fact and fiction—of settlers and Indigenous Peoples on the Great Plains. Morgan shares the internal struggle between resistance and allegiance to the settler-descendent stories she grew up with while paying respects to her father and documenting the censorship she faces from her mother, loyal still to the pioneer myth of the early twentieth century. It is only when both parents are gone that Morgan is liberated to write a story of reckoning on the northern Great Plains.