The Histories We Inherit
By Matt Kliewer
In The Children’s Blizzard, David Laskin seeks to unpack the complex history of Anabaptist emigration to the Great Plains and the eventual tragedy of the 1888 blizzard, which took the lives of hundreds of people, many of them children. There are many points where Laskin might impart some sense of cosmic morality to these events, such as when he repeatedly notes that the land that lured these settlers from their Mennonite communities in Europe had been violently seized from the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited it for millennia by the U.S. military and railroad companies.
Laskin ambitiously argues that the blizzard of 1888 resulted from many converging forces: the seeds of the National Weather Service, early communication and transportation monopolies, government and military policies seeking to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the United States, and a deep hope that faith alone could turn a hostile land into a fruit-bearing paradise. “Land, freedom, and hope” begins Laskin’s first chapter, and it’s hard, growing up on the Great Plains, not to view the combination of those things as akin to a hero’s fatal flaw in a Greek tragedy: hubris. Who could possibly be so blessed?
My own family’s history is tied into this narrative. My great-great-grandfather Henry Benjamin Kliewer was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, around 1880. His family emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-to-late 1880s and settled in Kansas. His father died within a couple of years of their settlement, though I’m not sure of the cause. His mother was forced to give away the oldest children to foster families. Henry Benjamin, or H.B., was one of them. Had they heard of the Children’s Blizzard when they cut the first sod for their house in Hillsboro? Or were they experiencing enough hardship without engaging with those of their Mennonite neighbors to the north?
In this book I saw myself, my family history, and that deeply ingrained fear of the lands from which I come. Laskin crafts a historical narrative that I embraced personally, one that engages with an incredible degree of specificity and is dedicated to fully developing the history and humanity of the many tragic figures it portrays. These qualities make the book a perhaps essential read for those within the broadcast range of this station.
Laskin asks us to critically engage with our collective pasts on these lands as a means of asking questions so well-trod for many of us they are almost cliche–how do we reckon with the histories we inherit, and how do we prepare for what comes next?
I’m Matt Kliewer for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
Originally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
