The Pfaffenhoffen Project
How do adult siblings preserve a sense of family after their parents have passed? Siblings aren’t always friends, but they afford an intimacy that is surprisingly essential. How do eight brothers and sisters stay connected over distance and time, and through the never-ending tangle of deadlines and disappointments, lovers and spouses, children and grandchildren, and their own frightening brushes with mortality?
While settling his father’s estate, American writer Andy Pfaff discovers tantalizing research that traces the family history back to the small village of Pfaffenhoffen in Alsace, France. Informed of their parents’ “unfinished business” at a family wedding, Andy and his siblings seize upon the notion of a reunion to celebrate their parents and reclaim their heritage. What they find surprises and amazes them.
Paths of the People: The Ojibwe in the Chippewa ValleY
Anishinabe, Saulteur, Ojibwe, Chippewa — all names of a people who have lived in the Chippewa Valley of Wisconsin for the past three centuries. Ojibwe oral tradition speaks of life as a circular path, with parents passing on knowledge to children and grandchildren. Over the past 300 years, contact with Europeans and settlement by Americans have forced them to adapt in order to survive. The challenges each generation has faced — whether at treaty grounds, boarding schools, or boat landings — have influenced what knowledge has been passed down, what paths taken.
Settlement & Survival: Building Towns in the Chippewa Valley, 1850-1925
Yankee, Canadian and European immigrants built Eau Claire, Chippewa Falls, Menomonie, and other towns along a network of rivers that transported people and pine. For half a century, workers labored in the woods in the winter and the mills in the summer. Residents built homes, schools, churches and courthouses; enjoyed the festive atmospheres of biergartens and sangfests; and endured the recurring hardships of fire and flood.
The forest's decline forced town "boosters" into a desperate search for new industries and jobs. Some communities did not survive. Most found their futures along the new networks — rails, highways, and power lines. Where one generation cut logging trails and rafted lumber, the next paved roads, operated hydro-electric dams, and manufactured tires, pressure cookers, and other products, shipping them all over the world.
Hmong in America: Journey from a Secret War
Hmong in America is the dramatic story of the journey of Hmong refugees from the Plain of Jars to Eau Claire, told through the voices of the people who lived it. Their journey begins in the rugged highlands of Laos, travels through the Vietnam War, pauses in the over-crowded refugee camps of Thailand, and ends with the challenges of resettlement and a new life in America.