Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism

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This working paper presents an autoethnography of my predominantly Scandinavian and Irish ancestors, their history as white settlers on lands dispossessed from the Dakota people in what is now Minnesota, and their assimilation into whiteness. It also introduces the Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative as one concrete action that attempts to repair some of this settler history.

Introduction

“You know – some people are from places,
but woman, I’m from you.
That’s all he had to say to me in the end –
‘I’m from you,
and I reckon that you’re from me,
and no one ever really leaves the places they’re from.’”

– McMahon, Tree Bats on a Waterslide

The question – “where are you from?” – is a question that has long felt unnecessarily perplexing to me. I was born in Minnesota and lived there until I was eighteen, so the answer is obvious. However, over the years, I have frequently expressed ideas similar to the words shared above in my novel Tree Bats on a Waterslide. To this day, I do believe – especially for queer, trans, and disabled people who often cultivate our own senses of chosen family – that we can, in important ways, be “from” the people who we meet along our journeys, form community with, and are impacted by. In my life, I have had deep, lasting, and formative relationships with people in Boston, Massachusetts; Greater Accra, Ghana; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; and Seattle, Washington, in addition to those in Minnesota who I grew up with and who helped form me in my early years. In this expansive and poetic sense, I believe that I (and anybody) can be from many different people and places.

In this autoethnography, I will attempt to answer the question of “where am I from?” in a much more critical way, tracing what I know about my family history and ancestry through artifact analysis triangulated with genealogical DNA testing. I will then briefly position my family history as “Minnesotans” living on land violently taken from Indigenous Dakota peoples within a broader history of settler colonialism and assimilation into whiteness. Lastly, I will introduce the Lundberg-McMahon redistribution initiative, an intentional reparative action related to my family’s history and presence as white settlers in Southwestern Minnesota.

Autoethnographic Approach

To begin answering the question of “where I am from”, and before positioning my own family history within larger ones, I undertook research to gain a better understanding of my own family history related to two issues: (1) where does my maternal and paternal familial lineage hail from ethnically, and (2) when did members of my family arrive and settle in America and Minnesota specifically? My primary data source was my own inherited family history, from what I’ve gathered through conversations with my family throughout my life, our traditions, and other cultural markers. I supplemented this by collecting all genealogical records that I had access to (family trees of differing levels of detail from each lineage) and a first-person description of ancestry from my maternal grandmother’s memoir. All individuals who are specifically named throughout this article are deceased.

Additionally, I completed an autosomal DNA test from AncestryDNA in July 2026. This decision was motivated by a desire to further triangulate the ancestral knowledge that I inherited through my own family history. By the time I conducted this research from June to August 2026, all four of my grandparents had passed away, limiting the direct sources I had access to. The fact that genealogical DNA testing felt like firmer knowledge than my own recalled family history reflects an intrinsic bias that I entered into this project with, that I am naming here, and which I will further critique in the next section.

Artifact Analysis of My Family’s Migration and Settler History

Oral and Written Family History

My understanding of my ancestral background growing up was (a) that my paternal side was Scandinavian and had been located for several generations in a small town in Southwestern Minnesota where I have extended family and that I have visited several times and (b) that my maternal side was largely Irish and came to Minnesota from a town in Western Wisconsin (maternal grandmother) and via Chicago, Illinois (maternal grandfather). My last name is Lundberg, a surname typically associated with Sweden. My mother’s maiden name is McMahon, which is an Irish surname. In her memoir, my maternal grandmother describes her ancestry as follows: “the largest part is German, the next quarter part is English and Scottish, the next is not quite a quarter part but is Irish, [and another part is] French” (Exhibit 1). My maternal grandfather was Catholic, my maternal grandmother came from a Protestant background, and my paternal side was Lutheran. According to family history, my maternal grandfather grew up in Chicago where he worked as a messenger for the Chicago mayor – possibly Edward Joseph Kelly (served 1933-1947) or Martin H. Kennelly (served 1947-1955), both Irish Catholic.

Genealogical DNA Test

Exhibit 2 shows genetic populations identified through the genealogical DNA test I completed as part of this research. This autosomal DNA test examines over 700,000 genetic markers (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) from a saliva DNA sample. The genetic populations reported back through the test (which AncestryDNA labels ‘ancestral regions’) are intended to reflect ancestry over roughly the last 1000 years. My ancestry was identified as predominantly Irish [35%], Norwegian [22%], and Danish [17%] with smaller components that were Swedish [8%], Dutch [7%], English [3%], Scottish [3%] Welsh [3%], and French [1%]. 24% of the Irish ancestry was traced to Munster, Ireland, whereas the other 7% and 4% was traced to Leinster and Connacht, Ireland respectively. Exhibit 3 groups these genetic populations by parents. Scandinavian components – Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish – were from parent one, assumed to be my father. The Irish components were largely from parent two, assumed to be my mother. The Dutch, Welsh, and French were also maternal. English was present in both lineages.

In addition to the autosomal DNA test, AncestryDNA infers migration routes over the last 5 to 20 generations (which they label ‘ancestral journeys’) by clustering genetically similar samples from the millions of other AncestryDNA tests and analyzing the family-tree data associated with those clusters via network analysis. While I lack detailed records of my maternal lineage, this analysis leverages the governmental and familial records of people who are genetically similar to me to identify where my family members most likely came to the United States from. The results are shown in Exhibit 4. Parent one, assumed to be my father, had four identified migration routes: Säffle and Åmål in Central Sweden, Värmland in Central Sweden, Telemark and Vestfold in Southern and Southwestern Norway, and Møre og Romsdal in Western Norway. Parent two, assumed to be my mother, had four identification migration routes: Beara Peninsula, East Beara Peninsula, South West Munster, and West Beara Peninsula, which are all in Munster, Ireland.

As I note above, the use of a genealogical DNA test to locate one’s ancestral history is contested and warrants several critical acknowledgments. First, as a white American, I am racialized as white, meaning that my ethnic identity is largely self-identified and can be constructed and situationally adapted in a way that reflects privilege which people who are not racialized as white do not generally have. As just one example, I can choose whether to emphasize my Irish heritage versus my Scandinavian heritage. Such choices carry social meaning and are ones that I can elect to make. Second, just as the geopolitical and ethnic categories I inherited through my family history are subjective and political, the geopolitical and ethnic categories and methods used for the DNA test are subjective. In particular, genealogical DNA tests are known to be inaccurate for specific geographic regions and regarding the exact percentage of ancestry, which itself is socially constructed. Finally, race science has a deeply problematic history in the United States and an uncritical presentation and use of genealogical DNA results to confirm ancestry can function as extensions of that history. Here, I intended to include the genealogical DNA test in this autoethnography as just one data point. While the results largely converged with family history, where they diverge, the results of the DNA test should not necessarily be privileged over other forms of knowledge.

Genealogical Family, Church, and Other Records

Paternal Grandfather’s Lineage

My paternal grandfather Marvin Rudolph Lundberg was born in Ash Lake Township, Minnesota in 1930 to Carl Rudolph Lundberg (born in Ash Lake Township in 1888) and Josephine Alma Johnson (born in Ash Lake Township in 1895) (Exhibits 5 to 7).

My great grandfather Carl Rudolph Lundberg was the son of Charles Jonas Lundberg (born in Norra Rörum, Sweden in 1851) and Emma Gustafson (born in Varmland, Sweden in 1858) (Exhibits 5 and 6). In his obituary, Carl Rudolph Lundberg is described as “a farmer all his life”, who served as “state secretary of the Minnesota Farmer’s Union” and “fought staunchly to put the farmer and his family in a better economic position” (Exhibit 8). Church and family records suggest Charles Jonas Lundberg left Sweden in 1869 and arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1880 and that Emma Gustafson left Sweden in 1876 (Exhibit 9 and 10). A marriage license places Charles Jonas Lundberg and Emma Gustafson in Lincoln and Redwood County, Minnesota respectively in 1882 (Exhibit 11). He was active in the Elim Lutheran Church constructed between 1885 and 1889 (Exhibit 12), and his name appears on the earliest available records from Ash Lake Township (Exhibit 13). In his obituary, he is described as a “well known and highly esteemed” “pioneer settler” and among the “pioneer builders of Lincoln county, [Minnesota]” who was a “conscientious and tireless worker for community uplift” and an “energetic spirit” that helped found the Elim Lutheran Church (Exhibit 14).

My great grandmother Josephine Alma Johnson was the daughter of Ruffus R. Johnson (born in 1868 in Ulstein, Norway) and Anna K. Jansen (born in 1866 in Herøy, Norway) (Exhibits 5, 7, and 15). In her obituary, Josephine Alma Johnson is described as “always ready to lend a helping hand in the church or to her friends” and a “faithful wife and mother” (Exhibit 16). According to Anna K. Jansen’s obituary, Ruffus Johnson and Anna K. Jansen were married in 1888 in Lamberton, Minnesota (Exhibit 17). In a local newspaper, Ruffus Johnson was called a “king meat cutter and cattle buyer” and “king sausagemaker” (Exhibit 18).

Paternal Grandmother’s Lineage

My paternal grandmother Jean Eleanor Norgaard was born in Tyler, Minnesota in 1930 to William Hansen Norgaard and Ethel Lucille Larson (Exhibits 5, 19, and 20).

My great grandfather William Hansen Norgaard was the son of Kristen Hansen Norgaard and Hansine Nelson Meyer (Exhibits 5 and 19). Artificial intelligence (AI) matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest William Hansen Norgaard was possibly born in 1851 in Tønder, Denmark and that Hansine Nielsen Meyer was possibly born in 1866 in Bådsbøl, Denmark.

My great grandmother Ethel Lucile Larson was the daughter of Cassius Larson and Saphorina Holbrook (Exhibits 5 and 20). AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest Cassius Larson’s parents were born in Norway. Family records indicate Saphorina Holbrook was descended from Ebenezer Butterfield (1786 to ~1850) and Caroline Butterfield (1790 to ~1850) (Exhibit 21). Butterfield is an English surname. AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest Saphronia Holbrook was descended from English settlers living throughout Massachusetts who arrived in the 1600s.

Maternal Grandfather’s Lineage

My maternal grandfather Edward Roger McMahon was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1929 to Edward George McMahon (born in 1898) and Marie Dunn McMahon (born in 1929) (Exhibit 22 and 23).

My great-grandfather Edward George McMahon was the son of Joseph McMahon and Julia Russell (Exhibit 22). AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest Julia Russell’s parents were born in Ireland in the 1820s. There are no AI matched records available at this time for Edward George McMahon. However, based on oral family history, my genealogical DNA test, which suggests my entire maternal grandfather’s lineage is Irish, and that many Irish migrants arrived in Illinois in the 1800s, Edward George McMahon’s parents were likely born in Ireland.

My great-grandmother Marie Dunn was the daughter of Joseph Dunn and Mary Foley (Exhibit 22). AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest Joseph Dunn’s parents were born in Ireland in the 1840s and that Mary Foley was born in Ireland in the 1870s.

Maternal Grandmother’s Lineage

My maternal grandmother Barbara Louise Hermann was born in 1932 in Menomonie, Wisconsin to Elmer Albert Hermann (born around 1909) and Ruth Cooper (born around 1909) (Exhibit 22 and 23).

Family records for my great-grandfather Elmer Albert Hermann do not include information about his parents. AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest that his father’s parents were born in Germany in the 1810s or 1820s and that his mother was born in Germany in the 1870s.

My great-grandmother Ruth Cooper was the daughter of Clifton Cooper (born in 1876) and Mae Wilson (born in 1873) (Exhibit 22). Clifton Cooper was the son of Joseph Cooper and Mary Gifford. Mae Wilson was the daughter of John Wilson and Oteria Van Notta. AI matched records from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 suggest that Joseph Cooper was born in England in the 1840s, that John Wilson was descended from Scottish and Irish settlers who arrived in the 1700s, and that Oteria Van Notta was largely descended from Scottish, English, German settlers who arrived in the 1700s and Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s.

A Note About AI Matched Records

I have included references to AI matched records (Census and other governmental and church records linked by name and birth date to my family tree suggested by AI as hints which I reviewed and accepted) from Ancestry.com obtained in August 2026 in this family history, as one piece of evidence for the purpose of triangulation. AI matched records are prone to inaccuracies, and there is often no way to truly prove that a record is or is not correctly matched. Furthermore, one single error in a family tree can cause the entire family tree to become inaccurate, meaning that older records are typically less reliable than more recent ones. This is particularly true for the lineages I identified stretching back to the 1600s-1700s. Such AI tools can also become particularly inaccurate for maternal lineages and when re-marriage occurs and when an individual holds multiple surnames over their lifetime. At this time, however, including these suggestive matches as one data point is useful when they are considered against my inherited family history.

Synthesizing My Family’s Migration and Settler History into a Narrative

Genealogical records indicate that a large portion of my ancestry is Scandinavian and Irish. Of my sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirteen were first or second generation immigrants, suggesting I am mostly a fifth or sixth-generation settler in the United States. Among these thirteen great-great-grandparents, four were from Ireland (arriving in the 1800s), three were from Norway (arriving between 1860 and 1900), two were from Denmark (arriving in the second half of the 1800s), two were from Sweden (arriving in the 1870s), and two were from Germany (arriving in the 1800s). The remaining three great-great-grandparents appear to have been descended from (a) an English settler arriving in the 1800s, (b) English, Irish, German, and Scottish settlers arriving in the 1700s, and (c) English and Dutch settlers arriving in the 1600s, though I have limited records for these lineages. Geographically, the Scandinavian immigrants largely settled directly in Southwestern Minnesota, and the Irish immigrants settled in Chicago, Illinois.

Overall, the family history passed down to me and reported in genealogical records largely aligned with the results of the genealogical DNA test, which identified the vast majority of my ancestry (81%) as being Irish, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish. The DNA test identified no German ancestry but identified Dutch ancestry, which could either reflect imprecision or inaccuracies in the inherited story, genealogical records, or the DNA test. The DNA test results, when combined with the other data, suggest that my maternal grandfather’s Irish ancestry reflected an Irish Catholic background and migration patterns in the 1800s, whereas my maternal grandmother’s smaller amount of Irish ancestry potentially reflected a Protestant background that was potentially mixed with Scottish settlers in Ireland.

Lastly, the migration routes identified through the network analysis largely aligned with the information gathered from genealogical records. The identified migration routes from Central Sweden, Southern and Southwestern Norway, and Western Norway likely reflect the paternal side of my family, and the identified migration routes from Munster, Ireland likely reflect my maternal grandfather’s family.

Based on this research, I have chosen to identify my ancestry as “predominantly Scandinavian and Irish”. In situations where a more detailed description of my ancestry is appropriate, I will describe my ancestry as follows: “My paternal ancestry is Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, except for one of my great-great-grandparents who has English ancestry. My maternal grandfather’s ancestry is Irish, and my maternal grandmother is German and a mixture of Dutch, English, French, Irish, and Scottish.” This description of my ancestry is supported by (1) inherited family history passed down to me orally, (2) the genealogical DNA test that identified the vast majority of my ancestry (81%) as being Irish, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, and (3) the ancestral migration routes identified through the network analysis which indicate my ancestors migrated to the United States from Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. I have chosen to use the term “Scandinavian” due to shared migration and settler histories amongst migrants from these regions.

For the sake of analyzing my relationship with the land and the Indigenous people who inhabited them before my family members arrived, I have multiple distinct histories to analyze. The two predominant ones from my lineage involve Scandinavian settlers in Southwestern Minnesota around the 1870s and Irish settlers in Illinois throughout the 1800s. Additionally, I have ancestral connections to English settlers in Massachusetts from the 1600s, along with English, Irish, German, and Scottish settlers arriving in the 1700s and English and Dutch settlers arriving in the 1600s. Because these earlier ancestors were traced through my grandmothers and the patriarchal nature of record-keeping, I have less information about these lineages. In the next section, I will position these family histories within larger histories of settler colonialism and assimilation into whiteness.

Confronting Settler Histories and Assimilation into Whiteness

My purpose in writing this next section is to position my family’s history within existing scholarship about settler histories and assimilation into whiteness and the history of Indigenous people in the geographic area in which my family settled. I am not a historian, so this section aims to reference other literature that I am beginning to engage with as part of this ongoing autoethnography. I envision this portion of the article as an evolving project I will expand over time as I do more reading and learning. For this reason, in this first version, I will keep this section relatively brief.

Scandinavian Settlers in Southwestern Minnesota and the Violent Displacement of Dakota People

Seven of my eight paternal great-great-grandparents were Scandinavian immigrants to Lincoln County, Minnesota who settled on lands ceded by the Dakota people on July 23, 1851 at Traverse des Sioux [1]. This treaty was made between the United States and the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota [2], whereas another treaty (covering the lands surrounding Minneapolis where I grew up) was signed on August 5, 1851 at Mendota with the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands [3]. Across these two treaties, the land was sold for $3,750,000, most of which was never paid because it was placed in a trust held by the federal government [1]. A large portion of the payment was diverted to traders through the “Traders’ Papers”, a document that Dakota leaders were tricked into signing and which allowed traders to claim that the Dakota people owed them debts that were then repayable via the trust [4].

Having relinquished almost all of their land through these treaties, Dakota people were now dependent on the payments from the U.S. government’s trust, which often arrived late or not at all, in part because of the Traders’ Papers. This contributed to the Dakota people reaching a point of starvation, which is what prompted attacks on settlers by some Dakota people that culminated in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

What started as war became what scholars have referred to as a genocidal campaign against the Dakota people [5]. At the conclusion of the six-week war, 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato [6–7]. Thousands were placed in camps (some on Pike Island near Fort Snelling and some in South Dakota), and by 1863, the federal government had voided its treaties with the Dakota people [6–7]. Dakota people were thus banned from Minnesota, and a bounty was placed on any Dakota person killed and scalped in Minnesota to forcibly remove all of them [6–7].

To position my own family history within these events, my great-great-grandparents appear to have largely settled in Southwestern Minnesota from Scandinavia in the aftermath of these events. Specifically, they appear likely to have received free access to land under the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of land in exchange for developing it as farmers [8]. In line with the above history, this land had been dispossessed from the Dakota people, who were then forcibly removed from these lands in the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 [6–7]. My great-great-grandfather Charles Jonas Lundberg, in particular, was described in records as an esteemed farmer and “pioneer settler” in Lincoln County, Minnesota (Exhibit 14). Scandinavian immigrants similar to him were driven from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark due to population growth and lack of economic opportunity for agricultural workers and were drawn to Minnesota because of the available land for farming [9]. In this way, the opportunities that my family found in Southwestern Minnesota in the late 1800s came at the direct expense of the Indigenous Dakota people who had lived on and taken care of this land for countless generations [5–7].

Assimilation of Scandinavian and Irish Immigrants into Whiteness During the Late 1800s and Early 1900s

The family genealogical research I conducted above suggests that my Scandinavian and Irish family members largely arrived in the United States in the mid to late 1800s. They arrived at a time when the boundaries of whiteness in the United States were changing. For the most part, the Scandinavian family members were viewed as desirable white settlers (they were Protestant and Northern European) actively recruited to Minnesota and were absorbed into whiteness through their role in settling Dakota land, which was a goal of the United States government [10].

While these family members may have been desirable white settlers from the start [10], the Irish Catholic migrants faced a longer journey to becoming white [11–12]. This assimilation occurred gradually through Irish people positioning themselves within a racial hierarchy via anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism [13]. In particular, this occurred during the late 1800s and early 1900s through Irish Americans’ participation in institutions such as the Democratic Party (which excluded Black workers from urban labor movements) and the Catholic Church [11–13].

Assimilation into whiteness provided my family with material resources. For my Scandinavian family members, whiteness meant access to land dispossessed from the Dakota people in Southwestern Minnesota and likely given to them freely through the Homestead Act of 1862 through which they advanced economically [8]. For my Irish family members, assimilation into urban political and religious institutions on an ethnic basis gave them entry into civic life to accumulate wealth, which Black workers were excluded from [11–13]. From there, redlining, New Deal programs, and other discriminatory policies turned these forms of wealth into major racialized differences in opportunity across the life course [14].

Other Parts of My Ancestry

While the Scandinavian and Irish Catholic parts of my heritage are reflected in eleven out of my sixteen great-great-grandparents, I also have five great-great-grandparents who come from other ethnic backgrounds. Among them, two appear to have been first or second generation German immigrants, one was descended from an English settler arriving in the 1800s, and the other two appear to have had a mixture of Dutch, English, and Irish-Scottish heritage descended from settlers on the East Coast from the 1600s and the 1700s. German immigrants in the 1800s were drawn to these lands for economic opportunity due to unemployment and political pressures in Germany and were absorbed into American life as settlers [15]. English immigrants in the 1800s were drawn for similar reasons [15]. In contrast, the Dutch, English, and Irish-Scottish settlers from the 1600s and 1700s were part of the founding history of settler colonialism underlying this country. While I have less information about these lineages and they are a smaller part of my ancestry, it is still important to name them here because they are part of my family history.

The Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative as a Reparative Action for Settler History

One of the most common critiques of autoethnographies and other genealogical work by white Americans is that they center white guilt without materially shifting land and other resources back to the Indigenous people they were taken from. At this time, I am not a land or homeowner. However, I do have access to some inherited financial resources that I can redistribute to people whose experiences and opportunities today may have been shaped by the historical actions of my family. Redistribution, in this way, is a reparative action aimed at repairing harms that my family was likely implicated in. It does not however absolve this history.

Earlier this year, I created the Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative [16] as a reparative action regarding my family’s history as white settlers. Writing this autoethnography was an important next step I identified within this project.

The Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative [16] seeks to redistribute financial resources toward (a) Indigenous-led initiatives for mutual aid, land reacquisition and related advocacy, wealth-building, and cultural preservation active on the Dakota lands where my family settled historically or relevant to the Dakota people whose displacement my family materially benefited from and (b) mutual aid and other initiatives that support the health care needs of disabled and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color, whose lives continue to be impacted by the settler colonialism and racism through which my Scandinavian and Irish family members historically gained access to and assimilated into whiteness. Over time, this initiative will redistribute funds roughly evenly between these two purposes.

The initiative’s two purposes are closely connected. The first purpose is an intentional place-based reparative action related to the land on which my family settled and which the Dakota people were forcibly removed from. The second purpose reflects how systems of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism that my families benefited from and participated in through their assimilation into whiteness as Scandinavian and Irish migrants and settlers continue to impact people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people today, in numerous different ways. In particular, the marginalization of disabled and transgender people of color is deeply related to the ways that settler-colonialism imposed a rigid gender binary and constructed certain bodies as disabled [17–20]. As a disabled and transgender person who spends most of my time in community with other disabled and transgender people, I feel a responsibility to take action to repair these historical harms and the ways they impact my own community [21].

This fund has been made possible by my family, who in 2025 established an irrevocable health care trust for me during a medical crisis. Although the term “trust” is often associated with affluence, this health care trust is limited in size, restricted to medical use, and does not place me in an affluent economic position. It functions as a constrained medical safety net that I am choosing to leverage to enable modest redistribution. While I believe people should take care of their own needs and their families’ needs, I also think redistributing privilege involves letting go of some security. At this time, this health care trust represents the primary expected future transfer of family wealth to me, and I have publicly committed to redistributing a majority of any such transfer. Since wealth redistribution is not the legally mandated purpose of the trust, I can only accomplish this by having it cover my health care expenses and thus freeing an equal amount of my own income up for redistribution. Because of this structure, annual giving will be around 10,000 USD, and this fund will cease operating when the health care trust runs out of funds, if I have a catastrophic health event, or if I die.

In its first eight months, the Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative [16] has redistributed $6,084 USD. This is a separate but related effort to the Lyra McMahon Social Justice & Political Solidarity Fund [22], an income redistribution fund for my work as a multi-media artist and public health data analyst.

I named the Lundberg-McMahon Redistribution Initiative after my paternal and maternal surnames to acknowledge the settler history I am descended from. It is important, however, that I directly acknowledge here that all writing, analysis, and redistribution decisions associated with this redistribution initiative reflect my own values and judgment. They are made in my personal capacity as an individual and should not be understood as necessarily representing the social or political views or positions of any family member or other persons who share these names.

Conclusions and Future Directions

“It’s so much harder to hold someone accountable when they were just one unquantifiable factor in somebody’s death.”

– McMahon, Tree Bats on a Waterslide

Returning to the quote from my novel I started this autoethnography with, it is fitting that an older white character from a small town in Minnesota would express these words. It is also fitting that I as a white person growing up in Minnesota believed them. While I do still believe that we can be “from” many people and “from” many places, in a material and critical sense, many of the places and relationships that I say I am from only happened because I was allowed to exist on land which was dispossessed from Indigenous people, a process that my ancestors had a part in and have directly benefited from for generations.

I wanted to close this autoethnography on another quote from my novel, because this novel is the place where I started wrestling deeply with my relationship with small town Minnesota. In the novel, these words are shared in a different context, but the quote speaks to the pain, anger, and distress that accompanies harm whose cause is structural, systemic, and/or shared by communities and because of that escapes accountability. In the United States, people who self-identify as American Indian or Alaska Native have a life expectancy that is on average 6.5 years shorter than other Americans, and this directly relates to “economic and political marginalization, cultural genocide, and historical trauma” [23]. Here, I am working to hold the tension that I believe my family had a role in these painful and traumatic impacts and that this complicity is also shared by a large number of white Americans. Given that accountability is shared, in line with the idea expressed in my quote, it can be easy for white Americans to conclude that none of us as individuals should try to take actions for accountability. Here, I want to suggest that acknowledging responsibility for harms our ancestors were likely implicated in is important, as are accountable actions, which I am trying to do here, in the ways that I am / we are materially able.

As I have completed this autoethnography, I have regularly reflected on the emotions of guilt and shame that have surfaced throughout the process, along with the desire I’ve felt to justify the behavior of some of my ancestors. From what I have read of other writers in this area, a theme I have garnered is that it is important to not allow ancestral or reparative work to resolve itself too cleanly or attempt to absolve an individual or family through repair, because that is not the point. The point is that Indigenous people deserve the resources and conditions they need to prosper and which never should have been taken away from them. I believe the point of this autoethnographic work is the ways it supports action.

This is only the first version of this autoethnography, which I am approaching as an ongoing project that I intend to revisit every few years. In the years ahead, I intend to share this article with family members and have honest conversations that may lead to refinements, learn more about the Dakota people historically and today, and become more aware about Indigenous-led mutual aid, land reacquisition and related advocacy, wealth-building, and cultural preservation efforts through the redistribution initiative, which may lead to opportunities for deeper engagement. I plan to also read and cite more work by Dakota authors in future drafts.

I want to conclude by naming that this autoethnography is incomplete and has limitations, including those that I have named and those that will be named as I discuss it more with people from a range of backgrounds. It accompanies a positionality statement I have published entitled “Positionality Statement for a Scholar and Artist at the Intersection of Population Health and Critical Disability Studies” [24] which functions as a living document. While scholarship is often treated as fixed, I think scholarship is best when it is active and living.

I hope this autoethnography will be an example of that sort of scholarship.

Exhibits

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Publication Information

Version History

This article was originally published on August 23, 2026.

Funding Statement

The author received no external funding for this work.

Declaration of Interests

The author has no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

All text in this article was written by me, and its accuracy is my responsibility. I included AI-matched genealogical records from Ancestry.com as part of the genealogical research underlying this autoethnography. I also solicited critical feedback on my article from Claude (claude-opus-4-8; Anthropic, San Francisco, CA) as one of several tools used within my reflexivity process, alongside journaling, conversations with friends and family over a period from June 2023 to August 2026, and critical engagement with prior literature. I discuss my perspectives on responsible use of AI elsewhere [25].

Disclaimer

The content of this article is solely my responsibility and does not necessarily represent the views of any other individuals, institutions, funding agencies, community organizations, or other projects I am affiliated with or connected to presently, in the past, or in the future.

Archived Version and Access Information

This working paper is Publication 2 of Volume 1 of Ableism & Healthcare Now, an independent research and analysis about structural ableism in public health and healthcare and serves as an entry that I am publishing about my positionality as a scholar. This working paper has not been peer-reviewed. It is published open-access here on the project website and available as a PDF version on Zenodo to facilitate citation, archiving, and indexing.

Suggested Citation

Lundberg DJ. Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism. Working Paper. Ableism & Healthcare Now. Published online August 23, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22017964.

References

Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, Minnesota Humanities Center. 1851 Dakota Land Cession Treaties. Why Treaties Matter – Self Government in the Dakota and Ojibwe Nations. Accessed August 15, 2026. https://treatiesmatter.org/treaties/land/1851-Dakota
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