Environmental Journalist, Filmmaker and Author Erika Bolstad shares with us her new biography/memoir Windfall: The Prairie Woman Who Lost Her Way and the Great-Granddaughter Who Found Her, which explores the compelling mystery surrounding the disappearance of her Great Grandmother, Anna, in the early 1900s. Just before Erika's mother dies, she reveals that Erica will inherit a plot of land in North Dakota, once owned by Anna. She is shocked to discover that the land includes a grant of mineral rights in a region experiencing an oil boom. Erika it seems will soon receive an income from the very fossil fuel she has spent her life opposing. Almost nothing is known about her great grandmother and her name suddenly vanishes from the historical record in 1905, never to be mentioned again.
Perplexed, Erika turns her investigative skills to uncovering her great-grandmother’s life and uncovers the unsettling truth about Anna's disappearance. Erika shares Anna's story with great empathy and shows how her fate is tied into the larger history of the great plains – the decades of environmental exploitation culminating in the discovery of oil; genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, the plight of women in the 1800s mid-west, and the cycle of boon and bust the settlers endured trying to eke out a living under the great expanse of sky.