My life so far: 29,220 days and counting.

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Remember the Reader’s Zoom this Saturday April 11!  CLICK HERE to copy zoom link or to sign in on Saturday morning. Dialogue and discussion with Colleen O’Brien, author of Baited, a thriller based in Glacier National Park. We will talk about Nature and Place as characters in our stories. Starts @ 9:00 AM/Pacific US time—you can do the math.

And on April 16, 2026, I turn 29,220 days old. You can do the math. It means I was conceived on a hot August day with the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the trauma of WWII, floating molecules in the breath of my young parents. It means I was born on a spring morning in Montana when millions of my grandfather’s bees were hurling themselves from hives to clover buds and war crimes trials were starting up in Europe and Japan.

These 29,220 days are the time blocks that built my life. I have awakened in any number of moods on these days. I have wasted days, raced unthinkingly through hours as though life was an endless Instagram scroll. I have been brought to my knees with grief and awe, flung myself passionately into love and writing and work. I have made mistakes, bad choices, unwittingly caused harm, and wished I could roll back time. I am walking a yellow brick road with most of the bricks behind me and a decade that curves into terrain unknown.

And here I am, turning 80 years old.

I enter this birthday with profound gratitude. Still here. Still healthy and cogent. Living with a beloved partner and

Ann & me among the 8 million protesting.

held within—and contributing to—a loving community. And I have the stamina to keep practicing my passion for stories, for writing, for creating spaces where stories can be respectfully shared.

 I’m starting a Substack column called Backstories, because at 80 most of my stories are back there, trailing behind me, swirling around me, awaiting articulation into the unimaginably huge conversation humanity is having at this time.

Standing on this threshold, I have the audacity to pray for 3,650 more days. Another 1/8 of life and, in my aging body and eldering years, I vow to live ever more consciously. I not only want my remaining days to count, I want to literally count them. I want to see each sunrise as a copper coin and to deposit that penny at sunset into a pottery jar marked “Prayers for Change.” Or maybe I can construct a calendar filling one wall where I cross off each day, noting some gratitude, no matter the internal weather of my emotions or the terrors of the wider world.

I am old enough now to know the preciousness of time. I step into this decade with a sense of accomplishment and a sense of purpose. And on the day I depart—whenever and however that comes— I want my last word to be “Thank you.”

April 17—my first day of being eighty.

I received this as a gift and no designation of who it might be from. Whoever you are, thank you. I will plant many more words in this vase.

If you want to help me celebrate, the best gift you can give me is to go online and deposit good reviews for any of my books! They don’t have to be long or intricate, a few words to encourage the next reader. “I read Seven Whispers 20 years ago and it’s still on my bedside table…”  Or, “Life’s Companion is my favorite journal writing friend and teacher.” Or, “My book club loved The Beekeeper’s Question. Don’t miss this story!”

All these titles are on Bookshop,  Amazon, and in BookClubs.com. Please love on Alyssa’s amazing audio in Audible or Libro or Spotify–wherever you have downloaded it. You can recommend it on Instagram and follow me @ChristinaBeeTrue and on Facebook as The Beekeeper’s Question by Christina Baldwin.

And Thank YOU for being part of my journey and letting me be part of yours.

Pray for PEACE. Pray for JUSTICE. Pray for the children whose days are just starting that they may live in a new world we insist into being!

Place as a Character in Stories

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Next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11, 9:00 AM Pacific.  See details at end of post.

The Body knows where it belongs. There seems some configuration in nature between the dropped fawn and the grassy knoll that receives it, between the river and the salmon that returns from the sea, between the bee and flower and darkened geometry of the hive. And even in my human blinders, I have experienced this for myself.

I was born in Deaconess Hospital in Great Falls, Montana and carried home to the rural homestead where my grandparents had homesteaded thirty-six years earlier. I was the second generation of Baldwins born on that homestead edging a tiny town. The first photograph of me I am four months old, July, my christening day. I am on a little blanket on the grass, torso sprawled, head lifted (cobra pose they call it in my senior yoga class).

Belly on the ground, on ground that still calls me, ground that holds my grandparents, parents, various aunts and uncles in the Sun River Cemetery. The Blackfeet here count ancestors going back ten thousand years. It will take me half a century to begin to reckon with the thievery that made this place a place I thought I belonged.

from Wikipedia

It was when I went to Europe, particularly into the English countryside, walking among the standing stones of Avebury, I had a different sensation of belonging. The ground came up through the soles of my feet, shaking me like lightening. I was filled with a kind of Earthy energetic programming. Though my Enlish ancestors immigrated to America in the late 1700’s, I immediately thought: this is what ancestral linkage feels like! This is what Native Americans feel when they walk the land we call Montana. The land they call Niitawahsin.

When I wrote The Beekeeper’s Question, the story demanded I “go home” to love and reckon with the place of my birth. Though fictional, the characters, the vocations, the struggles, the social issues all stream out of the place I come from. And everything happens in place, under the buttes, in the dry winds, the weather, the ways Montana shapes people’s characters.

Last fall I discovered Colleen O’Brien’s book, Baited, a mystery/thriller based in Glacier National Park and the small town of East Glacier, inside the borders of the Blackfeet Reservation. I enjoyed it both for the storyline and for O’Brien’s amazing use of place. Well—she lives there. She’s taught at Blackfeet Community College in Browning. She’s well acquainted with the Park, the rangers, the Blackfeet, the tensions of then and now. She stocks Beekeeper’s Question in her store, Glacier Park Trading. Seemed like a match.

We connected recently and decided to share the next READERS’ ZOOM on APRIL 11 (9:00 AM Pacific—check your timezone) to talk about PLACE as a character.  I am an author born in Montana who has always been a visitor and not a resident. Colleen is an author born elsewhere, now a resident. The books are our debut novels after careers in nonfiction. Should be fun. Click on the live link, above. Put on your cowboy hat and join us.

A Hmmm in the Chaos

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In these tumultuous weeks of autumn, 2025, I have been thinking about the generations in my novel, The Beekeeper’s Question. The impact and uncertainty of a faraway war rocks the community of Pigeon River, Montana in 1942-43. The young are swept into the situation, into the pressures of living through. Chapter 2 ends with a scene in the Philadelphia train station where Franklin Cooper is leaving for deployment and Maire, his bride, is standing on the platform among other women and families. (p14)

“At 30th Street Station, she buried her face in his jacket, nervously twisting the brass button bright on olive-green wool. Franklin heaved his duffel onboard and jumped up behind it. His hand reached through an open window. Maire’s hand reached from the platform. The hiss of brakes releasing. Rail cars jerking. Fingers slipping. His hand waving among dozens of finger-tipped branches reaching from the train. He was a soldier. She was his wife. It was their war.”

Though circumstances are different, I hear a similar tenor of concern, endurance, determination to make a life in the midst of it all, in conversations with mid-life nieces, nephews, and our daughter. These conversations focus on the practical, applicable, manageable: How do I stabilize my employment? Get to the right place to make it through? Cope with rising costs for housing, cars, insurance, food, education? What’s going to still be in place when my children are grown?

And then there are the elders in the story: Doc, Leo, Josie. They are the holders of perspective and life experience. Doc and Leo talk about the edgy moment of their arrival, how the Homestead Act gave them land and title, how the Indians had been forced into reservations, and then how the presence of the Indian School and the suffering of Native children awakened them to history and social consequences they still grapple with decades later.

Doc, the only woman in her medical school at the turn of the twentieth century. Leo, carrying on a life-long discussion with the bees and the Bible. And Josie Shines the Light, attached to the spirit of the land and the soul of her people, protecting knowledge forbidden by colonization.

In a scene in Josie’s lodge, tucked in the backcountry hills of the reservation, Leo is crediting her with saving his adopted son’s life. (p128) Josie responds, “Your son owes his life to his own spirit and to Iistapatapiop, Creator. We who serve our people know each one must swim their own river. Jesse was drowning when he arrived, but he was reaching for the surface.”

Regret twisted Leo’s heart. “In that season of loss, I too was near drowning. I was not a good father when he needed me most.”

Her eyes bore into him. “He needed you most on the day he was born. You took him as your own. You gave him a name, a family, a childhood.”

Our circumstances are different, but in the peer conversations around me, I hear a similar awareness of how we both hold and cannot hold the generations behind us. These conversations focus on where we can exercise empowerment, protect moral values, take care of grandchildren, leave our stories for a future we will not see.

At a recent panel for community authors, one woman said into the crowd, “This is a book I keep in my car. Whenever I’m in the ferry line or waiting somewhere, I pull it out and read whatever pages come open. I need these people. They are spiritual guides from their time to our time.”

And now we can have it in the magical voicing that Alyssa Keene brought to the story. Join us for the reader Zoom, and a merry conversation on the spoken and written word.

SHORT – The Beekeeper’s Question Audio Sample Video

Bees and Buzz, Honey and Magic

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The next reader’s zoom call is May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific. Link at the end of the blog.

The first photograph of me, I am three months old, lying on a baby blanket in my baptismal dress on the lawn at my grandparents’ house. July, Montana, the buzz of bees pollinating raspberries and garden vegetables. My little body is stretched over summer-warmed grass.

I do not remember this in the comb of memory, but my body knows. Whatever ceremony has just occurred in the little Methodist church my grandfather stewards, the one occurring in this photo is the land itself binding me to this place.

That autumn, my parents will drive east to New Jersey where my father will continue post-War university studies.  I will spend my childhood in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota. I will never reside in Montana, but the West will always feel like home, and the Baldwin family will long identify this homestead as its spiritual source.  What Jeannine Ouelette calls, “a cartography of self.”

The summer I am five, we take the train from Indianapolis to Great Falls so my father can work the honey harvest, and my mother can join the daughters-in-law putting up garden produce for winter. Here my Montana memories begin. Picking raspberries, running through irrigation water, sucking honeycomb, and bees. Bees. Bees. Finally allowed to ride out to the bee yards in the honey truck with my grandpa and an uncle, I watch them work hives amid the buzzing swirl.

On our way back to the homestead, one loose bee, caught in the truck cab, stings me on the hand. I remember the sharp pang of it, my howl of surprise. My grandfather plucks the stinger out and sucks my thumb to draw out venom— his hands a calloused tenderness, his lips a blessing. He tells me, “Brave girl, Chrissie, you’re a real Baldwin now.” I am carried into the kitchen, turned over to the women, baking soda applied to my sting. There is supper around a family table, ice cream on the porch steps. Stories float like pollen in the evening air.

If this sounds like origin story to The Beekeeper’s Question: it is.

Over ten years—with so many variations of story shifting into place—the constant was the vocation of Leo Cooper, a combination of Protestant theology in the human community and the “protestant ethic” of hard-working bees. I drew upon memory rising through the summer visits that immersed me in the family mythos. I created story out of my DNA—those mitochondrial snippets that fed a synthesis of personal history beyond my ken—and from hours spent watching bees in action—asking for their guidance.

I studied A.I. Root’s tome, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, 1930 edition—the book my grandfather had propped on the bookcase next to his King James version of the Old & New Testaments. I read Tammy Horn’s BEES in America, How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (University of Kentucky, 2005). I read The Hive, The Story of the Honeybee and Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) by Bee Wilson.

Honeybees were brought to America by early English settlers in 1620. “European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers.”  (Let alone, Old Testament references to the land of milk and honey.) The Indians called them “white man stinging flies,” their arrival linked to westward press of colonization. And one of the cultural compatibilities that supported the horrific importation of Africans into American slavery was how deeply interwoven cows and bees were in many African societies.  “As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing.” (p19 Bees in America)

Bees came into the Baldwin family in 1915 when a neighboring farmer was drafted into World War I and offered his hives to my grandfather for the duration. The man lived, but wasn’t interested in the bee business after the war, so the operation became “Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey.”  It grew to 500 hives spread out in a 50-mile radius that supported his eight children through the Depression and paid for college educations.

Homestead from the story

A lot of what Leo Cooper says in the story, comes from conversations with my father, Leo Baldwin, recalling his youthful years in Montana during his elder years living nearby.  He died in 2018, the book shaped enough that I committed to finishing it.

And then I came across Jacqueline Freeman’s profound gem, Song of Increase, Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World (Sounds True Press, 2016) and was introduced to the shamanic aspects of beekeeping. See her interview with Seth Godin here. I wish I could have had these conversations with my dad.

A lot of what Maire Cooper experiences in the story comes from Jacqueline’s book, and The Shamanic Way of the Bee, by Simon Buxton (Destiny Books, 2004) which introduced me to the long lineage of Bee Priestesses, the Melissae. The interweaving of bees with Celtic shamanism was in Maire’s blood and in the story, Leo’s bees awaken that within her.

And then there’s Sara Leedom, a global storycatcher honoring the Indigenous ways of beekeeping. Sara showed up in my memoir class to write about her travels to remote honey hunters. While I stayed home and wrote, she attended international bee conferences, including one in England that brought her in contact with the Melissae.

So, there’s a lot to think about, and a lot to honor in the lineage of bees. On these warm May days, I’ve been greeting the bumblebees diving into my rhododendron blossoms and yesterday I parked by a bee yard just to listen to the hum. Wherever you live, watch for them, and watch out for them. And if you’ve read The Beekeeper’s Question, join the zoom and join the buzz. Here’s the link: Saturday, May 24, 9:00 AM Pacific.

If you have any trouble, contact: christina@christinabaldwin.com

May there be love and honey in all our days.

Becoming “Doc”

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It’s a marvelous sign when readers of The Beekeeper’s Question so identify with characters they want to become like them. For several months now I have had the honor of conversing with book club members, both in person and on zoom—mostly women in their 60’s/70’s—inspired by the character “Doc,” as a role model of practical older woman wisdom.

For those who haven’t yet read the book, Doc is Jereldene Jesperson, a seventy-something, unmarried country physician serving the rural community of Pigeon River, Montana. She is the friend of widower, Leo Cooper, the local parson, beekeeper, and father of sons, one in the war, one in the valley. The Cooper family, in which Doc is an honorary auntie, is central to the story and to the community’s ability to make their way through the early years of World War II.

Franklin, Maire, Doc, Leo

Leo’s bee yards

Author, creativity coach and blogger, Sally Fox recorded an excellent podcast of me when the book came out last fall. (Click here to listen.) Recently she posted a blog about wisdom keepers and their important roles in the very real drama of our times. She writes:

One such wisdom keeper, Jereldene Jesperson, known to everyone as “Doc,”  stood out to me after reading The Beekeeper’s Question, a powerful novel by acclaimed Northwest writer Christina Baldwin. Set in an isolated Montana town in 1942, it tells the story of a family and community dealing with divides.

Doc is the family doctor—the only one the town could get. Though she arrived as an outsider, she tends to the bodies and souls of the valley with an open heart, caring even for those who once distrusted her. Over time, she becomes the wise woman people turn to in times of crisis.

I felt moved by her wisdom, comforted by her presence, and left the book feeling like we needed more Docs—seasoned by life, and able to offer their practical wisdom when the world seems to be running off the rails. You can find them everywhere if you know what to look for:

  • They are often older, though some are wise beyond their years.
  • They have known heartbreak but haven’t grown cynical. They still believe in goodness.
  • They observe deeply, understanding that no one is perfect. Their compassion bridges divides.
  • They don’t pretend to be above anyone. They burn their toast, drop dishes, and occasionally forget to put oil in the car. They get lonely and angry and sometimes need to talk themselves down from a high horse.
  • They love to laugh.
  • They are not easily rattled but will speak truth to power in a clear, no-nonsense way.
  • They have experienced life and death and understand the brevity of our time here.
  • They mentor and support others, grieving losses, celebrating victories.
  • They believe in America’s core values yet acknowledge how rights have not always been applied equally.
  • They know when to offer a hug, mug of tea, or spoonful of honey.
  • They love without concern for racial, cultural, or gender differences.
  • They bring perspective, a steady light in the storm, a reassuring shoulder. And a voice that says, “We’ll figure it out like we’ve always done.”
  • They have faced loss and aren’t afraid to love again.

The list reminded me how amazing it was to bring Doc to life; to put good words in her mouth and good actions in her community role. Readers ask me who she is modeled after, and the truest answer is  “the best of you/me/us.”

And Leo… well, he is based on the best aspects of the men in my family–men I would call “the stewards” of  masculinity, who can both tend and defend. He is seasoned, seeking, and rises again and again to cope with the challenges his family, congregation, and bees face in uncertainty.

This is true wisdom: femininity combined with fierceness: masculinity combined with tenderness. Leo and Doc are a team that brings physical and spiritual comfort into the room, serves tea with honey to the suffering. They show up, face into difficult conversations, counsel the younger generation, love the babies and children, hold onto their values. Right now, I see their faces everywhere in the protests rising across America. We are becoming Doc. Becoming Leo

My oldest cousin–age 95, marching in protest. Doc indeed!

I notice how a large proportion of  the protesters are white-skinned and grey-haired. Some people are lamenting, “Where are the youngers?” They’re busy–trying to survive financially, reassure their children (and each other), hold onto meaning in a world where meaning is shattered daily. Our job–the elders–is to get out there and raise our voices. Our generation is responsible for a lot of this mess: so it’s our responsibility to call it back. And it’s time to use our white privilege to stand in front of those being targeted: immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and to make alliances, to reach out, open dialogue, stand fierce, stay tender. As Doc and Leo reassure each other, “We’ll figure it out.” That’s our job now. See you there–in our communities, making good trouble.

Maximum Sentence in Westwolf Killing

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I have written several blog posts about the hit-and-run-killing of Mika Westwolf by a white woman with apparent ties to white supremacy. For background on this story see the posts, Because It’s All Still Happening, and Request for Allyship.

It took 23 months for this case to come to the court, but finally, the family and the defendant had their day for sentencing Feb. 7, 2024. The article below is from the Missoulian, written by  Sam  Wilson/Nora Mabie, photos by Ben Allan Smith © Missoulian. 

I also commend this article from charkoosta.com which goes into more depthl of the family’s testimony, and the judge’s response. A complicated case. The raising of the defendant’s children at issue, and the ongoing trauma to the family and wider community–both Native and white.

Family members listen in court. © Ben Allan Smith, Missoulian.

Missoulian POLSON — A Butte woman was sentenced Friday to 10 years in the Montana State Women’s Prison for the vehicular homicide of Mika Westwolf, a young Native American woman who she killed in a hit-and-run crash while walking along the highway near Arlee last year.

After roughly four hours of testimony in the Lake County Courthouse, District Judge Molly Owen sentenced Sunny K. White, 29, to the maximum sentence allowed under a plea deal reached with state prosecutors in November. In exchange for guilty pleas to vehicular homicide while under the influence and for leaving the scene of the crash, prosecutors dropped three other felony charges.

Carissa Heavy Runner testifying in court. © Ben Allan Smith, Missoulian.

“I wouldn’t just let my daughter be forgotten,” Westwolf’s mother, Carissa Heavy Runner, told a crowd after the hearing. “We did what we came here to do today. … The only way we can be healed is to be seen and to be heard. To speak our truth, hear our truth. No one can tell it better than us.”

George Heavy Runner, Westwolf’s grandfather, called the ruling “a victory.”

“This is what we asked for,” he said of the decision. “To show that her life did matter.”

White cannot be paroled for all 10 years of her prison sentence, followed by a 20-year suspended sentence during which she will remain on parole. If she violates her release conditions during that time, she can be sent back to prison.

As Westwolf’s family testified throughout the hearing, Owen repeatedly asked if they supported the plea agreement, noting that if she went beyond those terms with her sentence, White’s lawyers could take the case to trial instead.

“I do believe that if I rejected the plea agreement, this would delay the case even further and I do believe that Mika’s family deserves some finality here,” Owen told the packed courtroom, adding that she “might have concerns with the length of the sentence.”

Grandfather testifying. © Ben Allan Smith, Missoulian.

Friday’s hearing ends what has been a nearly two-year journey for Westwolf’s family and friends, many of whom spoke critically of the plea deal and what they saw as a half-hearted initial investigation. White spent just seven days in jail on an initial charge of child endangerment, and homicide charges were not brought until seven months later.

A tearful White was remanded to the custody of the Lake County sheriff for transportation to the Montana State Women’s Prison at the conclusion of the hearing Friday afternoon.

“I know there are no words that I can speak to ease that pain and I wish there were,” White said at the end of the hearing, emotionally addressing Westwolf’s friends and family. “I will be living with the guilt of my actions in this terrible accident that took her life and I pray that someday you can find forgiveness for me.”

The sentencing hearing included statements from a dozen of Westwolf’s friends and family, followed by statements from a handful of White’s family and supporters.

“A precious limb has fallen from our family tree in the loss of our dear Mika,” Westwolf’s grandfather said. “It can never be put back to grow with us, and we’ll never be able to witness what was to be of the potential, had she lived.”

Several people mentioned White’s alleged white nationalist ties, citing the names of her children, Aryan and Nation.

“You hurt our hearts and our spirit,” said Thomas Combs, Westwolf’s cousin. “This might be painful for you, but you have no idea — your children are still alive.”

White’s sister, Hannah White, also took the stand to offer support for her sister and disputed the white supremacy narrative.

“There is a lot of false information out there with her and her children’s names,” Hannah White said, suggesting those were instead the views held by her children’s father. “She’s not racist; she’s not white supremacist.”

She also described her sister as “loving” and “compassionate,” telling the court that “being a mother is the job that she was meant to do, and I truly hope that she continues to get to do that.”

Kim Paul, Westwolf’s adopted grandmother, addressed White directly.

“Do you think yourself superior?” she asked. “Did you intentionally do this? We will never know. … Her family is owed justice and Mika is owed her dignity.”

Paul described Westwolf, who was Blackfeet, Navajo, Cree and Klamath, as a caring and smart woman who was dedicated to her community.

Photo of Mika, held in her mother’s hands.© Ben Allan Smith, Missoulian.

“Mika was going to be a wildlife biologist, or a botanist, or a veterinarian or a landscape architect, or something outside, and some valuable service-oriented career that would help us positively impact this world,” she said. “How do you measure that?”

Kevin Howard, Westwolf’s stepfather, condemned the criminal justice system.

“I don’t know of any white folks that have to go on marches and create a spectacle in order to receive justice,” he said, adding family members worked to investigate Westwolf’s death as they grieved.

Several of Westwolf’s family members also spoke of forgiveness for White, including her biological father Michael John Westwolf II.

“I forgive you with all my heart and pray for the Creator to do the same and show you that love is stronger than hate,” Westwolf II said, as White became emotional while seated next to her defense attorneys.

White also pleaded guilty to one felony count of for leaving the scene. Under the plea deal, prosecutors dismissed three other felonies: two counts of child endangerment and one count of criminal possession of dangerous drugs.

Members of Westwolf’s family and friends at times asked for the maximum sentence under law, and objected to the terms of the plea agreement.

Westwolf’s death in March 2023 drew national attention. Her family led a statewide campaign, with awareness walks, rallies and other events, calling for justice and awareness in her case as well as other cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

After the judge’s decision, Heavy Runner told a crowd outside the courthouse she would continue to advocate for justice in the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people.

“We want to empower other families to not give up,” she said. “We can’t do it alone. We have to do this together. This is what Indigenous families are up against.”

Acknowledging the repeated allegations of White having a racist ideology, Owens noted during her sentencing that prosecutors had not charged the case as a hate crime.

At the hearing’s conclusion, Assistant Attorney General Thorin Geist said that Montana’s hate crime statutes require prosecutors to prove intent, and the state lacked sufficient evidence to do so.

“We have to prove that her motivation was the race of the individual, and I think it is a legal impossibility in a negligence case,” Geist said.

White’s two young children were reportedly in the car when their mother struck and killed Westwolf, according to the crash report and charging documents. White left the scene after hitting Westwolf in the early morning hours of March 31, 2023.

Evidence collected from the crash site indicated Westwolf was walking in the northbound lane of traffic when she was struck. She was hit head-on by the car’s passenger side, the case affidavit states. Westwolf died on scene from multiple blunt-force injuries.

Cell phone data put White’s location at the crash scene at exactly 3 a.m., according to the affidavit. A highway trooper discovered her body on the road at 4:15 a.m.

Authorities tracked down White, according to the crash report, and found her Cadillac Escalade in Polson roughly an hour later using a description of damage the vehicle sustained from the collision.

White told officers she was driving from Butte to Kalispell when the crash occurred, according to charging documents. She said she didn’t stop because she thought she had hit a deer, prosecutors alleged.

But according to the affidavit, investigators spoke with a witness who saw an SUV with a headlight out stopped along the side of the road that morning near the crash scene.

“He stated that the vehicle was on the side of the road facing north and noticed a headlight was out as he passed the vehicle while also traveling in a northbound direction,” the affidavit states. “Then the vehicle caught up to him and passed him traveling north going 90 miles per hour.”

Owens referenced that piece of evidence when she sentenced White.

“Even with this information, you continue to state that you thought you hit a deer,” she told White. “You killed someone, while under the influence, and you continue to deny your responsibility for that.”

Supporters and family hug outside courtroom. © Ben Allan Smith, Missoulian.

And so that part of the journey of justice is done. But as often happens, a passion for larger justice has been awakened in Mika’s mother, who vows to continue advocating for missing Indigenous people. You can follow her on MikaMatters.com and Facebook.

And now I ask myself: What is awakened in ME? What do I vow to continue advocating for? What am I willing to march for? Stand for? Risk for? More on that never-ending conversation soon. Right now a pause, a breath, an acknowledgment of the grief of this family and the roads they invite us to walk with them.

The Baldwins and the Coopers—multiple Leos.

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Second reader’s ZOOM, for folks who have finished my novel: The Beekeeper’s Question. Live conversation was held on January 11, with a special treat: Baldwin cousins, including men now 80s/90s who worked in honey harvesting, and our matriarch cousin, 95-years-old, with family memories from that era. 

In a long-ago writer’s group of mixed genre projects, I asked a friend who was novelizing her family history why she was writing fiction instead of memoir. Her answer, “Because with fiction I can offer my lineage another way out, alternatives they didn’t take.”

Her comment burrowed deep into my writing mind and inspired me, decades later, to borrow vestiges from the life of my grandfather, Leo Baldwin, and my father, Leo Baldwin Jr., and the small Montana town where the family ran “Baldwin and Sons Beeline Honey” for over 50 years. If you have recently read The Beekeeper’s Question, this locale and bee business is sounding familiar. And if you have visited the book page and watched the Langley Book Launch video you will see photographs of the actual homestead, town, and family members posing as stand-ins for the place and characters in the book.

I taught memoir and autobiography for thirty-plus years, wrestling with students over issues of integrity: How much can be shifted and still be considered true? Can I combine characters? What if people are still alive? What if the rest of my family doesn’t agree, or know, or admit to the realities of my story? What do I have the right to write about other people?

Well, a lot of that is solved by declaring a story is fiction and stating on the copyright page: “The characters do not represent actual persons, living or dead. All opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.”

Well, mostly. There was a female doctor in the valley in those years. She was a close friend of my grandparents. However, Doc Jereldene in the book is my creation. Why she moved to the valley and her character is sourced from my imagination. The rest of the towns people are all imagined—Gertie, Belle, the Pocket, Torgerson, and Sivertsen families. The Shines the Light family, emerged out of hours of cultural and historical research.

Rev. Leo Cooper, well, he bears a lot of resemblance to Rev. Leo Baldwin. And while I placed the story within the house of my grandfather’s life, I had to break free of reconstructed half-memories, and source Leo Cooper from writer’s mind. Leo, the character, was brought to life to fulfill what the story required and to be what his sons and daughters-in-law, and the valley needed him to be.

My greatest hope for this work of fiction, and the role of fiction in general, is to offer readers “another way out.” Reading a good story allows us as readers to consider choices and consequences that play out in the drama of plot and illuminate alternatives. The Beekeeper’s Question provides a storyland in which we get to vicariously struggle with issues of racism, morality, love, violence. We are invited into imaginary communities in hopes we learn from these fictional characters how to live in our own communities. Reading allows us to imagine ourselves in the world of then and there, and prepare ourselves for how we will speak, listen, and act in the world of now.

I have been reading works of fiction for seventy years. I know that memorable characters, from Caddie Woodlawn and Little Women, to a thousand adult novels, all contribute to my sense of how to be a human—especially, how to be the kind of human the story of my life requires, and what “the valley” of these times need me to be.

More soon. Keep reading…

Request for Allyship

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NOTE: This blogpost is archived as part of my writing list. It contains a time-sensitive request that went past on December 13,2024. However, the educational aspects of the story remain relevant, and the community will be informed as the court system makes a decision. Thank you to readers who wrote letters and emails. Some of you shared your words in the comments or emails: such thoughtful, compassionate outreach. And thank you to those who just read with curiosity. All open-hearted, thought-provoking, call and response, and quiet contemplation is welcome here.

I knew writing The Beekeeper’s Question would require reckoning with the injustices of western settlement. Despite my birth into the territory of the book, in childhood I was taught almost nothing about Indigenous people or the history of the land on which my grandparents homesteaded. I had to read and research to educate myself enough to write Piikuni characters into the story. And I needed a Blackfeet cultural advisor willing to confront my cultural blinders and help me fulfill my intentions for accuracy and respect.

It took me three and a half years to find such an advisor.  A friend-of-a-friend introduced us. We started texting in a stream of words like a river already flowing. She shared realities of Native people today, and elucidated history from the Indigenous perspective.  She told me of the harm done to her grandmother at the Fort Shaw Indian School. I told her my grandfather had been a teacher there. Their lives may have intersected: now ours were intersecting. We decided our ancestors wanted healing.

Grand Entry, No. American Indian Days, July 2019

The characters of Jesse, Willow, Gramma Josie, BB, Darrell, Aunt Aggie, the council, and little Drum all contain bits of her education, guidance, and validation. Nato’kssin, my friend.

Now her extended family needs allyship.

Many readers ask me what to do about the issues raised in the story. Here’s something immediate: You can help one family confront one tragic death. You can write one letter to a court in Montana, asking that the life of a young Indigenous woman, Mika Westwolf, be valued in the justice system, and that the young woman who killed her in a hit and run is held accountable.

I have written this story before in my blog post: “Because it’s all still happening.” Mika Westwolf was killed as she walked alongside Montana Highway 93 on the Flathead Reservation, heading home late at night on March 31, 2023.   When Popular Information ran Mika’s story, and Amy Goodman picked it up for Democracy Now, the death of this young woman and the tragedies of many Native families came to white-eyes attention.

The woman who hit Mika is named Sunny White. She named her little children Aryan and Nation. The combination of vehicular homicide, white supremacy, and hate-crime brought the FBI into the case. Her auntie describes the scene this way: “The newspapers keep saying “crash” there was no crash…she ran off the road to run Mika down in cold blood and drove away… the police caught up with her hours later, passed out in her rig,…when they woke her she is recorded in the police cam yelling “I’m going to prison forever pls don’t arrest me.” Well that tells everyone she knew what she did and intentionally left Mika to die alone…later she changed it to “I thought I hit a deer.” It’s ridiculous to be charged 45-yrs and have charges dropped to five yrs in a plea agreement… we need letters, just one paragraph, or email, or phone calls saying white people are watching this and care that the family gets justice”

Here’s what I am saying via email: I have been following this case since it received national attention in the spring/summer of 2023. Any event like this is a complex tragedy, but Sunny White must be held accountable for vehicular homicide, for child endangerment and other charges. The justice system needs to validate the loss of Mika Westwolf to her family and her people. Standards of sentencing need to be observed without prejudice, and a signal sent to Indigenous citizens that Montana law takes their harm and disappearance and deaths seriously.  Thank you. Christina Baldwin, Montana born.

This is what Mika’s mother wrote on Facebook and the www.MikaMatters.com website.

“On the morning of October 30th, 2024, in Polson, Mt the pre-conference trial hearing for Sunny White was held. That morning, Sunny White pleaded guilty to “vehicular homicide and incidents involving another person.”

White was also charged with two counts of criminal child endangerment and one count of criminal possession of dangerous drugs, which were dismissed as part of the plea deal. Sunny White was under the influence of fentanyl and meth when she struck Mika with her vehicle leaving her on the side of the road.

The total sentence could include up to 40 years in prison with substantial fines. If the stars all aligned in White’s favor in her sentencing, White would only receive five years or less. This is not acceptable to me or my family.

We, the family of Mika, initially hoped for a jury trial. We wanted to bring more visibility to Mika’s case and continue to pressure Lake County to work (as it should) with no racial biases. This is one of the many issues that we, as indigenous people, still have to still face, in this country, in 2024!

I am asking you that if you care about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and my daughter’s case to please write a letter to Katie Campbell (Sergeant of the Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Board). It is Katie Campbell’s duty to write the final report for Sunny White’s sentencing, that the judge will read. We hope that with our families’ testimonies (at the sentencing), and the letters that you will provide; Sunny White will receive the maximum amount of years and any chance of early parole will be denied. …  In the end, my ultimate goal is to get justice for my daughter, Mika, and try to get the sentencing laws changed in the state of Montana. Right now, the penalties do not work in favor of the victim. People get more time for theft, burglary, and drug convictions than taking a human life.

WE NEED YOU. If you care about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and my daughters’ case to please write a letter to Katie Campbell (Sergeant of the Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Board). 

Please write letters, email, or call:
Katie Campbell
Sergeant, Kalispell Region Probation and Parole Bureau
kcampbell2@mt.gov

Office: 406-872-6254

36235 Kerr Dam Rd Polson, MT. 59860

Victim Impact Statement please include at the top of your Statement

  • Primary victim’s name: Mika J. Westwolf
  • Defendant name(s): Sunny K. White
  • Date of crime: March 31,2023
  • Location of crime: North of Arlee, MT near Mile marker 20

Deadline is December 13th, 2024 (Her mother says to send letters and emails beyond that date as well.)

Once upon a time my grandfather, a newly ordained Methodist missionary, was assigned, as his “Christian ministry” to participate in the torturous “re-education” of Indian children. And once upon a time the descendants of a surviving Indian girl and a “re-educated” parson met to tell a story. Mika’s death became part of our story beyond the book. And writing Katie Campbell is part of my commitment to restitution and healing beyond the book.

View of butte and “Pigeon River,” site of The Beekeeper’s Question

I know this is an edgy request, but this is an edgy time. Do what feels right in your heart but do something. Maybe for Mika, maybe for some other cause. We are called to courage and engagement. Now, more than ever.

 

 

 

Echoes Then to Now-Part 2

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Morning. The trees receive the touch of sun and birds that have huddled in their branches after Monday’s windstorm, and Tuesday’s humanstorm, shake their feathers and head to the feeder. I watch over the rim of my laptop, out my living room window. Take a ragged breath. Nature is wordless, but people are chattering—wildly trying to make story, to find a way to fit what just happened into the narrative we thought we were living. The turn we thought we were in toward a better country, just before the bus went off the rails and over the mountain side. Mourning.

The thing is, we cannot make immediate sense/story after a detonation this huge. We try, because disorientation is uncomfortable. Terrifying. It’s hard not to wake up this morning with the haunting sense that America 2024 just became Germany 1933. But because we know the historical scope of fascism, even in this dire situation, we can make different choices and pull ourselves out of this wreck.

I made an offer, when my book came out, that early readers of The Beekeeper’s Question are invited to gather on zoom this coming Saturday November 9. This offer stands. 9:00 AM Pacific, 10:00 Mountain, 11:00 Central, 12:00 East. Since the invite is to readers who have completed the story, there will be plot reveal discussion. This session will be repeated January 18, 2025.

The video of the Langley book launch, is on the book page. It includes a slideshow of Montana and the 1940s, was attended by 150 people.

We will talk and listen to whatever people want to say about the book, and that time and this time.

Gather if you are moved to be in this circle. I send you love and honey to soothe your heart.

The Beekeeper’s Question: a book is born! .

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Welcome to this blog community and readership. May you find respite and thoughtfulness and a sense of traveling among known and unknown companions, trusting there are many of similar mind and heart journeying through life’s complexities.

 

Butte photo: Rebecca Dougherty. Cover design by Olive Elizabeth Black, Hey Olive Studios.

This moment, amid all else that is happening, I am celebrating the release of the historical novel I’ve been working on for twelve years. In 2012, I had an idea for a story about a beekeeper’s family living in Montana during World War II. But our business, teaching The Circle Way, was still taking most my time and I was shepherding other writers through “The Self as the Source of the Story.” In 2014, I read fifty pages to friends around a campfire, and they shouted— “What happens?! Finish it…” I began interviewing my father, then in his nineties, who lived nearby: tell me about our family business, Baldwin & Sons Beeline Honey, how your father got his land, the absence/presence of the Blackfeet, rural life in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, the impact of the war. Over many hours at his kitchen table, my father allowed me to harvest his early life experience for the story. He died at age 98 in October 2018. I vowed to finish the book.

Summer in the village of Langley, WA.

Two years ago, the same New York literary agent who sold my first book in 1977, took on the novel manuscript with great excitement. She submitted it to thirty editors—and such is the state of publishing today that only nine even responded. Each editor made thoughtful comments, while not quite buying. Their reactions inspired me to rework, tweak tension, trim, and craft, craft, craft. (Well, crafting words is my favorite activity!)  Last spring, when I turned 78 years old, I took the book back into my own hands.  Launching a book is a 3–4-year commitment: I have energy now. I have community support (you all) now. And I sense that the story is relevant to large swatches of the reading public: now. I chose Sea Script Book Company in Seattle/Langley, and IT’S HAPPENING!

The Beekeeper’s Question,

Love and Honey, War and Reckoning, a Novel of World War II

It’s 1942 and World War II looms over the lives of the Cooper family: a son in the fight whose pregnant Irish war bride arrives in this isolated Montana valley; a son married to a Blackfeet woman whose return tears open racial tension just when people must work together for the war effort. Their father, Leo, a philosophizing beekeeper and local preacher, models a vision for what the community might become.  His colleague, Jereldene “Doc” Jesperson, holds the valley together, curing bodies and tending souls. And Josie Shines the Light, a Blackfeet grandmother, must rely on Leo and his son to safeguard her granddaughter in the troubled settler valley.  This is a dramatic family saga of generations daring to ask the questions that shape their destinies; a story of enduring love in an era of American life that still echoes in society today.

Post war baby boom #1

All these years of writing, it’s the echoes that fascinate and frighten me: how pundits comment on the similarities of 2020s America to 1930s Germany. Then and now, the world is counting on the USA to be a global leader, to shine the beacon of the Statue of Liberty, to hold steady the global wheels of commerce, progress, and vision in the crises we face. It’s a huge task to ask of a nation and her citizens. We needed story then to inspire; we need story now to sustain. We need stories that remind us how ordinary people find extraordinary capacities in themselves because that’s what circumstances require.

Sometimes we have to go back in time to see the time we are living in. This story insisted I write about the war before I was born; insisted I locate the characters in a Montana home front, using my grandfather’s homestead and vocation to house the fictional family.

In my childhood, on honey-scented weeks of family reunion and harvest, no one spoke of Native land displacement, nor that the old fort had been in Indian school or explained the ramifications of the Homestead Act. But now— being white, being settler, being part of the land-grab and genocide of American expansion, the story needed to both reckon with that past and reattach us to the best of our lineages.

In writing a legacy novel, I was compelled to bring Montana’s original citizens into the story, to give them voice and presence. A Piikuni tribal member advised me on Indigenous character development.  Three veterans advised me on war and trauma. An ER doctor read the medical scenes. Beekeeping cousins reviewed the honey harvest.  And until just weeks before his death, my father helped envision the town and landscape as it was in his youth.

I wrote this book for you, for us. I wrote for all kinds of thoughtful people, known and unknown to me, and to each other, who populate this list. I wrote it for your book clubs, your friends and families, your church groups, your ancestors and your descendants; a touchstone story that calls us back to the best of ourselves and fosters conversations about who we need to be in our circumstances.

The Beekeeper’s Question is as luminous as sunlight through a jar of honey. In her sweeping new novel, Christina Baldwin courageously explores the traumas that shape us and the connections that heal us. These pages skillfully traverse individual stories, cultures, landscapes, and history. Through this powerful story we discover that community, an expansive sense of love, and—yes—the language of the bees, can grace us with interconnection between Self and Whole. In the current political and ecological moment, Baldwin’s message is as urgent as it is beautiful. –Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Rooted, Mozart’s Starling, and other titles

This is the beginning of many conversations…in writing and responding. I am excited by all that I discovered in this process, and how relevant it is to our lives 80+ years later. I am eager to continue bouncing between times, reflecting together the slipstream of life.

As a reader and member of this blog community between now and October 15—you may order the e-book for $3.99 (reduced from $9.99). This discount includes YOUR BOOK CLUB—please pass along this title for consideration, and all members of your club, your friends and family may use this discount.

I have priced the print book at $20.00—keeping it simple, keeping it affordable. Click here for the book’s page on my website, for an excerpt, Amazon access, etc.

I will host a special zoom call on Saturday November 9 to discuss the book with readers, and to honor those who have taken the effort to write reviews. Everyone on this list will receive announcement to register and a zoom link for that conversation.

Local book signing scheduled for Langley, WA on October 18, 4-5:30 at Langley United Methodist Church, 301 Anthes Ave.  A celebration of community: This is a book about a village…

When the light is right, we may see the angelic energy that overguards us always. War is horrific. Then, now, here, there. Pray for peace, for democracy, for stamina to carry on.