At Home In Russia, At Home on the Prairie

What causes a region, a place, to imprint itself upon the people who are born and live there? What is the connection between landscape and memory? A new television documentary from Prairie Public shows how a territory can endure in the minds of the descendants of those inhabitants after years, even after generations, have passed. At Home in Russia, at Home on the Prairie is one in a series produced by Prairie Public about the Germans from Russia. The documentary travels to an area typical of many German settlements on the Russian steppe at one time a breadbasket of grain and other agricultural products. The Germans who settled the area are largely gone now, scattered in forced migration through difficult decades of political unrest and change. Many of these German-Russians settled on the prairies of North Dakota, the Northern Plains, and western Canadian prairie provinces. One of those families is the Kutchurganers, who lived in south Russia before journeying to the prairies of North America. The stories are told by the descendants of these pioneers who settled on the prairies of North Dakota and Saskatchewan: Monsignor Joseph Senger, Christina Gross Jundt, Helen Feist Krumm, Dr. Adam Giesinger, Father Thomas Welk, Theresa Kuntz Bachmeier, Barbara Schneider Risling, Ron Volk, Colleen Zeiler, Debra Marquart, Mary Ebach and Clara Ebach.