15. Two Minnesotas

I was born in small town Lutheran Minnesota in 1942, and lived there until I was ten. There were years of visits to favorite uncles, aunts, and lakes, and from that time on, from homes in California and Oregon, I have followed Minnesota, proud of her sports teams and historic and liberal support of the arts, proud of her acceptance of refugees from Vietnam and Somalia.

But…  as I began my own journey in American Indian history, another Minnesota appeared. Most dramatically, there was the 1862 Mankato Hanging of 38 Indians fighting for food and freedom. More systemically, I began to reflect and read about the Indians and their reservations near my hometown. I hadn’t known a Minnesota Indian by name. I read David Treuer, whose Ojibwa roots are on the nearby Leach Lake Reservation, and Louise Erdrich, further away on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation. Their world—of boarding schools, allotments, Termination, and Relocation was and is not the Minnesota I knew.

Then George Floyd. And on a recent day on public radio a story about Calvin Griffith, who moved the Washington Senators to Minnesota and changed their name to the Twins because he found out there were “only 15,000 blacks [in Minneapolis-St. Paul]… We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”

There was another NPR story that same day about Hmong Chef Yia Vang, whose family came to Minnesota from a Thai refugee camp when he was a child, because Minnesotans were passionate sponsors of refugees. And there is news of the Minnesota Freedom Fund and herculean efforts to get rid of the bail system.

So now I see two Minnesotas from this Oregon distance—and maybe that’s not so odd. Maybe the Covid and BLM lenses are helping us all see more of worlds we thought we knew.

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