Written by Winona LaDuke,

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It’s 2016, and the weight of American corporate interests has come to the Missouri River, the Mother River. This time, instead of the Seventh Cavalry, or the Indian police dispatched to assassinate Sitting Bull, it is Enbridge and Dakota Access Pipeline. In mid August, Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II was arrested by state police, along with 27 others, for opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the meantime, North Dakota Governor Daplymyre called for more police support. Every major pipeline project in North America must cross Indigenous lands, Indian country. That is a problem.  

The road west of Fargo is rarely taken. In fact, most Americans just fly over North Dakota, never seeing it. Let me take you there.
 My head clears as I drive; my destination the homeland of the Hunkpapa Oceti, Standing Rock Reservation. It is early evening, the moon full. If you close your eyes you can remember the 50 million buffalo, the single largest migratory herd in the world. The pounding of their hooves would vibrate the Earth, and make the grass grow. There were once 250 species of grass. Today the buffalo are gone, replaced by 28 million cattle who require grain, water and hay. Many of the fields are now in a single GMO crop, full of so many pesticides that the monarch butterflies are being wiped out.

If you drive long enough you come to the Missouri River. Called Mnisose, a great swirling river by the Lakota, she is a force to be reckoned with. She is breathtaking.  

The Missouri River has a fixed place in the history and mythology of the Lakota and other Indigenous nations of the Northern Plains. In the time before Sitting Bull, the Missouri River was the epicenter of northern agriculture; the river bed so fertile, the territory was known as the fertile crescent of North America.

Now Enbridge and their partners are preparing to drill through the river bed. The pipeline has been permitted in sections from the west and from the east. The northern portion was moved away from the water supply of Bismarck, into the watershed of Standing Rock.  That’s unfortunate.

Written by Lee Egerstrom,

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No one wants to hear the word “Oops” uttered at a construction site. And not at healthcare and medical facilities, either.
So printed on a wall above blackboards in a carpentry classroom at Summit Academy OIC in North Minneapolis is the carpenters’ proverb: “Measure twice and cut once.” That also sums up what the adult students are doing with their lives, said Steve Shedivy, director of marketing.

Literally, the old adage means carpenters and construction workers should double check their measurements before sawing lumber or putting building materials into place. Figuratively, for everyone else, it simply means to prepare thoroughly before taking action.

Summit Academy (SAIOC) offers 20-week job training programs that ready students for apprenticeships and internships in the construction trades or in healthcare and medical-related career positions.
The program offerings vary during the year, Shedivy said.

Within the construction fields, training programs include electrician, heavy equipment operator, concrete form carpenter, residential carpentry and pre-apprentice construction/carpentry.

Healthcare programs are for community health workers, certified nursing assistants, medical administrative assistants and pharmacy technicians.

Using Minnesota state government projections, the school notes that there will be $6 billion in construction projects in the Twin Cities metro area by 2018. Nationally, the aging population is driving 5.6 million new healthcare jobs within the next four years.
For many students wishing to prepare for expanding job opportunities, a lack of a high school diploma is a large barrier to success. SAOIC has started a unique 10-week GED certificate program to precede the training programs.

Native American students are a small but growing percentage of SAOIC enrollment, Shedivy said, but could increase with the GED preparation program. Roughly half of the Native American population in Minnesota left school before graduating, according to various federal and state studies.

It’s still too new to determine how the 10-week GED preparation, tutoring and help with a personal study program will affect SA enrollment. There are technical training programs at Minnesota community colleges geared to similar career paths, but accessing those programs is not easy for adults without high school diplomas who want to go back to school.

Meanwhile, the logic of nonprofit training programs for recognized real world jobs would seem to be patently obvious. That isn’t the case in most parts of America.

Written by Jon Lurie,

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Minnesota’s newest supreme court justice is also the first Native American to serve as a member of the state’s highest judicial body.
Hennepin County Judge Anne McKeig, 49, wept as Governor Mark Dayton announced her appointment in late June.

“Today is a historic day, not only for myself and for my family but for all Native people. It underscores the importance of one person leading so that another can follow,” McKeig, who is a descendant of the White Earth Nation, said during the proceedings.

McKeig, 49, recollected watching the 1995 swearing-in ceremony of Robert Blaeser, the state’s first judge from White Earth, calling it an inspiration that set in motion her own career path.

“It is people like him who have led the way that have allowed for others like me to dare to dream,” she said of Blaeser, who served nearly twenty years in Hennepin County District Court.

Dayton said in choosing a new justice he looked for “excellence, for proven public service, for people who have demonstrated that they have compassion, that they understand that even if it is not directly out of their own experience, the plight of so many Minnesotans. Diversity is part of that but, again, that’s no substitute for experience and excellence.

Written by Lee Egerstrom,

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It worked for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow back in 1855. It’s working again for OPOS (Our People, Our Story) Tours and Travel of Bloomington.
By blending some Dakota and Ojibwe culture together, with a little help from the Iroquois, Longfellow created a remarkable Great Lakes regional legend and a poetic classic that is still bringing tourists to Minnesota where they may also learn about Native American culture and history.

OPOS Tours and Travel is a restarted Twin Cities-based tour and travel agency previously known as T & T Native Tours, which was the first 100 percent Native owned travel business two decades ago. Reincarnated, it brings Longfellow’s epic “Song of Hiawatha” to life as part of its Metro Tours packages for visitors and for locals who want to know more about Native legend, culture and history in their own backyards.

About half of the groups that arrange OPOS tours are outsiders from out of state who simply want to enjoy and learn about Minnesota, said Sonja Tanner, founder and president. The other half are locals, including large groups of Native Americans, who want fun outings and to learn more about Native culture, she said.

Half-day metro tours include stops at Minnehaha Falls, the legendary home of Longfellow’s warrior Hiawatha, as well as the ancient Dakota settlement Kaposia in South St. Paul, Mounds Park burial grounds, Ft. Snelling Park Interpretive Center, Battle Creek Park and a touristy stop at Ancient Traders Market in the Longfellow area of south Minneapolis.

Tanner and daughter Ashley are members of the White Earth Nation and bring Ojibwe culture and traditions into the enterprise. Both are alumni of Bemidji State University.

Another OPOS partner is Chris Prescott, Shakopee Mdewankaton and descendent from a long established Dakota family. Prescott joined with Sonja Tanner to restart the business in October a year ago and was guided by two yearnings. He said, “I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he said. The other motive was equally personal. “I have always loved travel.”

He has traveled extensively around the world in what indigenous people in Australia might call “a walkabout.” The reception for Native American exhibitors he recently witnessed at an international travel fair in Germany reminded him that North American Native people and their cultures are of great interest to world travelers. Going forward, he said, the tour and travel company will seek to attract more of these travelers to Minnesota and its 11 Ojibwe and Dakota tribal communities.

Written by Jon Lurie,

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Sitting alongside his family in ceremonies, Wakinyan LaPointe has heard the warnings for as long as he can remember. Lately, the dire messages have become increasingly urgent: Water must be preserved and protected. Unless that is done, all life on Earth is in danger.

“Everything we are – our languages, our ways of life, our ceremonies, are all dependent on water,” says the 26-year-old Sicangu Lakota. “Without water there is no life.”

Wakinyan and his brother Thorne, 25, are college students and community organizers. They have been instrumental for years in Minnesota-based water events such as the Healthy Nations river scouting expeditions, Mde Maka Ska Canoe Nations Gathering, the Four Directions Water Walk, and Mde Maka Ska Community Conversations.

But after the recent death of an Indigenous rights leader in Honduras, the two men felt a greater sense of urgency to act on behalf of water, and the world’s Indigenous populations.

Berta Caceres, who had successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam project at the Río Gualcarque – a river sacred to her Lenca people – was slain in her home last March. More than a dozen environmental defenders have been killed in Honduras since 2014, according to Global Witness, which makes it one of the most dangerous countries in the world for activists protecting forests and rivers

Along with their father LeMoine, mother Nancy Bordeaux, and sister Tiana, the LaPointe brothers conceived a plan to invite Indigenous leaders from around the world to Minnesota – the font of much of the Earth’s fresh water – for a summit, which they are calling Mni Wakan: A Decade of Water.

Thorne and Wakinyan put their heads together and wrote a summons to the world’s Indigenous leaders. It came in the form of a formal statement, or in the lingo of the United Nations, an “intervention” on water.
“The statement, a broad interpretation of the water crisis this world is experiencing, reiterated our Lakota values: Mni Wakan: water is sacred; Mni Pejuta: water is medicine; and Mni Wiconi: Water is Life,” says Wakinyan. “In our Lakota way, it is our responsibility to strengthen our relationship with water. The statement was intended to acknowledge that relationship and place it in everyone’s minds. In the process of so doing, we invited indigenous peoples, and the appropriate UN representatives, to come to Mni Wakan: Decade of Water. This will be an indigenous led, indigenous centered, water summit, which we are planning for April of 2017.”

Written by Lee Egerstrom,

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The Prairie Island Indian Community appears to be the first Native American community to buy land and make emergency evacuation and relocation plans under the threat of living next door to nuclear power plant reactors and stored radioactive fuels.

The PIIC Tribal Council announced in March that it had purchased 112 acres of land east of St. Paul for possible future development. This was a precautionary action in the event of a nuclear event with either the power plant or continuing radioactive waste storage at Prairie Island.

On June 6, PIIC applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to have the newly acquired land placed in federal trust in the event the community must vacate its ancestral island homeland.  

The importance of this step became obvious on June 3 when the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia ruled that spent fuel rods from the power plant may remain indefinitely on the island – unless the federal government finds a suitable depository somewhere else that no one wants.

Tribal Council President Shelly Buck said the community and its allies among states, utilities and environmental groups in ongoing litigation are unaware of any other tribal entity that has taken such steps from a nuclear threat.

Robert Holden, deputy director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C., said other tribal entities across the country are close enough to nuclear plants and hazardous sites to be concerned for safety. “But none are as close as Prairie Island,” he said, noting that the power plants and stored fuel waste are only 600 yards from PIIC homes and businesses.

There are tribes in Arizona and tribes concerned for water safety and salmon fisheries in Washington state that are too close for comfort, he said. No other group is literally “living next door” to a site that could become another Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima (2011) nuclear disasters.

PIIC’s Buck said that the Community doesn’t plan to completely relocate. “Prairie Island remains our ancestral homeland and a location with significant spiritual meaning; that will never change.”

At the same time, she said, Prairie Island doesn’t have room to grow and expand “with a nuclear neighbor, so finding safe, usable land for future use is a priority.”