By Leah Lemm/MPR News
Jingle dress dancers gathered on February 1 to hold healing ceremonies at the locations where Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by federal immigration agents while observing their operations.
Hundreds of people attended the ceremony in south Minneapolis, many in ribbon skirts and regalia.
Star Downwind was a lead organizer of the ceremony.
“The dress came to our people when there was a time of sickness. And so that’s what we do. We show up when there’s people suffering,” Downwind said.
The jingle dress and the dance have provided healing for Native communities for over a hundred years in Minnesota.
A week after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis in 2020, Downwind organized a jingle dress ceremony at the memorial site. Downwind said a friend called her recently, asking if she could do it again — now for Good and Pretti.
“It’s just a part of the responsibility of being a jingle dancer — is to go to where people are suffering or people are sick and they need healing to bring it,” Downwind said.
A prayer marked the start of the ceremony. Then the jingle dress dancers moved in rhythm, in a clockwise circle around the drum. The crowd surrounded them.
It had snowed earlier, so there was a layer of white covering Good’s memorial. Two men had shoveled the street to make space for the dancers.
Caley Coyne was one of the jingle dress dancers at the ceremony. Usually, Coyne dances the fancy shawl but brings out the jingle dress only “when it is very needed.”
“To bring healing to a community that’s obviously already very hurt, just to try and uplift and heal and protect all of those around us,” Coyne said.
Downwind said several community members were involved in organizing the ceremony, including Nicole Matthews, the CEO of the Minnesota Indigenous Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition.
When she heard about the Good’s death, Matthews says she was scared and angry.
“We’re seeing it in broad daylight. All of it happening, unfolding right in front of us.”
The ceremony comes at a time when federal immigration operations are still in progress. Yet Matthews says intentional prayer and being with one another is her “armor.”
“I believe our medicines and our prayers are our greatest strength, and that gives me courage to be here,” Matthews said. “When we come together in prayer and in solidarity with each other, we’re protected.”
Reporter Melissa Olson contributed to this report.
