As runners prepare for October races, Native Women Run is working to ensure Native women have a place at the starting line. This nonprofit organization represents and empowers Native women across the United States and Canada, creating opportunities to run while strengthening visibility, sisterhood, empowerment, and community. Founder Verna NezBegay Volker, a Navajo Nation citizen […]
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By K.E. MacPhie Shashana SkippingDay is dreaming bigger than a building—she’s helping build a future where Indigenous birthing people receive care that is safe, supported, and sacred. As the planner for a developing Native-led birth center, she’s deep in the work of creating something our communities have long needed and deserved. The vision isn’t new. […]
By Lee Egerstrom The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) as started a $6 million campaign with partners to provide facilities and conduct research on ways to improve the physical fitness and mental wellness of Minnesota’s Native American youngsters. Don’t expect to see a lot of lab coats, test tubes, syringes or scales. The laboratories will be […]
By Arne Vainio MD The whole getting into medical school thing was not something I was aiming for. My parents owned the Good Luck Tavern in Sturgeon, Minnesota and my dad wasn’t a good businessman. He committed suicide with a gun when I was four years old. My mom kept the tavern going for a […]
By Arne Vainio M.D. (Editor’s note: this was originally published in 2021.) Tashia Hart is putting together a cookbook featuring manoomin (wild rice) and other wild foods of Minnesota. This was published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press in the fall of 2021. I like to cook and she asked me for my manoomin recipe. At first […]
By Arne Vainio MD (Editor’s note: This was written in 2015.) At the end of August I danced for the first time. George Earth has wanted me to dance ever since he came back in to our lives. He introduced my mother and father back in 1957 when my father owned the ill-fated Good Luck Tavern […]
Editors note: Written in June 2020 Difficult times. Uncertain times. How many times have we heard that in the past few months? The COVID-19 pandemic came to us in March and social distancing has caused millions to lose their jobs and countless businesses won’t make it. Hospitals in some parts of the country are overwhelmed. In […]
By Arnie Vainio MD (Editors note: written in 2014.) I just got back from Atlanta, Georgia. As a board certified family practice physician I need to recertify for my boards this year. The exam covers all of medicine and no one knows for sure what will be on it. I am a member of the American […]
By Arne Vainio, MD (Editors note: this article was written in written 2016.) George Earth and I traveled across Minnesota and then across South Dakota so I could speak at a conference a couple of years ago. I was supposed to fly, but George told me he always wanted to see the Black Hills and […]
By Arne Vainio MD How long have I known you? Since I started at the clinic over seventeen years ago. From the first day you were a resource and you took on tasks for me that weren’t really even your responsibility. Insurance companies expect a doctor to stay on hold while they preauthorize a medicine […]
By Arne Vainio, MD I missed the print deadline for my last story. Something always happens around Christmas to make me appreciate the gifts we have and the things we do for each other and our interdependence. This year I didn’t have anything. The snow was coming down hard and it was the beginning of […]
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