By Jon Collins/MPR News
Plans are moving forward for two lots that have been vacant for decades off Lake Street in south Minneapolis, where members of Red Lake Nation are working to build a healing center and garden focused on serving Indigenous people living in the city.
Officials from the city of Minneapolis and Red Lake Nation announced the sale of two city-owned properties on the 2900 block of Bloomington Avenue, one a vacant lot and another containing a long-vacant building, for $1 each.
The sale still needs approval by the Minneapolis City Council, which is expected to make a final decision in October.
Cheri Goodwin heads up Red Lake Nation’s family and children’s services department called Ombimindwaa Gidinawemaaganinaadog, which means “uplifting all our relatives.” Goodwin said they aim to provide resources that are ethnocentric and culturally specific to help Indigenous people struggling with drug dependency or homelessness.
“We are here today to say that we’re going to take over our services, we are going to drop our disparities, smash our disparities once and for all by building culturally specific services,” Goodwin said.
American Indians are five times more likely than white Minnesotans to die of opioid overdoses, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Human Services.
Addressing the opioid epidemic is going to require a more culturally informed approach that focuses on decolonization, Goodwin said.
“When we open these doors, we’re going to have food, we’re going to have a kitchen, we’re going to have showers, we’re going to have washers and dryers, we’re going to have cultural services to start,” she said. “These plots of lands will be our cultural community garden.”
Rehabilitation of the building will be completed in mid-November and will cost about $900,000, which the tribe has already allocated, Goodwin said.
Red Lake Chairman Darrell Seki, Sr. said they hope to expand the project in future years to provide affordable housing or a treatment center on behalf of the people of Red Lake. “This is progress for our people, it’s progress for our great Red Lake Nation,” Seki said. “It’s not the end, it’s the beginning.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said it’s important that the city partner with Red Lake Nation and others who have been disproportionately harmed by colonization and broken treaties in order to successfully uplift people.
“The work that we want to be doing on this parcel, the work we’re going to be doing in partnership with Red Lake, is not just preventing people from dying, it’s letting people live,” Frey said. “People deserve to live a brilliant life, and that means attacking addiction head on.”
Red Lake Nation Secretary Sam Strong said it isn’t easy to work with people struggling with drug dependency or other disadvantages like homelessness, but that it’s going to take a society-wide commitment to help people get to a safer and better place.
“These are our family members, these are our brothers and sisters, our mothers and daughters, these are our people – and we can’t forget them,” Strong said. “When we forget these people. We lose our place in the cycle of life, and it impacts us all.”
The city will write down the remaining $159,998 in estimated value of the lots, according to city documents. The city bought the properties in 1996, then later sold them to a developer for a multi-unit rental building that was never built. The city acquired the properties again in February.
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