Podcasts about Bde Maka Ska

Ned and Meg get off topic super quick because we were in the same room again. Joy! Hello to everyone we met in San Diego, you're all wonderful! Ned and Meg talk about people who hang themselves with their own ropes, also idiomatically known as being hoisted by one's own petard, thank you Shakespeare. We talk about whales and linguistics and dogs with vocabulary buttons and the meaning of the phrase 'from scratch,' plus Bde Maka Ska, a lake in Minneapolis. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Minnesota Now runs over the lunch hour, a time that here in the MPR News studio, we are thinking quite a lot about food. So we figured, why not check in with the best chefs in Minnesota and ask what they're eating for lunch Monday to get some inspiration? Jorge Guzmán is the chef at the three-star restaurant Petite León in Minneapolis and is opening a new Mex-Tex style restaurant, Chilango at the Beach Club Residences on the shore of lake Bde Maka Ska next month.He has been nominated for the prestigious James Beard Best Chef award three times. He joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer to talk about his work. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.   We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Once again, public officials in Minnesota are considering changing the name of a lake which includes a derogatory term used to describe Native Americans.The Ramsey County Board of Commissioners will hold a public hearing on Tuesday morning on the proposal to rename Savage Lake in Little Canada. The lake is two bodies of water, split by I-35E as it runs between St. Paul and I-694.The Little Canada Historical Society submitted the petition last year to rename the lake Lake Metis. Metis means “mixed” in French. The proposed new name reflects the area's history. Curt Loschy, head of the society, said back in the 1830s French Canadian fur traders and Native Americans set up their summer camp on the east side of Savage Lake.Initially, it was known as “Lac au Sauvages” which means “wild lake” in French. In the late 1800s, when English became the dominant language, the body of water was known as Savage Lake.“I've never liked the name of savage,” said Rockne Waite, a member of the Little Canada Historical Society. He has been spearheading the effort since he made his first phone call to the public works department in 2010 to find out how the name could be changed. 2020 Minnesota's 'Redskin Lake' could see name change 2022 New map restores Native names to northern Minnesota 2023 With new name in Dakota, St. Paul nonprofit pushes Indigenous renaming forward Waite says he attended city council meetings trying to get the lake changed. “And nobody knew how to change the lake names at the time,” he said. Waite, who is of Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestry and originally from San Bernardino, Calif., has lived in Little Canada since 1974. Waite eventually connected with Pete Boulay, a climatologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Boulay also works in the geographic names section of the DNR.  The process to change a geographical feature like a lake, creek, island or mountain begins with a petition. It must have signatures from at least 15 registered voters in the county where the name change is to take place. Boulay recommends getting 25 signatures, just in case any are ruled out.From beginning to end, the name change paperwork has to go back and forth a couple of times from county to state and finally to the U.S. Board on Geographical Names. If the U.S. board votes to approve the name change, then the name change process is complete.If that sounds like bureaucracy on steroids, Boulay said there's a good reason for it.He said he wants the name to “stick” and not have to be revisited again. “And I also want to build a good enough case where the U.S. Board on Geographic Names would accept the name,” he said.Only one name has been rejected by the board and that was in 1994, before Boulay began in his position.   Loschy said this is not the first request for a lake name change in Minnesota. “The reality is, this whole name change thing, there's been a lot of name changes to Minnesota lakes that have been insulting to the Native Americans.”  2015 Calhoun not the first lake with a controversial name 2019 DNR taking Bde Maka Ska name fight to MN Supreme Court According to the DNR there have been 121 name changes to geographical features in the state since 1991. Seventy-one of them have been lake changes. Twenty geographical features originally named after a slur used against Native American women have had their names changed. Eight of them were lakes. One lake in Washington County was changed from Halfbreed to Lake Keewahtin.    A high-profile name change in Minneapolis led to a lawsuit against the DNR. The agency approved the name change of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska in 2018.If Lake Metis is approved, Boulay says it will not only be the first Lake Metis in Minnesota, but it will also be the first in the nation.

Authorities shut down the iconic Stone Arch Bridge to avoid a repeat of the chaos and fireworks assaults in the Mill District last July. But crowds migrated to parks like Boom Island, Minnehaha Falls, Lake Nokomis and Bde Maka Ska instead. Social media postings show fireworks being launched directly at police and bystanders. This is an MPR News morning update, hosted by Phil Picardi. Music by Gary Meister.

There's a little Jamaica right here in Minnesota and it's called Pimento Jamaican Kitchen.Tomme Beevas started his restaurant 11 years ago with a $99 tent and a backyard grill.Now he's an award-winning chef and entrepreneur opening two new locations this summer — one at 354 Wabasha St. in St. Paul and a second Minneapolis location at the new Bde Maka Ska pavilion.Beevas has found a way to make his restaurants more than a place for food.Pimento Kitchen's secret sauce is community spirit.Listen to this rebroadcast of MPR News guest host Nina Moini's conversation with Beevas about how his grandmother inspired his cooking and the vision for his businesses.Guests:Tomme Beevas is an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. He's the owner of Pimento Jamaican Kitchen and the founder of Pimento Relief Services, an organization that aims to support and uplift communities of color in the Twin Cities.Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.   

There's a little Jamaica right here in Minnesota and it's called Pimento Jamaican Kitchen. Tomme Beevas started his restaurant 11 years ago with a $99 tent and a backyard grill. Now he's an award-winning chef and entrepreneur who's opening two new locations this summer — one at 354 Wabasha St. in St. Paul and a second Minneapolis location at the new Bde Maka Ska pavilion. Beevas has found a way to make his restaurants more than a place for food. Pimento Kitchen's secret sauce is community spirit. MPR News guest host Nina Moini speaks with Beevas about how his grandmother inspired his cooking and the vision for his business. Guests: Tomme Beevas is an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. He's the owner of Pimento Jamaican Kitchen and the founder of Pimento Relief Services, an organization that aims to support and uplift communities of color in the Twin Cities. Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS. 

There's a little Jamaica right here in Minnesota and it's called Pimento Jamaican Kitchen.Tomme Beevas started his restaurant 11 years ago with a $99 tent and a backyard grill.Now he's an award-winning chef and entrepreneur who's opening two new locations this summer — one at 354 Wabasha St. in St. Paul and a second Minneapolis location at the new Bde Maka Ska pavilion. Beevas has found a way to make his restaurants more than a place for food.Pimento Kitchen's secret sauce is community spirit.MPR News guest host Nina Moini speaks with Beevas about how his grandmother inspired his cooking and the vision for his business.Guests:Tomme Beevas is an award-winning chef and entrepreneur. He's the owner of Pimento Jamaican Kitchen and the founder of Pimento Relief Services, an organization that aims to support and uplift communities of color in the Twin Cities.Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS. 

Native Americans were the first inhabitants of the lands now known as Minnesota. Yet when people talk about our state's history and culture, Indigenous art and stories are often left out. Kate Beane, executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, is working to change that. She joins the podcast to talk about how Indigenous traditions redefine what art means and how artistic expression is tied to history. Kate also discusses how she and her family have advocated for Dakota place names in Minnesota, including restoring the name of Bde Maka Ska (formerly known as Lake Calhoun) in Minneapolis. EPISODE RESOURCES The Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M): https://mmaa.org/ Our Home: Native Minnesota exhibit: https://www.mnhs.org/historycenter/activities/museum/our-home Returning home, restoring a name: https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/kate-beane-returning-home-restoring-name Understand Native Minnesota: https://www.understandnativemn.org/

The first people to call this land home often named their surroundings by using descriptions of what those natural resources looked like. Names we use today for Minnesota waters and lands come from Ojibwe and Dakota people. Cultural observers say how we treat names reflect the barriers Indigenous communities — and Minnesotans of color generally — encounter to be fully seen in society. “Our language is very visual. It's descriptive,” said Kate Beane, who is Dakota and holds a doctoral degree in American Studies. “It is something that you can close your eyes and really sort of see through the eyes of those who came before us.” Beane is a descendant of people who were removed from Minnesota by U.S. soldiers to the Flandreau Santee reservation in South Dakota in the 1860s. A public historian as well as the executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Beane thinks deeply about what place names contain. “The way that I was taught is that ‘Minnesota' is a reflection of the sky on the water,” she said. “And it's sort of that reflection, which is why oftentimes it gets translated as cloudy water, clear water, it depends on the weather.” Evan Frost | MPR News 2020 Kate Beane sits for a portrait at the public art site on the shores of Bde Maka Ska honoring Maḣpiya Wicaṡṭa (Cloud Man) and Ḣeyata Ọtuŋwe (Village to the side), the Dakota leader and community that inhabited this area in the 19th century, on Nov. 16, 2020. European fur trappers and explorers would often ask residents what a lake or river was called. Beane is not sure if some titles are names, directions to a place or descriptions of food found there. As Europeans settled in large numbers they often changed those names. Beane said the renaming is just part of the larger process of erasing Native culture. That's reflected in how many Dakota names are mispronounced or anglicized. “But they [English versions] are actually harder for us to pronounce as Dakota people because they are mispronunciations,” she said. Some names of cities and landmarks like Nicollet, New Ulm and New Prague are pronounced differently than the European languages spoken by early immigrants and explorers. Naming is tied closely to the history of colonization and oppression of Indigenous people, Beane said. In 2015, Beane and others led an effort to return Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis to its Dakota name Bde Maka Ska which means white earth lake. Beane said opponents seemed to be more angry about who was leading the reclamation effort than about the name itself.  She said they were called ‘militant Dakota' who were trying to take away the lake. The restoration effort was successful, Beane said, in part because the Indigenous community and its allies worked together. She recalls Minneapolis park board hearings where members of the Somali community came to advocate for a stop sign near a park where their children played. These Somali neighbors also voiced their support for Bde Maka Ska. Changing values George Dornbach | MPR News 2017 A painted mural in the halls of then-Ramsey Middle School reads, “Rename Ramsey” as students and teachers campaigned to change the name of their school, June 9, 2017. “We are certainly seeing an acceleration of this idea of reclaiming space and of changing names to reflect changing values,” said William Convery, director of research at the Minnesota Historical Society. “In Minnesota, it's played out from everything from the movement to reclaim the name of Bde Maka Ska to renaming middle schools and high schools named after Minnesota governors who were involved in Native American extermination,” said Convery. Following a student led-effort, the Minneapolis school board in 2017 agreed to remove the name of former governor Alexander Ramsey from a middle school and honor Alan Page, the former Minnesota Viking who became the first African American to sit on the state's supreme court. Ramsey called for the driving of the Dakota people out of Minnesota in the 1860s. Last year, Henry Sibley High School, named after the state's first governor, changed its name to Two Rivers high school for similar reasons. The debates and discussions over the use of historical names or of derogatory terms for places and things in Minnesota is not unique to the state, nor is it new. In 1995, after a campaign by northern Minnesota students the state prohibited applying a derogatory word for an Indigenous woman to geographic place names. Despite this, a town in Itasca county still goes by the slur. Until 1977, two Minnesota lakes bore a racial epithet aimed at Black people. Indigenous activists in Minnesota have also been at the vanguard of efforts to eliminate the use of Native American mascots for sports teams. As people in southern states forced some symbols of the Confederacy and white supremacy be removed from public places, Convery said Minnesotans are considering how names of the past no longer reflect modern sensibilities. “So in some ways, these names are always changing and we're always updating our values and thinking about the way we name things in order to reflect those values,” said Convery. ‘Say his name!' Brandon Bell | Getty Images 2020 Anna Barber fixes a tombstone in the Say Their Names Cemetery on June 19, 2020, in Minneapolis. While protests followed nearly every police killing in Minneapolis over the last 10 years, they did not match the intensity of the global response to the murder by Derek Chauvin of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who begged the officer to let him up so he could breathe. The chant, “say his name, George Floyd” resounded through the streets of Minneapolis and in cities across the world. “Mr. Floyd harkens to a particular, deeper history,” said Rose Brewer, a sociologist and a distinguished teaching professor of African American studies at the University of Minnesota. Brewer said repeating Floyd's name recalls so many other African Americans killed by Minneapolis police officers. “But it also, from my perspective, harks to the push for us to place that in the broader Minnesota context.” That context, said Brewer, is that Minnesota has not always lived up to the progressive image that social liberals aspire to. Racial disparities in health care, employment, housing, education, as well as the criminal justice system have long disadvantaged Black residents. In response to Floyd's killing, community members closed down the intersection of 38th and Chicago where he took his last breaths under Chauvin's knee. Though the area has since reopened to traffic, it has retained the name George Floyd Square. The square continues to draw people. Brewer believes George Floyd Square is important for several reasons. It is a place where people come together to push for social and political change. “But also, how can you not have a memorial of sorts that recognizes a heinous, but powerful, emblematic expression of structural racism, of institutional racism?” Brewer said. 

Patty:  So we're here talking Deondre Smiles about Indigenous geographies. And I took like grade 10 geography that was the extent of my geography training, which means I learned about glacial movement and labeling rivers and all of that stuff. But I mean, first off, just the idea of Indigenous geographies from a land bank perspective is really interesting. Because colonial borders are one thing biozones are another thing. And so it's just seemed like a real this really fascinating topic that I know almost nothing about. So why don't you introduce yourself? Explain a little bit about your work and then and then we'll get into kind of what what we mean when we're talking about Indigenous geography.Deondre:  Sure, I'd be happy to. So my name is Dr. Deondre Smiles.  I use he him pronouns as well as the Ojibwemowin general pronoun win.  I am a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, I'm of Ojibwe, Black, and settler ancestry is specifically Swedish. On my mother's side, my mother was Ojibwe and Swedish. My father was African American man from Oklahoma. And so I am currently an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria. I'm out on the west coast of BC, Canada. Some other interesting facts about me, I'm originally from Minneapolis, did a did a bachelor's degree in geography at a tiny little State University that probably noticed nobody's heard of in Minnesota, I did a master's degree in global Indigenous Studies at the University of Minnesota and did a PhD in geography at Ohio State where I also did a postdoc for a year as a, as a history postdoc. Well, they're kind of interesting things about me, I tend to not think of myself as a super interesting person. So usually, I'm at a loss about this. I also, also sometimes, trying to talk about myself is really hard, but that's perfectly alright.Probably the coolest thing about me are probably, you know, the people surrounding me right? Married to a wonderful woman for almost two years now we have a cat so um, that's probably what I'm, besides posting a lot of things about Indigenous geographies, on Twitter. I'm also well known for posting photos of my cat um, quite often. So I do that. I live out in Victoria. Most of the time, I'm actually talking to you tonight from Columbus, Ohio, where my wife is still here doing a doctoral degree at OSU. Back for our reading break, and doing some doing some other kind of appointment type of things. Avid musician. Yeah, that's pretty much that's pretty much me in a nutshell.I mean, obviously, there'll be far much more that we'll talk about here in this interview. But specifically when it comes to Indigenous geographies, because that's what I really describe myself is, my interests in that work are multifaceted, to say the least. And so there's kind of a couple of key strands of my work that I really have drawn upon. And the first one is what we would call critical Indigenous geographies, right? Like bringing the way that Indigenous peoples engage with space and place into conversations with power and race and economics and capitalism and colonialism and all these things. The other strand is what what we would call in the United States like tribal cultural resource preservation, probably north of the border in Canada would be you'd probably use a term of, you know, Indigenous resource management or a cultural resource management.And so a lot of my work over the last, oh, six years of my, my education and in my academic career have been focusing on the ways that tribal nations in the US and First Nations in Canada and Indigenous nations around the world have found very creative and unique ways to protect on cultural sites such as burial grounds against development and disturbance. That's been that was the focal point of my dissertation. And what I'm doing now at UVic is bringing in some of my other interests that such as science and technology studies, political ecology, or the studies of how politics and power engage with the natural environment. In an Indigenous research ethics in exploring the ways that these Indigenous nations are now using the lessons that they learn from defending the dead and applying that to more than human relatives such as you know, the land, water animals, plants, especially in an era of anthropogenic climate crisis that it seems like we as Western global northern society seem to have the throttle down, like at full in our hurdling ourselves straight into this.And I think it's important with that where you see a lot of discourse nowadays about oh, well, the world is ending we need to look at you know, colonizing space. And you know, what are we going to do when the world ends, and I draw upon really, really awesome scholars like Kyle White, and other Indigenous scholars, especially a lot of Indigenous women and Two Spirit and queer thinkers that say, well, Indigenous peoples have already lived through the apocalypse, right? Like we have already seen, the apocalypse happened on our lands, and in the ways that colonialism and capitalism seeks to sever us from those connections. And so maybe if folks actually listened to Indigenous peoples, we might be able to offer something about how we can deal with Apocalypse, and how it's not necessarily the end of the world, but maybe an opportunity for us to reframe how we are in relation with the world.And so that's the work that I do. I'm starting up a lab, a geography lab at UVic. In that regard, we call ourselves the Geographic Indigenous Futures lab, or GIF lab for short. While I say we have labs, mainly me right now, but I'm recruiting graduate students to work with me and work in the lab. So, if you're an Indigenous student who's really interested in space and place, and you want to go get a master's in geography, I'll make sure to drop my contact information here with the host some definitely come talk to me, I'm recruiting for fall 2022. Now, so I'll leave it there. Because otherwise I could do the time honored Ojibwe tradition of kind of going on and on and talking for a while, but we have, I'm sure you'd have some some questions you want to throw my way. And I'd love to just have a conversation with both of you. So thank you for having me.Kerry: You know, it's interesting, I just left the shores of BC. On Saturday, I was on the west side, visiting my family, my daughters out there. And the one thing that I will say about being in BC, especially in the Vancouver area, we were right in Burnaby. North Vancouver, like we were around places there is that you you pick up, the land speaks you know, there's there is no doubt that there is a sense about the space of BC that feels old and nurtured and loved. And that energy, that space of being in that can only have been curated by those who have known and understood this land.And interestingly enough, I was I was there spending time with my granddaughter. And I you know, Halloween was coming up. And she mentioned the idea of a zombie apocalypse. And so I thought it was so funny when you mentioned how we understand the land because what I had turned to her and said Is she was like, what if there's a zombie apocalypse Nanny. And I said to her, let me tell you something. We are people of Indigenous and of color. We've been there and done that. We don't, no nothing about the apocalypse is gonna sway us. And so she looked at me and she was like, Wow, is that true? And I said, look at where we are. This land is eons old, it has existed before us, and it will exist after us. And there are some of us that do understand this space.So with that, Deondre.  My question for you is, are we listening anymore? Do you believe and it sounds like you know, I kind of feel that you may go this way that the the ears are now right, to truly hear the voices that are have always been an understood meaning out.Deondre: So yeah, that's a really, really great question. Kerry, I think that we are definitely in a position where the ears are more open than they were probably a generation or two ago. I mean, one of the things that I deal with as an Indigenous geographer is still this, this this overarching kind of thought that well, you know, why do you study Indigenous geography? You know, are there Indigenous people left?  I think about in my PhD program, being at a departmental happy hour. Having fellow grad students decided that I was going to be the person to try to sharpen their theoretical claws on and say, you know, why do you do Indigenous geographies? Didn't didn't colonialism win?  And I'm you know,  I'm like, well, it didn't because I'm standing here right in front of you right now, you know, right likeBut, you know, these are the things that we have to deal with. I think that in the current political climate that we find ourselves here in North America, particularly, I think that people are starting to realize that Indigenous peoples have a lot to say about how to live in relation with the environment. And it's becoming more than the romanticized  “Oh, yes, Indigenous peoples are these like, you know, very deeply spiritual folks that are out there, you know, living in community with the, with the, with the animals and things like that,” you know, this very kind of pseudo spiritual environmentalist BS that really infantilizes Indigenous peoples and kind of places us as part of, of the environment.And what they're starting to realize is, oh, no Indigenous peoples have, you know, these really complex systems of environmental stewardship, um in particular, some that my colleagues do really, really great work on, you know, ecologies of fire management and stewardship, or lands, you know, stewardship, that are based upon, you know, long standing, you know, worldviews and ontologies and epistemologies that have predated colonization, right.Um, you know, in particular, in BC, you know, having just dealt with the, you know, these massive fires that burned across the province this summer, I had a pyro geographer, who's from a tribe in California, come into my class just a couple of weeks ago. And he talked about fire. And he said, yet when I go around, and I talk to people about fire, for example, right, their first inclination is like, fire in forest and fire in the environment is bad, right? Like, you don't want wildfires and things like that. He says, No, if you actually do it, right, and you actually do do it properly, and you don't just you know, it isn't just some out of control fire, but it's done with an eye on the ecosystem and things like that, based on these cultural values that other tribal nations have have thought about, you can find that fire is like a really beneficial thing, for example, and it blew my students minds.I think the obstacle that we are facing right now, though, with this kind of opening of the ears, it's not that people aren't willing to listen, what we oftentimes have to deal with is that we still have to deal with ideas of theft of Indigenous knowledge, for example. So right now, I think we're kind of we go in and out of this, this framework where settler academics and settler policymakers, governmental leaders, like all of a sudden, you know, and I've noticed this in Canada, more than the United States, right? Where all of a sudden, it's really fashionable to be down with Indigenous issues, right? Where it's like, you know, oh, yes, we actually want to listen to you. But the type of listening that they do is based upon Okay, so how can I use this knowledge to help further my career? How can I use this knowledge to take it and I can use it to get grant funding or I can use it to get accolades that don't go back, that don't trickle down to the communities that did this, right. How can I listen? In the case of some academics, how can I listen so that I can use it against them and kind of shoot back at them? Oh, well, you know, your, your forms of knowledge are not scientifically rigorous, right? Like, you have to think about the science.I think the challenge is going to be actually listening and mastering the art of listening without preconceived thoughts about how you're going to respond and how you're going to act. Right, right, listening and actually taking what people have to say in mind. And you know, not thinking, Oh, well, I'm just going to listen and then I'm going to get a word in after that, but thinking okay, maybe I might have to sit with what they've said, especially if it's things that make people uncomfortable, I think we as as Western, a Western quote, Western global northern society are really, really quite bad at sitting with discomfort, like, we it's something that we want to get rid of. And a lot of times that discomfort is what you have to sit with. And that's actually where true growth kind of comes out of right? When you deal with those. Those awkward moments or the moments where you kind of feel like how the community is kind of taking me to task here, right? Like, I think we all kind of know that. Right?Like, I think about, I think about the times when my mother like you know that this strong Anishinaabekwe definitely let me know what's up. I mean, she she raised me with tough love sometimes. And you know, when I was a kid, I was like, Oh, this doesn't feel really good. And now that I'm still, you know, I just turned 31 this year, and I still feel like I'm still pretty, you know, I still have so much left to left to learn in life. I'm like, I'm really glad she did that. Because those are the moments we're actually kind of through and kind of learn things right. And so I think that that's going to be the next step for listening is you know, you listen not to capitalize or to exploit you don't listen just for you know, your kind of ego’s sake, but you actually listen and you almost towards a point where you kind of pass the mic to these communities to these Indigenous peoples and you allow them to start kind of guiding the conversations going forward.Patty:  I wanted to start with your essay on George Floyd. Yes, just because it's it's an interesting way of thinking about Indigenous geographies and urban spaces, because we think of Indigenous places, we always think of rural spaces. So, you know, so I kind of wanted to start there, it's an urban space, it's a way of thinking about the way that the state acts on our bodies. And then you had another essay about autopsy. And those two put to those two reading one after the other was kind of really interesting things in my brain. Just because they and then the last one about radio just just seems like a nice place. It feels like life. Plus, it's kind of what Kerry and I do. It's not really radio, but it's independent Indigenous media. So yeah, so that George Floyd piece was really, I didn't realize that you were actually from, from Minneapolis.Deondre: Yep. Born, born and raised for the first few years of my life. As a matter of fact, the the apartments that I spent the probably the longest time in in South Minneapolis is about four blocks north of where George Floyd was murdered. One of those things and so I remember you know, the little convenience store, Cup Foods that he was killed in front of I remember that is a little kid passing by that. And I know that intersection quite well.And in kind of another another sort of panel that I talked about, about this, I was like, it's actually quite funny kind of taking a look at that apartment, because in 1994, right, my, my single mother was able to afford the rent in that apartments, I mean, we were, we were pretty poor, right? I think there was one bedroom and so I got the bedroom and my mom and then my dad when he was around, slept on an air mattress in the living room. And we were lucky enough that we were right next to Powder Horn Park, which is a major center for South Minneapolis as far as like recreation and things like that. I took a look at that apartment now. I can't, I can't figure we paid more than probably 500 or 600 bucks a month for it back then in the early 90s. And now it's it's pushing like $2,000 a month. And there's like a laundry list of all these requirements, right? That you have to make so much of this income and you can't do this and you can't do that. And I'm like, man, it's some shitty ass apartment in South Minneapolis. Right? And you're, you're acting like this is like, you know, a condo in Vancouver or something like that, because it now it's across from a park. And, you know, all of a sudden, you know, Minneapolis is now cool, again to folks to live in, right?You know, it's like I grew up in Minneapolis in the mid 90s. Like, we were like the most kind of like Wonder Bread like Midwestern city. I mean, it was cold all the time. And Minneapolis was not cool back then. I mean, it was cool for a lot of reasons, right? But kind of dominant society kind of us as “oh that Midwestern city.” And then, you know, around the time, unfortunately, I think like when Prince passed away and things like that, all of a sudden people are like, oh, yeah, Minneapolis might actually be a really kind of trendy place. And now you see that gentrification, but that's all kind of an aside of just kind of the changes that have happened. But yeah, my family's my family. My grandmother moved her kids down from the rez, from Leech Lake in the 19, late 1960s, early 1970s. And they've there's been members of my family that have lived in Minneapolis ever since. So if you have any, any viewers or listeners from South Minneapolis, we have many generations of South Highschool Tiger alumni in my family. So yeah.Kerry: I love thatPatty: To build on what you said, you talked about gentrification, you talk about the way certain places are framed as safe and dangerous. Depending on how the dominant society sees them, right, because there are neighborhoods, so we know how to live in them. And then even is like, you know, Ibram Kendi talks about this. And in one of his books, that even though he was from a neighborhood that the dominant culture may have thought was dangerous. He thought it was safe, and it was this other neighborhood …Kerry:  And that is such an interesting sentiment everywhere we go. Because, once again, taking it back to being in BC last week. What I thought was fascinating is that parts of Burnaby in BC is, or parts of Burnaby are considered not necessarily the best areas. And when I drove through what vague, what's considered the hood in Burnaby, I was I just couldn't fathom this. That most a lot of those places had Land Rovers and Mercedes Benz outside, even though in the lot, you know, like outside in everybody's driveways, there was nothing that would have been like the stereotypical markers of what we would consider a hood. And so for me, what it really created in my space was this, this, you know, taking an inner look at how we take these perceptions of what we do call hood, versus what the reality is. And so I think it fits really well into the question that you're asking Patty, this idea of how, you know, the bigger culture can create these ideas or these lines, these red lines that make certain areas supposedly distasteful? I could not, I'm talking beautiful, you know, houses on a couple of acres, neighborhoods, it just it made no sense to me. But this was considered the hood. Couple of shootings that happened and all kinds of things. Very interesting demographic or way of thinking about it.Deondre: It really is, in terms of Minneapolis, right? I mean, in my lifetime, I've seen neighborhoods that were used to be considered gritty becomes suddenly these really hip places, right. For example, northeast Minneapolis, or as, as a lot of kind of hipsters like to call it nordeast Minneapolis. I mean, back in the 1990s, right, this was kind of an industrial neighborhood, kind of gritty, really blue collar. You know, there's nothing sexy about northeast Minneapolis. You know, fast forward 20 years now you have craft breweries and yoga studios, and places where you can buy kombucha and things like that, and now everybody wants to live over there.You know, the kind of the biggest thing when I talk about the Twin City is that people, they shake their heads, even in Minnesota, when I talked about it is, I always I always kind of bring up on like it during the era of Jim Crow segregation in the south, the worst segregation in the United States often was not in cities like Birmingham, or Atlanta, or Charlotte or places like that. The worst segregation, oftentimes were in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, because it had that veneer of being in the north, where, you know, the North fought against slavery in the Civil War, and kind of the, you know, the American mythos. And, you know, the North with, you know, through the Great Migration and things like that the North was viewed as this is by white Americans is like, Oh, yes, see, we're opening our doors to these Black Americans from the south.They would get to the north to find racist covenants in real estate deeds, and redlining, and things like that. You know, one of the biggest, the biggest proponents of segregation in the United States was Robert Moses right? One of these great urban planners that we hold up as I looked at all these things he did in New York City. Well, what he did in New York City, and other cities is designed highways to run right through Black neighborhoods and to divide white neighborhoods from Black neighborhoods. Right? It was like the 20th century version of the railroad tracks like the other side of the freeway. In St. Paul, in particular, the Rondo neighborhood, probably one of the most vibrant Black neighborhoods in Minnesota. found itself under under the under the bulldozer in the 1960s. When they decided, well, interstate 94 Need to go someplace, we're going to build it right through the middle of this neighborhood. There's nothing left of Rondo besides some street signs saying where it was, um,And so yeah, it, you know, North Minneapolis, which is probably you know, the area of Minneapolis that is identified the most with Blackness and also has this reputation of all this, that's where all the shootings happen, right. You don't want to be in North Minneapolis. I'm like, Well, you know, what, what happened was that, you know, these processes of segregation and things like that ended up instigating race riots, right. And then White Minneapolitans kind of said, well, we're moving out to the suburbs because North Minneapolis used to be one of the wealthiest areas of the city and then after these race riots that were caused by you know, neglect and all of these in all these different things white Miinesotans white, Minnesota said Okay, so we're gonna move out to these new suburbs and leave Black Mineapolitans in North Minneapolis, which then became kind of economically segregated and left and left largely to its its own plan kind of obsolescence right anytime. You know, though, the city will be really quick to take any credit for like any kind of, you know, major positive developments in North Minneapolis saying, oh, yeah, you see, Minneapolis is super diverse, super welcoming city and a lot of times is like no, that happens at a community to grassroots level,right.It's the kind of a funny story that I think I told in the article is around you know, around the time of the protests right, in Minneapolis or on the police precincts you you see it you saw a lot of folks from rural Minnesota in the suburbs, kind of jump on Facebook and say Oh, see, look how it look at those, look at those, quote, thugs rioting down there, right? Like, that's why that's why I'll never go to Minneapolis even though you know, these are the kind of folks that go to country music concerts at the baseball stadium, like once a year, and then like, leave and don't come to the city otherwise, and it's it, but that drives the dominant narrative, right?So people, my mother lives in North Minneapolis, and people are like, Isn't she like, you know, isn't she like, scared of living there? Like, isn't that dangerous? I'm like, No, it's not dangerous, right? It's like any other big city like you, you go there, you you, you handle your business. Um, you know, it's, you know, I can if I wanted to go, if I'll put it this way, right, it's like, you, if you go looking for trouble, trouble is going to find you. And it's going to find you, whether that's in North Minneapolis, or that's in 50th and France, which is like the fanciest neighborhood in Minneapolis, right southwest Minneapolis. But it just comes down to kind of the ways that you know, white settlers, quite honestly kind of paint these kind of narratives.Kind of one example that I don't think I talked about in that paper is, you know, the fact that Minneapolis is Dakota land. And when they talked about renaming Lake Calhoun Bde Maka Ska. It was it was kind of that moment, for the first time where people kind of saw how much masks could come off in then this moment, right. You had these people that live next to the lake, that was, you know, it's called Lake Calhoun. And it was named after a politician who was a major proponent of the system of slavery in the United States and help to, you know, support it and strengthen it in the in the early 1800s. You saw people kind of coming out saying, Why, why do we really need to rename this? Right? Why do we need to re rename it to Bde Maka Ska. Stop focusing, oh, it's gonna bring down our property values, right like that, that time honored, like, you know, dog whistle for oh, it's going to it's, you know, if it's viewed as anything other than white American, it's gonna, it's gonna hurt us.And people are like, wow, those people are being are being like, super racist. And folks like me are saying, those are the same people that that would be, you know, flying pride flags out in front of their house and having, you know, Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards, and saying, like, everyone is welcome here. You know, because they are in a neighborhood where they don't have to confront diversity, right? Diversity is something that is far away from them. And they're like, Oh, yes, it can stay over there. Like, we'll support it, but we wouldn't actually want it coming into our neighborhood.And then when you know, something as simple as a name change, you know, is threatening enough to them that they can be like, Oh, well, you know, if that's going to bring down the neighborhood, we don't want that. And so, I think kind of the whole kind of saga. And really what I tried to kind of attest to in this is that, well, you know, this really kind of ripped away kind of that veneer of the North, in the minds of a lot of people's being this really kind of a non-racist place, right? I'm like, it's just as racist as the South. And that if we understand that, and we and we think about those kinds of geographies of race as being something that is nationwide versus just, you know, just focused on the South, then we can actually really understand quite honestly kind of how fucked it is in the United States for a lot of folks and how we can really take concrete steps to try to push back against that, just like the the people that went out there on the streets in Minneapolis, I'm really, really tried to do Minneapolis and many other cities as well.Kerry: In it, when I think about, you know, all of what you just said, You're it what comes to mind, I think about this whole year I've been I've been spending some time doing some reflection on like cycles. How I see things cycling in and cycling out, right. And I really feel when you mentioned that pulling back the curtain like that idea of the veneer being stripped away. I think that's very profound. Ove, over the last couple of years, I think we've all had to go internally, and and or you can't gaze at the scenery, and not recognize that there is much that is not what it seems and as much as we may have settled in some complacencies about the way that we have viewed the relationships that we have with each other or that we've even had with the land because nobody can say that Mother Earth is not saying something back to us now.You know, what you started with a sense of we must listen, we must pull it back and really be willing to see it for all the dirt and grime that exists. And it, Are we ready now to add some soap and water hopefully it's environmentally sound and start to wipe away. Start to wipe away at some of this dirtiness that exists. And with that, like what? Where do you Where do we fit as people who, who may have this different viewpoint? Because we've been mired in some of that grime for a long time. Where do you think we can move ourselves? Or show up? You know, we're normally the ones that do we come with the grit? You know, what did they call the, you know, the Mr. Clean Magic, magic chalks or whatever we normally come in to do that deep cleaning. When do you think we fit in for that?Deondre: So yeah, so so people, so people like us, right, that are used to really kind of doing that deep cleaning, and kind of, you know, doing that kind of labor. I think that I really points to the next generation of really badass, Indigenous and Black and other, you know, scholars of color, activists of color, community members of color. You know, I feel like with every succeeding generation, we say, you know, we're aren't we're becoming more visible and we're become we're, we're ending up in places that we were not intended to be right.I think about as an Indigenous geographer. I think about 20 years ago, you would not see any of us in tenure track positions in institutions, I think, maybe, you know, I think for Black geographers that are better doing equally, if not more badass work, they would be the same thing, right? I think that you wouldn't see us it might be one or two in some vision, you know, very forward thinking visionary kind of departments. But you know, in my own departments, where I feel very, very fortunate to be it took a decade to do an Indigenous hire, right. And there they are so happy to have one but you know, we geography in particular, like we can be such a such a kind of a backwards kind of looking discipline and where we're constantly kind of tied to the past and kind of still trying to maneuver how to bring bring geography into the present.And you know, when that when those conversations happen, I'm like, Well, what does the future of geography look like I always kind of say, look to like the Black, the Indigenous and the other scholars of color, especially the ones from the Global South, right? They are the ones, we are the ones I try not to use weeks, I'm like, it's gonna be all these people that are in school right now that are going to really use the work that we've done as a launching pad to really do some really, truly exciting things. And I think that happens outside of academia as well. You know, the saying that often gets put in, you know, you see it on memes on Facebook, and you also see it on Twitter a lot, you know, you know, these Indigenous students, these Indigenous children are, you know, quote our ancestors, wildest dreams. I'm like, you know, it might sound kind of hokey, but I'm like, that's actually really super tricky, right? It's the truth,Kerry: hey, I have a bought my T shirt yet, but I so want one, I so want one because that state saying being our ancestors’ wildest dreams is the truth. And you touch something that I think is so important, and I just wanted to spend maybe a second here is, you know, Deondre, tell us what brought you to geography. And you know why, I was speaking to my husband recently. And we were talking about, you know, some of the rappers that are existing like the King Vons of the world, and, you know, some of the spaces where, you know, we've seen Black folk show up in what has been our traditional ways out of being, and yet you said something to me that I thought was so profound when you mentioned that, you know, being a Black geographer, has been, you know, you're trailblazing in certain ways.You're, you're creating and showing up in ways that you may not have been able to before. And I think that message is so important. For those of us coming up, though, not us. I'm a little more seasoned, but those coming up like my grandchildren's generations coming up, to recognize that there are these opportunities that you don't got to be in the NBA, and, you know, a mumble rapper, to be able to show some semblance of success. Could you tell us a little bit about how you did it? What brought you there? You know, cuz geography, you know what, it’s geography?Deondre: So that's a great that's a great question. Sorry, to sorry to interrupt. There I am. Yeah, I resonate with that. There's a lot of really, really good basketball players in my family. Actually, I was not one of them, I was a swimmer in high school, actually. So I've always kind of been that person that's kind of kind of walked a bit of a different path. And so there's two people, well, really one person and then a community that I really want to credit with kind of inspiring me to take the path that I that I've taken and so the first one is, is my mother.So why I really like geography is my mother from a very early age. She, she was always really big on education, it was something that she she felt very strongly about. You know, one of the things that she would do when I was in high school is she said, there was no question of like, Oh, what am I going to do when I when I graduate high school? She's like, No, you're going to college, right? You're, you're going to go to college. And so she would wake me up every morning. And she would say, like, oh, you know, good morning, kid who's going to go to college, right.But that, the framework of that started when I was two or three years old, and she would bring me to the library in South Minneapolis, right. And I would check out books and I would read the newspaper on my, I was reading from a super early age. And I would get maps, right, I also would like look at maps. And I really, really enjoyed maps, because it was always it was always really fun to look at them. And imagine that I was going places, right, like tracing the roads and kind of thinking, what would it be like to go here? What's this place like, it really inspired a curiosity about different places.You know, growing up in growing up, as we did, you know, I didn't really get a lot of opportunities to travel. But when we did, I always really enjoyed it. I remember we went out to went out to an Indigenous march in Colorado Springs in like the mid-1990s right about, you know, honoring treaty rights and things like that. And I really, really loved it. Um, I remember having my map kind of tracing the path that we were taking and learning, you know, seeing the new cities on street signs and things like that. Um, and it's just something that I always kind of picked up because of that, because she exposed me to it at an early age. I found that geography classes in elementary and middle school in high school, were the classes that I got easy A's in right?  Um, the one story that I often tell on Twitter is, I almost got into trouble in high school because I wrote a paper about South Africa, and I had researched it so thoroughly that the teacher thought I plagiarized it, it was like, it was miles beyond what a high schooler would write, was expected to write. And so it was one of those things when it came time to go to college. You know, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a question of, if I was going to college, it was like, Okay, where are you going to college? Because like, my mom wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna just let me not go.But also, you know, when I thought about the majors, right, I was immediately like, Nope, I'm going, I'm going into geography. That was actually the big determining factor in where I applied to school. I was like, does it have a geography program? If it doesn't? I'm not, I'm not applying here. If it does, then then I am. And so that was, that was what led me to it.And then when I got to school, I kind of thought, Well, what do I want to do with a geography degree? And I kind of thought, well, maybe I want to do like land surveying, or maybe I want to be a cartographer. But the American Indian Center at my school, we would do this yearly Spring Break service trip, and we would go out, they had a relationship with the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana, and we would go out there. And so the year that I went, we went out there. And they took us on a tour of the communities.And they told us a story of the Northern Cheyenne people. And one of the big stories, big, big parts of their history is they said, Well, we our homeland is here in Montana, in the mountains. And these foothills, we were relocated down to the Great Plains by the US during, you know, the era of of treaty making and treaty breaking and relocation and things like that. And they said, Well, what we did is we we loved our homeland so much that we, you know, we as a people took off and fled back to Montana, and the US military chased them. And there was a there was a series of military conflicts, right, like the Battle of the Little Bighorn of the battle Greasy Grass happened not very far from the Northern Cheyenne homeland. And it was kind of part of the history and they said, We, you know, because of the resistance and the bravery that we, we showed up, the US decided that they would allow us to stay here in our homelands.And they talked about, you know, having conflicts over resource extraction, that, you know, companies want to come in and mine coal on the reservation. And they they've said, Well, we as a community have, you know, a lot of us have are the feeling that we would rather live in our homelands and be and be poor, and be economically disadvantaged, versus allow them to basically tear our land apart for any kind of short term, like economic gain. And it kind of was something that really inspired me and I was like, This is a story. This is a story about a story about a love for a place love for land rights.And I was like, well, geography is about space and place, but we often don't bring the emotion into it. We don't, we don't bring these Indigenous perspectives. And so that pretty much was like okay, so I want to bring Indigenous perspectives into geography. And then, you know, pretty much any hope for me to do any kind of other type of geography was pretty much on me down the drain at that point, and that's really kind of led me on the the the work that I do to the present day,Kerry: A couple of things I have to say, first of all, I know your mom has got to be proud of you. Your mom has got to be so proud of you. You know, you you're just an exemplary young man. And and I know that as a grandmother as a mother, I could be totally doing the ups for you. So that's first.Second is what I really love about your story and your retelling of it, is how you followed your passion. I think it's so important to point out that every one of us, I think, as you take your journey, we have something that is a spark, and, and really tapping into what that interest is. And then following that space, is the key to your freedom, it is the key to being able to be and living in your best space. And I know this is a little aside, but to me, it almost is about a geography. Because even our personal journeys is marked with a path, it's marked with a set of markers that allow us to be in our highest space. And so, life imitates our passions and our arts.Patty: Yeah, no, I love I love that because that's clear in you know, kind of in the papers that you write the the layering over, of Indigenous perspective on on this space. And I was just because that was the advice that I gave to my kids, you know, if you're going to go to university study something you love, if we're, if you're going to spend that money, study something you love, because there are careers and opportunities and things that you don't even know exist right now. And they will either they will cross your path, as you walk it you know, as as as you get there like Mariame Kaba, when she talks about abolition, you know, we walk this path of abolition and the opportunities, possibilities that we don't even know about, well, you know, we will build the world we want by walking this path.But I also want to remember that not everybody has the ability to do that. Right? That there's, I mean, privilege might be the wrong word. But opportunity. There's also you know, there's also certain necessities, right? Sometimes, you know, people may have obligations or things that, you know, so we also need to think about creating this world where people can follow their passions in this beautiful way. Because like I was making the world a better place when we can do this, when we're not getting our soul sucked out of us. Because we have to do this thing that pays the bills.And that's, I think, where this generational stuff comes in, you know, the Deondre, you had talked about, you know, what are the you know, are the children of today kind of being our ancestors’ wildest dreams? Because I think about that, whenever I go to powow, my favorite thing, about pow wow? You know, and I don't know, Kerry, maybe, maybe the parallel is, you know, watching watching people play spades, I don't know, when the old ones are dancing with the young ones. And I look at the old ones and I think you remember, when this was illegal, when our ceremonies were illegal, when, you know, when you sang hymns in church to cover up the organizing that was happening in the basement, because our gatherings unless we were gathering in church, it was illegal, you know, we weren't allowed to gather together. But the young ones, they don't know that world. Right? So my generation, kind of the sandwich generation, we have the trauma from our parents, and then the push through of our generation of trying to, you know, blaze this path or make this path even possible.You know, and then, you know, Deondre, you are the next generation, I'm afraid because I'm 56. So your generation behind me, you know, kind of emerging into these possibilities. And then these ones who are coming next, they don't even know, this is all just normal to them. Being able to be an Indigenous geographer, and to layer Indigenous realities over these colonial spaces that are themselves layered over Indigenous reality. So there's just that's just really cool to me.And we've kind of gone off of my plan for the conversation which is like totally fine. That's that's a much better conversations. But I do want to end with your with your piece about listening to native radio, just because that's just so hopeful and beautiful talk and it made me think of Smoke Signals. Have you ever seen the movie Smoke Signals? I'm dating myself now. He starts off with a good day to be Indigenous, It’s A Good day to be an Indian. So, what prompted this article about listening to native radio as, as an Indigenous geographer to think about Native radio? Because I loved it.Deondre: So that is an awesome question. And it actually speaks to the importance that I place on working with people from different academic backgrounds is me and thinking about things in a different way. I think a lot of times in the spaces that I that I'm in, I get this reputation as somebody that thinks a little bit outside the box, where it's always people are always like, well, that's not that's not possible. And I'm like, well, that's not possible, if you think about it in the way that you're thinking about it. But you know, how can we make it possible.And so in my master's degree, I was really, it was a wonderful interdisciplinary degree. My, the program director of that of the Master of Liberal Studies program at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, which is what it's, it's kind of shifted to something else now. But he was a rhetorician. And he does a lot of Media Studies things. And so he was really good, or he's really good at at many things. Back then probably the thing he was the best at was irritating me because he would always ask, well, what is geography? And I tell him all these things, and I would say, Well, you know, it's really wide, wide, ranging and multifaceted. And you'd be like, Well, if that's the case, then is there really such a thing as geography, right? If geography can do everything, then what is geography? And I'm like, no, no, we have disciplinary boundaries.And of course, now I really kind of come around to the thinking of like, Yeah, we actually really don't have for a, for a field that really focuses on maps and political spaces and things like that, you know, among other things, we are, we really have rather porous boundaries, and we're always in the risk of kind of like, falling away from each other, which, you know, maybe that's what geography might do in the next few generations is maybe we might turn into something else as we, which, you know, may or may not be a bad thing.But anyways, because of his interest in rhetoric, he had me do a lot of media related stuff. And so one of the projects that I did was I there's this television show produced by the PBS affiliate in Duluth, called Native Reports, um probably one of the best television shows out there about Native American and Indigenous culture. Um, you can actually watch it on on YouTube, if you live away from Duluth, which I'm assuming 99% of the of the listeners and viewers probably do. But he had me analyze that. And so I watched like, two seasons of Native Report. And I went through and I was like, here's all the things they talk about, here's the geographic locations, here's all these things. And I did that for a project paper.And then I started kind of a sequel to it where I'm like, Okay, so there's, there's the Indigenous radio stations as well. And I kind of want to kind of, and those, those things are more accessible on those, they've been around a lot longer than these television shows. So so let's see what they do. And I kind of started the project. And then I moved on to other things. And I graduated with my master's and I kind of left it alone. And then we fast forward, you know, three years after I get my master's, you know, this old, this old mentor and program director is like, Hey, I'm pulling together this special issue on listening, your radio piece is basically really close to being ready for publication, you should put it out. And so I sat down, and I kind of, I did more content analysis. And so I actually listened to a bunch of tribal radio stations in Minnesota, I spent like, half a summer doing that just sitting there when I was doing work, listening to the radio is like a really kind of it was really a really relaxing form of data collection, it kind of brought me back to being a little kid listening to you know, listening to the radio when I was growing up, right, I actually I did that I didn't watch a whole lot of TV, but I listened to talk radio a lot and things like that.And so I listened. And I was like, you know, what kind of music are they playing? What kinds of messages are they saying Are there are any kind of geographical references, all these things. And by the time I got done with with listening and looking at reports about things, I took a look and I'm like, Man, this is actually a really, really good paper that ties together geography and community, right kind of saying, here's the ways that these radio stations can foster a sense of community and foster a sense of connection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous listeners. And so I submitted it. To my surprise, they got accepted, right? That was like my second ever published article.But you know that paper, I really felt that as like, this is a really, really good way of talking about how community can be formed in some some of the most everyday kind of ways and how things as mundane as weather reports, or public service announcements, or even just the basic news can really tie people together in these really kind of enduring ways. And so it's one of my, it was one of my favorite articles to write. And I'm really glad that I'm glad that it's still picking up traction, right? I never imagined two years after writing that, that I'd be, I'd be talking about it on a on a major, you know, on a major program about some, you know, Indigenous issues and things like that. SoKerry: The ties that we create, when we allow ourselves to just go into our own spaces, and I, I, I'm really, really loving all parts of this conversations, even the parts we veered off on, because I think what I'm really going to walk away from this conversation with is how deeply we are tied to our passions. Like we we can create these unique medicines, these unique ways of, of looking at some of these enormous problems or what feels like they are enormous problems, when we come in it come at it from these unique perspectives. And with an open mind and our creative hearts. That's what's really going to tap away at some of these problems that exists. So thank you, Deondre for being such a reminder of that space. You're right, that thinking out of the box. That's your superpower, I would agree with you. It's definitely a superpower. And we're into those here. We're into those here.Patty: Yeah, that was that was really neat. Because when I when we think about it, because we think sometimes, you know, but you know how great social media is. And it is I mean, that's how I connect with you know, there’s so many, that's how I found you found each other on Twitter, and I find so many interesting people that way. But these are corporations, right? Like, they're corporations with algorithms, and they exist to make money. And the fact that, you know, my husband and I were just talking about this a few weeks ago, you know, he's talking about Google, and how Google, you know, just gives all this stuff away for free, you know, with the maps and the searching and everything and I’m like, that's right. Because if you're not paying for the product, guess what, you are the product. So there's limits to you know, kind of how great social media and these things can be.And we were talking about, you know, so we were just talking about, you know, how we form connections. And then, you know, looking at your paper, it's, it's these, these smaller, independent things that we do, because we've got like national radio and national this and national that, but it's these small local connections and, you know, in podcasts to you, because we form kind of smaller communities, and we're talking to each other. Right. So we're not as like, like, there's no code switching. I'm not concerned about my white audience. And what my white, I'm always surprised that white people listen to this. Because I'm not concerned about their feelings. I'm not concerned, I'm concerned about having Indigenous conversations about Indigenous things. I'm concerned about listening, you know, to Black voices, and to Afro Indigenous voices, because that's a world that I don't walk in, that's not my worldview, I need to listen and I need to cede power when necessary. You know, I need to pay attention to when I don't know things, and be willing, be willing to listen to that.So. So that reminder that these things, these, you know, native radios, and zines and podcasts and all of these ways that we communicate amongst ourselves, how important these things are. Because we live in diaspora, right? We have a homeland here on this continent, but we still but we're still in diaspora I do not live, it's a 24 hour drive. And I'm still in Ontario. If I want to go home, I drive for 24 hours, I'm still in Ontario, I'm going up and around Lake Superior. I don't live at home. I'm connected to them through various ways. And I'm connected to that geography through various ways. So thank you, thank you for this conversation and reminding us that geography isn't what I thought it was in grade 10. It's not labeling that some coloring rivers blue, it's …Kerry: Longitude and latitude, that’s what I remember.Patty: it's, it's our lives, our lives, our connection to each other into place. And that's really beautiful. And thank you, thank you so much.Deondre: It's, it's absolutely my pleasure. Yes. As a matter of fact, the experiences that you talk about, I mean, we I get, I get so many students that talk about like, Oh, I didn't know that geography could be all these things because the way that that you're taught it in grade school is such a limited kind of way. And that's where sometimes I kind of push. And I say, hey, we, you know, in geography, we're like, why is it that so many students come to us from other other departments? Right? It's like geography is one of those great majors in the university that it's, it's something that people kind of come to, there's very few people like me that come into come into college or university thinking, Oh, I'm going to do geography. A lot of times they happen to take a class for their Gen Ed's, or things like that. And they say, Oh, hey, this is actually really, really cool.And I and that's when I kind of pointed on …  we need to be bringing this perspective, to a holistic kind of viewpoint, we're right away. And in elementary school, and we're teaching children about maps and things like that. We're also teaching them about the ways that geography is really tied to our everyday kind of lives. Right? That's what that's one of the big themes of every single class that I teach is I say, well, geography is not some abstract thing that you kind of put away and you don't deal with it.I mean, there's, you know, in particular, when I teach a world regional geography, which I'll be doing again, this spring at UVic, I do an assignment where I say, Okay, I want you to tell me your daily routine, right? Where do you go? What you know, when you commute to school? What routes do you take, what buses do you take? Do you drive? What route do you take to your campus? Like, where do you go to eat? Where do you go to shop? Where do you go, you know, when you're hanging out with your friends, if you're taking, you know, taking somebody out on a date, if you're going for a swim when you're doing all these things, and I tell them start writing that down? Let's make a map of your daily life. And I'm like, That's geography right there. It is not like What's the capital of BC? Or what latitude is Valparaiso, Chile on, right, it is how do you relate to space in place?And I think that if we do that, um, you know, people are going to well, more people will come around to geography, but also, I think that may be some of the horror story that I hear so much are people in their high school geography classes or elementary school geography classes. My wife has told me some of her is actually, actually she's a she's an audiologist. So she's about as far away from geography as you possibly can be, except I'm always one that's like, oh, no, we can do things that are audiology and geography, I think of a good colleague of mine, um, Arianaa Planey, at the University of North Carolina, and badass Black geographer who she's in a, she's in a public health program. Now, she's done things related to, you know, geographic access to audiologists and things like that. And so, like, Hey, we're pretty much everywhere. Right? Geographers have fingers in pretty much every single academic pie that's out there. You just gotta, you just gotta know where to find us and kind of look for our hallmarks of who we are and in what we're doing. So yeah ..Kerry:  I really appreciate this for the creativity of it. You know, sometimes when you think about, you know, being an academic or being in a space of puts us in a box, and you know, staying in that, you know, curvature of that well, there's not a curvature, keeping it in the perimeter of that box. This conversation, lets us know that everything can be in the flow. And I like that rhyming. So I'm going to stop right there, Deondre, and say, Thank you so much thank you for all that you brought to the show. I appreciate you so much.Deondre: Thank you very much. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Hence, you know, I can't even believe that we've been talking for an hour. It's like, I feel like we've just been going for ten minutes.Patty: I know, these hours go by so fast.Kerry: They do.Patty: Alright, well, thanks again. And yeah, I guess you're on the list to come back.Kerry: Right. You know, what I was really thinking I would love to have you back with the our archaeologist and let's have a conversation about how, you know, geography may have shifted and changed and what has happened in the spaces of those I would kind of be interested …Patty:  Do you mean Paulette? Paulette Steeves.  You knew Paulette right?Kerry:  Yes Paulette.Deaondre: Paulette yup.Patty: Because yeah, cuz we had Paulette and then last time we chatted was with Keolu Fox and You've done work with Keolu, like these three know each other so .. we’ll figure something out. We gotta go. It was lovely talking to you. See you on twitter!Deondre: Yes, this was a great time, thankyou very much, I look forward to the next time I get to see you all.  Kerry: Good byePatty Good byeDeondre: Good bye This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit medicinefortheresistance.substack.com

Note: This episode was recorded on Friday, June 11.Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld and Jim du Bois discuss the June 14, 1981 tornado that struck Edina, Minneapolis, St. Paul and the Har Mar Mall in Roseville. Also, a look at the rapidly expanding drought conditions in Minnesota. SPEAKERSJim du Bois, Kenny Blumenfeld Jim du Bois 00:00Edina, Lake Harriet, HarMar? Whatever you call it, it's the 40th anniversary of a significant tornado event in this area. This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld is a climatologist. Kenny, we'll get to the 40th anniversary discussion here momentarily, but, boy, just looking out the window at the garden in the yard, you can tell that something kind of turned the corner over the last few days. Kenny Blumenfeld 00:34Well, we were super hot, right? I mean, newsflash, it was hot as hell. And yeah, and we didn't get any precipitation or, you know, some people got a little downpour here and there, but there wasn't anything widespread and substantial. And our gardens, our grasses. Everyone is feeling the effect of that. It's become really dry. So I know we're going to talk about the tornado, but we can really quickly recap the heatwave, shall we? Jim du Bois 01:05That sounds good, Kenny. Kenny Blumenfeld 01:06All right. So we are speaking on Friday, June 11. This should be the last day of the consecutive run of 90 degree highs and 70 degree lows in the Twin Cities. So I think we can call it, the heat wave will break. today. Although if you look at the Weather Service forecast, it's not exactly cold next week. They've still got temperatures, you know, in the 80s and 90s in much of Minnesota through next week. It's just not as humid and not quite as persistent. I think there's going to be some ups and downs. But, so the main event heat wave will end at some point on Friday, probably before most people hear this. Maybe it'll end with a little pop, some thunder. But I think the strongest storms will be out in Wisconsin, and you know, before we recorded, overnight on Thursday night and into Friday morning there's monster thunderstorms in the Dakotas. I mean, just from eastern Montana, into especially North Dakota, but also parts of South Dakota, they had reports of wind driven tennis ball-sized hail. And the winds were were being clocked by I think it was one of the stations out of Williston, had a, a real weather station, had a 93 mile an hour wind gust. So there were some really strong winds. And these storms were producing pretty large hail. So, wind driven large hail can pack a punch and do a lot of damage. We don't have anything like that to worry about. It's just been hot. It's probably going to not rain very much until the next time we talk. And that's going to be over a week. And as we were talking about before we went on, yep, Minnesota has slipped or I should say lurched into drought. We've been kind of teetering on the edge of it. Now over 40% of the state is actually in an official drought designation of moderate drought. And the entire state is at least abnormally dry, which is kind of a pre-drought category. So, the majority of the state is either abnormally dry, or in that first level of drought, which is called moderate drought. And there's even some pockets of the next level, which is severe drought in parts of southern Minnesota. We've just, these precipitation deficits are catching up with us. We're spending too much time in between rainfall events, and when it rains is not enough to catch us up. And as we had happen, you know, then we have a scorching heat wave laying on top of that, and that just made it, it's been too much. So, we need to come out of this pattern or it's just going to escalate. But yeah, we're at the beginning of a drought officially now. Jim du Bois 03:40And Kenny, there's really no immediate relief in sight, correct? Even going out 6, 10 days. Kenny Blumenfeld 03:46I mean, you know, the Weather Service mentioned in their discussions last night and this morning, in some of the recent discussions, that it's not the same heatwave, for sure. It looks like there's going to be a couple hot days next week. But this sort of day after day run does not look like it's making a return. But it's gonna be a while before we're, you know, down in the low 50s at night. I hope that happens in the next week or so. But it doesn't look very likely at this point. But yeah, I wouldn't say the kind of relief that you're thinking of. On the other hand, Jim, when it's 95 degrees every day, and and the nights don't get below 70, you know, maybe, maybe high of 88 feels like relief. Jim du Bois 04:33It's all relative, isn't it? Kenny Blumenfeld 04:35Yeah, I think it is. Jim du Bois 04:37And I also assume no real relief in sight as well regarding precipitation. Kenny Blumenfeld 04:44Yeah, this isn't super promising. I was on a radio show this morning speaking with a host from the Two Harbors area, and we were just talking about how the weather models right now are very up optimistic as they have been for months, that it's going to start raining hard in about seven days, but it just never gets much closer than that. And so, it's hard to have now that we've had this multi month pattern where it looks wet, it looks like you're gonna get into a wet pattern, but it doesn't really materialize, maybe one out of four times that actually materialize, and so you end up with, you know, one week per month, it's actually getting decent precipitation. It's hard to trust that prognosis. There's nothing really in the forecast for the next week or so showing significant precipitation in Minnesota. Certainly nothing to start pulling us out of this major deficit that's building. But you know, the weather is not that easy to predict, once you get into, you know, that two-to-five-week period. And so, maybe Jim, maybe there's a pattern change coming that we don't see, maybe we're going to get, you know, we're expecting a really active tropical weather season. And maybe, maybe a couple of these are going to come up the zipper just right up the Mississippi and dump a bunch of rain on us or at least help export some of their moisture into our region. And, you know, imbue the next systems that come by after that with extra moisture, and we end up getting dumped. It's hard to know. But right now, we're in a drought pattern, and I don't see any strong signals of that changing soon. Jim du Bois 06:22Well, let's certainly hope that we get a pattern shift and get some of that much needed precipitation. It sounds like dry conditions and drought are fairly common in the western parts of the United States right now, hearing about very serious drought conditions in Colorado, concerns about water in California, wildfires in California, potentially also Washington State and Oregon. So, just a real need for precipitation in a rather substantial part of the country, it sounds like. Kenny Blumenfeld 06:53Yeah, yeah, basically, the western half or so of the country is running pretty dry, maybe the western 40%. And we're on the eastern edge of that. And then we're starting to get some signs of it. What's interesting is, you don't have to go too far to the east. You know, in the eastern US where I'm going to be next week. I mean, there've been Flash Flood Watches, and they've got precipitation surpluses. So, it's really, we're just on different sides of the same pattern where we're stuck in getting kind of dry air pulled into our region, there are other areas that are in that kind of non-stop conveyor belt moisture. Jim du Bois 07:29Well, as we had promised in the tease, we're going to talk about a tornado event that took place 40 years ago, this coming Monday, June 14, and it did depend where you were living in the Twin Cities at the time in terms of how you would probably describe the event. If you were in Minneapolis, it was the Lake Harriet tornado. If you were in Edina, the Edina tornado. It famously knocked down the marquee on the Edina Theater, which sadly has now apparently gone out of business in the wake of COVID. But then it could have been the HarMar tornado if you were in that area. And it was a rather significant event. Kenny, how did that particular event unfold? Kenny Blumenfeld 08:15Yes, so it was Father's Day weekend, and I actually did a fun run with my dad and my brother that weekend and it poured, poured, poured, poured in the morning. And it was just, you know, we think of this event, and I've, you know, done research on severe weather, and we remember there's a tornado that went across the Twin Cities, and that was a big deal. But that whole weekend was very stormy and even in the morning, the morning of the tornado, a violent thunderstorm complex moved across the southern Twin Cities metro and into kind of the Rice County area, Northfield area, and it produced estimated winds of 80 to 120 miles an hour. This was a completely separate storm, Sunday morning, June 14, 1981. It was demolishing outbuildings in rural parts of the southern Twin Cities area. So, that was, we just had a, you know, meteorologically we had strong winds aloft, we had a moist, very humid airmass moving in, and a low-pressure area approaching from the west bringing in a cold front, and that's just a really good recipe for severe weather. And so, later that day as the air became quite muggy in the Twin Cities area, a thunderstorm blossomed over the southwestern Twin Cities metropolitan area, started producing hail in the Lake Minnetonka areas. There were a couple thunderstorm cells, but the main one moved into the Edina area in the late afternoon and produced a tornado not too far, just a little bit southwest of 50th and France, and that tornado tracked right over the Edina movie theater, twisted and then bent down, I don't know if you remember the old pictures, but it bent that marquee and then kind of twisted it to the ground, and then it tracked from that point over essentially western and northern Lake Harriet. I mean it crossed about half of the lake and hit particularly hard the pavilion at Beard's Plaisance. It threw that, lifted it off its structure and threw it into the lake, picked up a bunch of water from the lake, picked up some fish from the lake, which is something that tornadoes like to do occasionally. Knocked down almost every tree in the Roberts Bird Sanctuary, pretty much every tree in the Rose Gardens and the old park commissioner house by Lyndale Farmstead was damaged pretty extensively. And then the tornado just tracked over the Chicago-Lake area past, went and damaged old Agassiz School. Mercifully, it actually appeared to briefly lift off the ground and miss the area between the University of Minnesota and downtown Minneapolis, and then it went back down near St. Anthony Park in St. Paul, tracked into the HarMar area where it actually deposited some of those fish from Lake Harriet into the parking lot. Jim du Bois 11:05Wow. Kenny Blumenfeld 11:06Neat little sight. Did a lot of residential and tree damage at the time, and then moved into Roseville where it finally dissipated after doing extensive damage. I think officially it was 83 injuries and one fatality near Lake Harriet, was rated an F3 tornado, I guess retroactively, we would call it an EF3, pretty damaging winds probably in the, you know, it's always an estimate, in 50 mile an hour range. And it was not enormous, but it was a good size tornado occasionally up to a half a mile wide at the base. And yeah, I mean it was, and then we were a little slow to pick up on it. So, the original warnings, I lived not too far from Lake Harriet. That's where I grew up. So, we had the winds pass our house, I mean, big gusts of wind and you can see the trees kind of bending and, but we didn't know that there was a tornado, there was no warning yet. It was about three or four minutes after the wind subsided that the first report officially came in and the sirens went off. And so, there was a little bit of a catch-up game going on between the warnings and where the tornado actually was. And that led to some confusion. Initially, it was assumed that there were three separate tornadoes: one in Edina, and one in Minneapolis, and one in Roseville. And it wasn't until a couple days later that it was confirmed to be a single track. The former State Climatologist Earl Kuehnast walked the entire length of the tornado path and was able to confirm a pretty much continuous track. Jim du Bois 12:43Well, Kenny, we all have memories of that day. I remember I had worked an early shift, 5:30am at a radio station in the Twin Cities. I was living over by the University of Minnesota at the time, it was Father's Day, as you mentioned, and we were having dinner for my dad. So, I had gone home about 2:30 or so and caught a brief nap until I was roused by the Civil Defense sirens and walked down to our front porch where my mom and dad were sitting and my mom who grew up on a farm said oh, we already heard the tornado pass by. We were living, or my parents were living at that time by Bde, Bde Maka Ska. So, it crossed rather close to my childhood home. So that was my memory. But then of course, I went back to work and drove down to the site around, it would have been 38th and Bryant and phoned in from something quaint called a telephone booth to the radio station and described what had happened. Talked to a couple of people whose houses had been in the path. But what are your memories, Kenny, of that day? Kenny Blumenfeld 13:52Oh, I mean, it was, I was you know, playing soccer in the backyard. The sky turned kind of green, and I was already, so I was already a huge weather fan even though I was seven, I was only seven years old. But I loved storms. I was terrified of them. I remember we were playing soccer outside, there was a brief kind of a sun shower, and then it got muggier and within about 15 minutes or a half an hour of that, you can see this much darker and more ominous clouds on the horizon. And our horizon, we're south Minneapolis, so we could basically see, you know, maybe 10 miles or something because it was, there's lots of trees and I was sort of looking up because of very dark clouds not too far away. And my mom told my friend he had to go home. And I went into the house and then kind of watched as the winds picked up. And you know, they were pushing the trees almost to the point of snapping and bending but you know, almost uprooting and almost snapping but they never did. But I did remember very distinctly that the trees were kind of pointed down the street to the north at the beginning of the storm, at the beginning of this gust, and then about a minute later, they were pointing kind of almost, not quite the opposite direction. I didn't know what that meant at the time. It was only years later I figured out oh, that was you know, we were about a mile away from the tornado that was the circulation of the tornado passing. The winds would have been, as it's to our northwest, the winds would have come, you know, essentially, kind of out of the west or southwest initially. And then as the tornado passed, they would have been basically coming out of the northeast. So, that sort of made sense. I would say 50 to 70 mile an hour winds, 50 to 60 mile an hour winds in our neighborhood. But you only had to go a few blocks to the north, and you can see trees down, trees down on houses, and then the more significant damage as you got into the area where you were 38th, you know, the Lyndale Farmstead area, Agassiz School I think it was 38th and Grand and then that whole area up into Chicago-Lake, they were hit very hard. Jim du Bois 15:53Well, Kenny, we will chat again in about two week's time, you and your family are going to be riding roller coasters throughout the eastern and southeastern part of the country, correct? Kenny Blumenfeld 16:04That is correct. Guilty pleasure we have. We've always been roller coaster enthusiasts. It's something I've done with the kids for several years. So, got a little road trip planned to go visit some of the good ones. Jim du Bois 16:18Well, Kenny, make sure you enjoy, and everybody stay safe over the next 48 hours or so probably, especially the next 12 hours, it'll still be pretty hot. Stay hydrated. Don't work too hard outside. Pay attention to your body's signs. And Kenny, we'll look forward to checking in with you when you're back on terra firma, and not somewhere up on a roller coaster. Kenny Blumenfeld 16:44Yeah, losing my mind going down a big steep drop. Alright, well, thanks, Jim. You have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks. Jim du Bois 16:52This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld's a climatologist. We'll talk to you soon.

On today's show, we talk with Angela Two Stars (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) a public artist, curator, and director of All My Relations Arts, the art gallery at the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis. Angela shares her enthusiasm for supporting contemporary Native Artists, and her passion for appreciating Native artwork without viewing it through a Euro-centric lens. Angela also shares her commitment to raising awareness of the endangered status of her tribe's language, as well as others', and draws attention to the critical need for language revitalization efforts.While she is always on the lookout for ways to create opportunities for other artists, Angela Two Stars is renowned for her own artwork. Her professional arts career began at All My Relations Arts gallery as an exhibiting artist, which then led to her first curatorial role for the exhibition titled, Bring Her Home, Stolen Daughters of Turtle Island, a powerful exhibition highlighting the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Angela's public art graces the shores of Bde Maka Ska and honors the Dakota people of Mni Sota.  She has also been commissioned by the Walker Art Center to create a new work of public art at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in the fall of 2021.Miigwech Angela for sharing your gift for art and your passion for artists and the power of creative expression.Native Lights: Where Indigenous Voices Shine is produced by Minnesota Native News and Ampers, Diverse Radio for Minnesota's Communities with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund. Online at https://minnesotanativenews.org/

Way Over Our Heads 5-15-2021SPEAKERSJim du Bois, Kenny Blumenfeld Jim du Bois 00:00You asked for it. Summer's coming. This is Way Over Our Heads. It's weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois, Kenny Blumenfeld's a climatologist. Kenny, how you doing? Especially considering that you made a bold prediction. In our last episode, you said it was going to get hot at the end of May. We're almost to the midway point of May. And it's kind of looking like your prognosis was correct. Kenny Blumenfeld 00:28Oh, yeah. I'm feeling smug and super smart. Oh, yeah. All of it. I'm doing all right, Jim. You know, the weather always has me on the edge of my seat. So I guess that makes today no different from any other day. But yeah, it's coming into an interesting time. For sure. How are you? Jim du Bois 00:48You know, Kenny, I'm doing well. I'm enjoying these last several days. We've had some sun. It's been a little bit cooler than average, but still quite pleasant. So I would have to say I'm very happy with May so far. With the one caveat: it's darn dry out there. What does our drought situation look like right now? Kenny Blumenfeld 01:10Yeah, it's getting uncomfortable. So, you know, we've gotten really lucky. I guess the overall story is it's for the most part been kind of normal precipitation in parts of the state, southern and central parts of the state, but dry in the far south in the northwest and parts of the far north, too. And that's kind of the overall picture. But you can't argue with it, we're just stringing together these runs of dry days upon dry days. And that is really where this year, it's kind of different from some of the other years. Now, last year, we did this too. We had very dry conditions. We had runs of over 15, and even 20 days, last spring, where we didn't have any precipitation. But we weren't concerned about drought, then, because we had this huge buffer of moist soils, wet soils that were left over from the very wet 2019. And really a kind of a multi-year period. Well, we've now kind of spent through a lot of that moisture. And so, we find ourselves about as dry as we were last spring, you know, with much of the area coming up short for precipitation. But this time, we don't have those reserves of soil moisture to draw down because we've already exhausted a lot of them. And so now we're starting to kind of see some of the consequences. We have been lucky. You mentioned it's been dry. And it has been and you know, there's been a lot of fire weather potential and some wildfires, especially out in western and northwestern Minnesota, in this kind of pre-greenup period. But we've been otherwise somewhat lucky, because although it has been dry, it's generally been cool, and not even entirely sunny. And that has kept some, not all, but some of that evaporation at bay. Obviously, you lose moisture much faster if the humidity is very low, you don't have precipitation and also the temperatures are high. And for the most part, you know, as we think of the bulk of this spring, we've kind of been avoiding that, with the exception of what was the first day or something like that of May was very warm. But you know, it's been generally cool across the state, below normal so far for May temperatures. And that has helped slow down the drying. And that's why we kind of look ahead with the warm weather coming you got to be a little bit nervous because we're about to turn it on. And if we don't get precipitation to offset the exceptional drying that is possible in the coming week or two, I think then we're gonna be looking at much more dire drought type situation. Jim du Bois 04:03Well, staying on the topic of dryness, I couldn't help but notice how low the relative humidities have been over the past several days. Is this unusual for this time of the year in Minnesota? Kenny Blumenfeld 04:15It's not. I mean, I'd say the frequency of very low relative humidity is a little bit unusual in the context of the last several years. But this is the thing: our climate is really keyed to sunlight. And another thing that sunlight keys is the landscape. And you know, I know we talk about these terms, photosynthesis, evapotranspiration, evaporation, and I'm not sure if people are really thinking about what it all means but there's this beautiful relationship with the kind of normal cycle of the sun and how spring progresses and it goes like this. As you get into say, April and especially early May, the sun is quite strong. And as a result, temperatures generally, you know, can warm up a bit. But you have a problem in that usually, unless spring came very early, you don't have everything fully green yet. And so when all the plants aren't green, and the grasses aren't green, and the trees aren't all leafed out, and even when they are, it still takes some time for all of the systems to really get moving. But that means that there's not moisture being conducted through those, through those plants. And if it's not being conducted through those plants, and it's not entering the atmosphere. And so usually in the spring, you get much drier conditions, until that sort of green up really kicks in and starts contributing additional moisture to the atmosphere. So if you're going to have fire weather, it's usually before you're fully green. It's usually kind of typically, not always, but typically the first half of May and into April. That's kind of your main fire weather season. And then after that, you've got enough moisture in the air, because of all the plants that the humidities are higher, and it's harder for, you know, things to burn, they don't burn quite as readily. So it's all keyed to the Sun, the Sun kind of triggers the photosynthesis which then leads to all that plant growth which then leads to the plants conducting moisture and use it and going through that evapotransportive process whereby they pull moisture out of the ground, conducted through their various root stem and leaf systems and then transmitted back to the atmosphere. So that's all synchronized by the Sun. And it keys to our rainy season, once that moisture really kicks in, you start seeing our monthly precipitation starts to go up. And it stays up until, you know, mid-September, when the Sun starts getting weak enough that the evapotranspiration and photosynthesis shut down, and everything kind of goes back to sleep and things start drying out. So then you get another dry weather and fire weather season typically, in September, late September and October. You ever notice, Jim, that, you know, unless you're in a really extraordinary circumstance with extreme drought, you don't usually get big wildfires during the hottest time of year? Have you ever noticed that? They're not usually in July and August when you might expect them to be? Jim du Bois 07:32You know, Kenny, I never considered that before. But you're right. My recollection now, you don't see major fires during those months. Kenny Blumenfeld 07:41Well, I think of all of our really big fires, too. What was that? What was it the Pagami, the Pagami Creek fire, or Pagami Lake fire, the Boundary Waters fires of 2007 and nine and 11? Those were in May. And then you have the famous, the kind of historical Cloquet and Hinckley fires that were in the past, and those were in the fall. Those were in September and October. Even though July is far and away our hottest month, and we can be scorching hot, and we can be in extreme drought in July, there's still usually enough moisture in the air to prevent, you know, the fire weather people call them fuels, that prevent those fuels from building up and drying out a lot. And so instead we see our main fire weather window, basically going from whenever the snow leaves the ground, up until you know, maybe mid to late May. And then the next piece of it would be September and October. Jim du Bois 08:49Well, Kenny, we just entered a new decade and at the end of every decade, the NOAA climate normals change. So now we're looking at a period that would entail the years 1991 to 2020, where previously we were looking at stats from 1981 to 2010. What has the shift in normals indicated so far? You know, honestly there weren't any big surprises for Minnesota because, you know, we track all of this. And Minnesota's population is pretty aware of the changes that have been ongoing. In the Twin Cities, there was a very subtle increase in the temperatures. The average temperature in the Twin Cities went up annually by about six tenths of a degree over the previous normal period. So, there was a generalized increase in temperatures. It was strongest in January and December. And it was pretty robust in, you know, May through September growing season also, but we did lose a little bit of ground in February and in April, meaning that the period 1991 through 2020 in February and April was actually a little bit cooler than the period from 1981 through 2010. And if you can really think about it, you're kind of subbing in the 2010s and taking out the 1980s. And what that means is that February and April were actually a little bit cooler for those two months in the 2000 10s than they were in the 1980s in the Twin Cities, and this is also true across much of Minnesota. But all the other months, by and large, were either the same or warmer. And we sort of see this across the state too. Also, the state got wetter, we got more precipitation. The 2010s, that period from 2000, really 11 through 2020 was very wet in Minnesota, the wettest on record. And so no surprise that that ended up driving up our already fairly high, historically kind of elevated annual precipitation, but that too was not across the board increases and month to month. We really saw it concentrated here in the Twin Cities. May got a lot wetter, June got a lot wetter, and a couple of the kind of mid and late fall months. Whereas we lost precipitation pretty helpfully in March. And you can think of that, as you know, whatever happened to the high school tournament blizzards? Those don't seem to happen. We didn't have, we hardly had any of those in the 2010s, and so our snowfall and precipitation stats really drove down during March across basically all of Minnesota. But by and large, the 2010s were kind of snowy. And so even though the snowfall came down from the 1981 through 2010 normal period, we did see most stations in Minnesota continuing to be at or above historical high marks for snowfall in the 2010s. It just wasn't quite as snowy as the the 1980s that they replaced, but it was one of the snowiest decades on record. You know, no really big surprises in Minnesota. I would say the one thing that's different from this time, of course, we were just getting to know each other when the last normals were released. But in 2011, when those were released, the period 1981 through 2010 really jumped in terms of temperature over what had been the previous normals period. So that was almost like this head turning kind of shock where, you know, we saw some of the winter months in particular had warmed by, you know, more than three degrees at many stations. So, these very large changes in temperature that we saw the last time those weren't really replicated this time. The warming was much more subtle, kind of giving the impression that the sharp upwards trajectory that we had been on maybe leveled off a little bit in the last decade. Jim du Bois 13:10Are severe weather statistics part of this period that defines what a normal is? Kenny Blumenfeld 13:17Ah, that's a really good question. You think they would be, wouldn't you? Jim du Bois 13:21Yeah, yeah. Kenny Blumenfeld 13:21I mean, wouldn't you like that? It would be nice to have normals. You could kind of, and by the way, if anyone's wondering what is a normal, it's really, just think of it as an adjusted 30-year average. The reason I say adjusted is because if a station has every single day available, and for every single month and every single weather variable, then it's essentially just a 30-year average. But these are usually volunteer observers who make these observations, and they're often on vacation for a couple days out of the year. And you have to have a method for sort of estimating what those values would be if they had made every observation or if nothing had changed. And so, there's minor, very, very minor adjustments that can be made. But a normal is a 30-year adjusted average. And no, they're not, there aren't really good severe weather metrics because of some of the...you know, if you think of temperature, precipitation, Jim, those are kind of objective measurements. I mean, sure, there's a little bit of human error that goes into reading a rain gauge, but if you read 1.37 inches of precipitation out of your clear bucket or out of your manual rain gauge, you might be off by a 100th of an inch and it's a valid measurement, and with temperature, most of the volunteer observers actually have a sort of semi-automated system that logs the values for them, the high and the low temperature. So, it's pretty objective, but think about hail now or strong winds or you know, damaging winds or tornadoes, there's no real objective way of measuring, you know, there's no tornadoometer that you could use to measure the various aspects of a tornado. And we also know that you're a Skywarn weather spotter. You've been trained on the severe weather training, and so you know how to spot storms, and you think of our ability to see these over time has also improved. So, it's kind of hard to standardize that data set. But it would be great if we could come up with, you know, some kind of functional 30-year average. So, we knew, you know, here's the number of hailstorms that we should expect in Minnesota or in this area in a given year. Here's how many times we expect it to hail at your location in a typical year, yeah, all that stuff would be great. But no, we don't we don't have much for that at all. Jim du Bois 15:59Well, speaking of severe weather, last week, we observed the 56th anniversary of the May 6, 1965 tornado outbreak that hit parts of the southwestern western and northern metro areas, and I believe Kenny 13, 14 fatalities? 13? Kenny Blumenfeld 16:20Yeah. Jim du Bois 16:20Somewhere around there. Kenny Blumenfeld 16:21I mean 13 at least. Jim du Bois 16:21Yeah, yeah. Kenny Blumenfeld 16:22And a lot of, you know, hundreds of injuries and a lot of damage and a lot of stories. You know, everyone who is there, not me, I was not around yet, but everyone who is there had a story from that day. You remember anything about it? Are you too young? Jim du Bois 16:39Well, no, Kenny, I do remember it because it was my birthday. And I remember distinctly having a kind of mini-birthday celebration, we were going to have a bigger one with friends over the weekend. That was a Thursday night. So, I had a little piece of cake. There's actually a photo of me I dug up with the cake and little did I know the rest of the evening would be spent in the basement listening to some pretty compelling live reports called in by listeners on WCCO radio. But that's my biggest memory. Now, we were in a part of the Twin Cities that was not impacted by the storms. There was no damage in our neighborhood. Kenny Blumenfeld 17:20Where were you, Jim? Jim du Bois 17:21Living by Bde Maka Ska at the time. Kenny Blumenfeld 17:24Okay, yeah. Jim du Bois 17:25So there, now there were reports supposedly there were funnel clouds spotted over Lake Nokomis heading toward Harriet, Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles. We were hunkered in the basement so we couldn't confirm or deny those reports. But there was a lot going on that night. And Kenny it begs the question, we haven't seen an outbreak like that for the Twin Cities since 1965. Statistically, are we overdue? Kenny Blumenfeld 17:56Yeah, I mean, on one hand, something like that we really only have one instance of it on record, so we have no idea what the return period is. We could look at other kind of similarly major events that were in the region that maybe didn't do exactly what that one did and assume that the recurrence interval has averaged about 20 to 25 years between major tornado outbreaks in what we now think of as the Twin Cities area. So, from that perspective, yeah, I mean, you know, you could, I suppose count July 3 1983, and maybe start the clock ticking there, because that was brutal. But we haven't in the Twin Cities area had anything like that in, you know, somewhere between, what 38 and 56 years. And so, it's, um, it has, you know, we should remember that this kind of thing happens. It's so hard for people to picture something that they've never experienced. And this is one of the, you know, we talk about this, you and I talked about this at bars all the time. Jim du Bois 19:11Oh yes, we do, Kenny. Kenny Blumenfeld 19:12How, how can, how do you warn people about the likelihood of something that they can't really comprehend? There's no real analogy, and you can only point at other towns in the United States where something like that has happened that maybe made the news during their lifetime. And you kind of say, we'll see that can happen here too, because we've had this kind of thing. I worry about that. Because we never know, we don't get a, we don't get a memo saying it's gonna be this year, or it's gonna be today, even. We don't know, I mean, obviously, we know it's not going to be today. There's no chance for the kind of outbreak Jim du Bois 19:47Right. Kenny Blumenfeld 19:48We, you know, we'll get a little heads up in that we'll know when the conditions are right for you know, unusually potent severe weather outbreak, but we're not going to know from the, you know, 15 times we have that kind of advanced warning in a given year somewhere in Minnesota. We're not really going to know which one to four of those is actually going to produce memorable weather in that part of the state. And of that one to four experiences, we won't know, is this, the one? Is this the one that's going to, you know, wreak havoc on the Twin Cities? So, it would be great if people, you know, kind of maintain situational awareness, knew where they were at any given time, the name of the county that they're in and what the nearby communities are so that when the next one comes, they kind of recognize their situation, and where they are, and you know what they might need to do. Yeah, it does concern me. Another thing, though, Jim, from Bde Maka Ska I believe, if you, and this is one of those things, you know, merely rewind the clock 56 years, I'm pretty sure that from the south shore of that lake, in 1965, you would have been able to see from the southeast, you would have been able to see the tornadoes to the west. And from the southwest, you would have been able to see the tornadoes up in Fridley. So, you know, no big deal. You kind of blew it, should have gone outside and looked. Jim du Bois 21:26Right. I don't think my parents would have been too happy about that. So... Kenny Blumenfeld 21:30Oh, I think everyone belonged in the basement. Jim du Bois 21:32Right. Kenny Blumenfeld 21:35But I think, yeah, you know, I, I, when I was a kid, the infamous Lake, Harriet-Har Mar tornado that went from Edina into southwest Minneapolis and then kind of jumped over towards Roseville. Well, also passed through Lake Street, Chicago Lake area, that tornado, a bunch of my friends saw it. And I was only about a mile at most from the path that its nearest point. And there were some signs. I was already an avid weather observer, but I was like eight, or not even eight, I was seven. So ,I always wonder what did I really see? And what could I have seen if I had just, you know, stayed outside a little longer or, you know, looked down the block. Because it was, it was, but you know, what do you do? You got to, I guess, if you're like me, then you spend the next 30 years trying to find tornadoes. Jim du Bois 22:36Right. Kenny Blumenfeld 22:36Which I did. Jim du Bois 22:37What's interesting too, Kenny, looking back to the 1965 outbreak is there are very few photos in existence of those tornadoes. And they were numerous and large, and in one case long lived, at least one case. And yet, we have very few photos. Now one variable, though, was the fact I believe it was dark during a lot of those tornadoes. So, there wasn't the opportunity to get good photographs. Also, of course, we didn't have a camera, a digital camera in our pocket at the ready so it was more difficult for someone to actually take a picture. But if you look at the outbreak in Fargo, North Dakota in June of 1957, that was very well documented. There were a lot of photographs, including some film that was taken, I believe, by a TV cameraman. And it's interesting why there are so few photos from that outbreak. Is that unusual, Kenny? Or is that an outlier? Or, you know, how do the various outbreaks over time rank I guess in terms of how well photographed or documented they are? Kenny Blumenfeld 23:48You know, a lot of the big ones from the mid-century and before just didn't have much photo documentation. I mean, you know, the tornados from 1965 in the Twin Cities were, they were moving at a pretty good pace. I mean, I think they were, as far as I could tell, they seemed to be highly visible. A lot of people witnessed them. But you had, it wasn't like now where you got a phone in your pocket with a camera on it. You had to think camera and have it with you. And I think when people were gawking at the tornado, those who weren't being hit by it, they were kind of making a decision of well, I can stay here and watch this once in a lifetime thing. Or I can go try and get my camera and possibly lose this opportunity. And so, I think that's one piece of it. The other was, you know, for as much as we say WCCO was giving people heads up, I mean, everything I've heard from those radio broadcasts, and I believe I've heard everything, every second of it. It was much less forecasting of, you know, here's what's on the ground right now so much as like relaying and urging people to stay in their basements and relaying information that in some cases may have been minutes, dozens of minutes old. And I don't think there was a great opportunity for people to know exactly which storm at what time was producing a tornado right then. There was, you know, I think one or two instances during their radio broadcast where callers were mentioning seeing the tornado right then and there. But a lot of them were calling into report something they had seen a while ago. And so, it would have been hard, and there were a lot of thunderstorms that night. So, knowing which one was the one producing the tornado out of the, you know, 50 or so that went across the Twin Cities that evening, that would have been challenging. I, I...and the other thing I would point out is, you know, Todd Krause from the weather service did go around to various historical societies, and it seems like from that evening, there are between four and six kind of credible tornado photographs that have...I think four is probably a good number, but maybe five or six credible photographs of the tornadoes at various parts of the area from that evening. And that's actually a pretty good number. How many tornado photos do you know of from the May 22, 2011 Minneapolis to Fridley tornado, Jim? Jim du Bois 26:34Interesting, yeah. Good. Kenny Blumenfeld 26:36Believe the number's at zero. Jim du Bois 26:38Yes. Boy, that's, I hadn't thought of that, Kenny. That's, because that was in that was during the day there was plenty of daylight. And yeah, that's surprising. Kenny Blumenfeld 26:49There's, there's actually some video that a gentleman took from kind of Central Avenue area. And that's actually amazing video with power flashes. And so you could presumably with permission, freeze that video and make a screenshot, but I know of no pictures of the tornado. And also, the June 14 (1981), Twin Cities tornado not well photographed, there were two pictures that I know of. And then a little bit of video from Roseville area. And St. Anthony tornado from 1984, zero photographs. The Hugo killer tornado on Memorial Day weekend of 2008. escaped not just photography, but also videography, nothing, not a shred of documentary evidence that it actually existed in the form that we know from surveys and radar that it did. And that was also a daylight tornado in a supercell thunderstorm, meaning all you had to do was be in the right location and you could have seen it wide open. But nobody was there Jim du Bois 27:59Interesting. Kenny Blumenfeld 27:59So, I think it has something to do with the nature of the beast. I mean, this is why storm chasers do what they do. Because if you know where to go, and you know how to position yourself, and then you have an understanding of the environmental conditions and all of that, then it's just kind of a matter of going to the right place, adjusting a little bit and then waiting. But if you're not in that position, then it can be very difficult to get a photograph or video of one of these things even on days where the ingredients are right there. And you know, the landscape of the Twin Cities doesn't necessarily make it any easier. With buildings, trees, bridges, all kinds of obstructions, and plus, you know, roads that if you are a chaser, you have to contend with traffic, detours, construction season, and all of that. So there's actually a decent amount of forces working against good photographic or video documentation of these things. Jim du Bois 29:02Well, Kenny, we had teased it at the beginning of the program today, that summer is coming. So, what can we look forward to Kenny? Kenny Blumenfeld 29:11Across the state, we're moving into a warm weekend and next week is starting to look hot. I mean, you know, so it's gonna be a beautiful weekend pretty much statewide. I can't think of a part of the state even, you know, Grand Marais I suppose if the water or if the wind is blowing off of the lake might be a little bit cooler, but I do expect warm conditions pretty much statewide Saturday and then ramping up a bit even more on Sunday with temperatures, I expect them 60s and 70s on Saturday depending on which part of the state you're in. 70s and 80s on Sunday, and then just you know, keep dialing it up as we get into Monday and Tuesday. Some of the official forecasts now have temperatures in the 80s for most of next week. And if you read the forecast discussions, the weather service forecasters in the Twin Cities anyway have been noting that the main guidance that they use to populate their temperature forecasts has had what's called a cool bias, meaning that it's been tending to make temperature forecasts that are a little lower than what gets realized. So in any case, we have the potential, later next week especially, for some widespread 70s and 80s, across Minnesota. And some of the output I saw from the European model recently has temperatures getting close to 90. So that's really kind of the dominant pattern for the next week to 10 days it's just going to be warm, increasingly humid. And although that humidity will be good in terms of preventing some of the fire, we really are going to need precipitation, because that evapotranspiration, the loss of water right out of the soil and out of the plants is going to really accelerate with those higher, higher temperatures. So it is going to feel like summer. Jim, I think we have, we have a decent shot now if the current forecast pattern holds, then I wouldn't be surprised if you do see people swimming in Minnesota lakes, at least in southern Minnesota on Memorial Day weekend. It's a possibility. I'm not promising it, but there's enough warm weather in the models now and in the forecast that we could see that. But we also really like some precipitation, because the water levels are pretty low. Jim du Bois 31:45Well, Kenny, the last episode, you said it would be hot at the end of May. That was your gut feeling. And it looks like things may be lining up to make that happen. But we shall see. There's always that variability. Kenny Blumenfeld 31:58Yeah, it certainly looks possible. I think that we're going to certainly, the second half of the month will be warmer than the first half. That's a no brainer. And it will pull our average up to kind of normal to above normal for the month. I think that's a no brainer. But are we really going to stand out? And is it going to be a kind of a hot end of the month? Well, that that part remains to be seen. But yeah, right now I'm feeling okay about that statement and about the side bet that I made with one of my colleagues about may finishing kind of warm. Jim du Bois 32:33Well, Kenny, enjoy the beautiful weekend ahead and we'll enjoy the taste of summer that's coming. Fingers crossed for some much-needed precipitation as those moisture levels start to increase. Kenny Blumenfeld 32:46Yeah, that's the big one for sure. Jim du Bois 32:48Yeah. Kenny Blumenfeld 32:48Need that precipitation. Jim du Bois 32:50But Kenny, enjoy, and we'll talk to you in about a week. Kenny Blumenfeld 32:54Yeah, you too. Good to talk to you, Jim. Thanks a lot. Jim du Bois 32:57This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld's a climatologist. We'll catch you next time.

Adam got to each lunch at home today... Cook is upset at the Badger Basketball program and Chad went for a walk around Bde Maka Ska this weekend... Are those things "Overrated, Underrated or Properly Rated?" See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Drew Campbell is a former Blue Earth County commissioner. He grew up in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, three blocks away from Bde Maka Ska.

Last summer, avid sailor Vikas Narula was at Bde Maka Ska trying to invite people to sail with him.  He’d been rejected a few times when he met Alvin Manago and his friend George Floyd. They agreed to join Narula, a total stranger, and spent the next hour talking about Floyd’s life in Houston and their respective families, and even took a few selfies. Narula lost touch with Manago and Floyd, and didn’t think about that day until a few days after Memorial Day when Floyd’s face was everywhere. Use the audio player above to listen to Manago and Narula recount their stories about knowing and meeting Floyd, and their time on the lake.  Guests: Vikas Narula is the co-founder of a software company and an avid sailor.  Alvin Manago was one of Floyd’s housemates and worked with Floyd at Conga Latin Bistro. A GoFundMe fundraiser has been set up to help with living expenses. Later in the program we heard from a Fortune 500 company and a vocational training center on how they’re teaming up support racial equity in Minnesota. Target Corp. announced it will provide Summit Academy OIC, a longtime player in workforce development in north Minneapolis, low-cost space to expand its operations and open a new information technology learning and training center, called North Star Innovation Center. Guests: Laysha Ward is the executive vice president and chief external engagement officer at Target. Louis King is the president and CEO of Summit Academy, a vocational training center located in north Minneapolis. Use the audio player above to listen to the program. Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

So happy for all who have supported me through Season two!!!! I am talking a little fast in this episode because I have been walking lake Bde Maka Ska, just listening to the stillness of life. This next week is going to be crazy busy for me & I just wanted to share a few happenings before I return to my day of relaxation ❤️

The debate over the name change of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska is now before the Minnesota Supreme Court. Justices will consider whether the Department of Natural Resources has the power to make that change. The lake was named for U.S. Vice President John Calhoun, who defended slavery. Dakota public historian Kate Beane joined the Counter Stories team to discuss restoring Native American names to well known landmarks. Beane has been one of the leading voices in the campaign to restore the Dakota name Bde Maka Ska. For Native Americans a name can give a sense of home and history, connecting people to the land and their ancestry. And it’s a step toward correcting the stories and practices that erased Indigenous people’s history and culture. This episode’s co-hosts are: Hlee Lee, owner of “the other media group” Don Eubanks, associate professor at Metropolitan State University Anthony Galloway, Art-Us Marianne Combs, MPR correspondent And guest Kate Beane, Flandreau Santee Dakota and Muskogee Creek and public historian

Montana's state-tribal relations committee adopts motion on Keystone XL Navajo Nation leaders decide not to financially back three coal mines Minnesota Supreme Court hears arguments on Bde Maka Ska naming process

Save Lake Calhoun filed a petition for writ of quo warranto in Ramsey County District Court, claiming that the Commissioner of Natural Resources had exceeded her statutory authority in changing the name of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska. The district court denied the petition, concluding that Save Lake Calhoun failed to establish an ongoing act necessary to obtain quo warranto relief. The court of appeals reversed and remanded for entry of judgment in favor of Save Lake Calhoun, concluding that the district court erred by denying the petition for writ of quo warranto because Save Lake Calhoun had presented “a sufficient claim for the ongoing exercise of power” by the Department of Natural Resources. The court of appeals also addressed the merits of the claim and determined that the Commissioner of Natural Resources lacks authority under Minn. Stat. §§ 83A.015–.07 (2018), to change a lake name that has existed for more than 40 years. On appeal to the supreme court, the issues presented are: (1) whether the Legislature gave the Commissioner of Natural Resources authority to change the name of a lake that has been known by its current name for more than 40 years; (2) whether a writ of quo warranto is appropriate; and (3) whether Minnesota should abolish or limit the common-law writ of quo warranto. (Ramsey County)

Winnebago tribal council woman says no to Delaney’s universal health care Grassroots groups at Native forum yell honor treaties in opposition of pipelines Minneapolis park board votes to change street sign names to Bde Maka Ska

08/21 The entire crew is in, and everyone is a little excited for the MN state fair. The Paul Bunyan statue at the fair is going to be auctioned off. Mpls Park Board to vote on renaming Calhoun parkways after Bde Maka Ska, and Johnny Heidt with another edition of guitar news!!

06/19 The Mayor has a number of deep thoughts on the Garage Logic service road of life on the St Paul school board voting last night to drop James Monroe's name from two of it's buildings. A Minneapolis Park Board commissioner is floating an idea to add affordable housing for low-income residents at the pavilion site at Bde Maka Ska.

Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan weighs in on Bde Maka Ska name change Tribes recognized during commemoration of transcontinental railroad

1 year as The Brian Wallenberg Show! (Yea)! (MN) Change of the name of 'Lake Calhoun' to the Native American name, Bde Maka Ska is being enforced by the Democrats of the state to show that the original name is racist. (Audio Clip). Economy is strongest since the Democrats ran for the 2020 election. Brian feels there is a definite divide in the country with what the Democratic party is doing to get votes. **Fake News** Up with David Gura show,made an on-screen misspelling and misquoted Kellyanne Conway as saying President Donald Trump "commended" neo-Nazis, in reference to Confederate monument (VA) name change 2017, and has since been fake news of the bias view point of Democrats. **Seriously?!** (Audio Clip) Hillary Clinton (D) is talking on 'The View' China should get involved since, Russia has been part of the Trump campaign, to make President Trump's Tax Returns available to the public. Seriously... China? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) speaks that illegal immigrants are not just 'illegal aliens,' or not part of this country, do they live here? Yes. Therefore, they are 'her constituents' in America. Seriously...Illegals, citizens? **Civil War II** Democrats are pushing more and more for illegal votes and getting more and more non-citizens to be citizens. (Audio Clip) Former President Barack Obama (D) speaks of the Muslim race and how they have helped building up America. (The former President appreciates his family history, of a Muslim father that had raised him in America. By the example of his Muslim ancestry he feels Muslims deserve credit and have done a lot in our country). Again, Brian is showing that Democrats have this division (in the country with Republicans), to get Minorities as their focus to get votes in all elections. **E-Mails** Tara states she is happy Brian is on the air. Bill writes that a co-host should make his show more entertaining to show the view point of a Democrat. --- Thanks for Listening!---

This week: How a lake in the States lost its Indigenous name, re-gained it, only to potentially lose it again because of a Minnesota court decision. Join us as we dive into the details of the Dakota waters known as Bde Maka Ska (aka Lake Calhoun). Sitting with host/producer Rick Harp at the roundtable this week are Brock Pitawanakwat, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University, and Kim TallBear, associate professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. // // This episode was edited by Anya Zoledziowski. Our theme is 'nesting' by birocratic.

In episode 73, Heather and Bennett discuss the book “The Bus on Thursday” by Shirley Barrett and the FX television show You’re the Worst. Other topics include: Game of Thrones, JRR Tolkien, Hallmark movies, Dominic Thiem, Dwayne Wade, Spiderman PS4, The Overstory, Ben & Jerry’s, the Boston Bruins, Notre Dame, Joe Biden, Bde Maka Ska, Bridget Jone’s Diary, The Dressmaker, the Girl on the Train, New Girl, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Grey’s Anatomy, Lake Success, Love Simon, Shrill, Thor 4, The 100, Prince of Egypt, Goofy Movie, Fred Savage, Booksmart, and Pride & Prejudice Atlanta.

This is the second in a three-part series titled, "Farming on Stolen Land." These three episodes were developed by LSP staff member Elizabeth Makarewicz as a guide to exploring issues of native land justice and equity in Minnesota's food system. This episode offers a peek into the life of Dakota tribal member and activist, Carly Badheart Bull. Carly is a scholar of the Dakota language and, along with her twin sister, Kate Beane, has led a campaign to return the original Dakota name to an historically significant body of water, Bde Maka Ska. Source

This is the second in a three-part series titled, "Farming on Stolen Land." These three episodes were developed by LSP staff member Elizabeth Makarewicz as a guide to exploring issues of native land justice and equity in Minnesota's food system. This episode offers a peek into the life of Dakota tribal member and activist, Carly Badheart Bull. Carly is a scholar of the Dakota language and, along with her twin sister, Kate Beane, has led a campaign to return the original Dakota name to an historically significant body of water, Bde Maka Ska.

04/30 More discussion on the proposed name change for Lake Calhoun after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stated that he would not follow the ruling of the appeals court. The handshake has now been viewed by an office in Philadelphia as an invasion of personal space. That and Johnny Heidt with another edition of guitar news!!

Justice & Drew discuss a judge ruling that the DNR did not have the authority to rename Lake Calhoun. Plus, they chat with Senator Roger Chamberlain about a late night for the legislature that focused on gas taxes, butt grabbing, and more.

Work continues on Native American voting rights issues in North DakotaNative community and some politicians want to keep Bde Maka Ska name

Mike, Tommy and Kevin return and waste no time using a cheap gimmick to try to get some listens. In this episode they take the Mighty Ducks to the world of Game of Thrones. Who fits in where? Who is dead? Will Julie "The Cat" Gaffney win this just like she wins the rest of our hypothetical contests? Show Notes The link to the trivia pentathlon quiz. The high score right now is 6 out 10, which has been accomplished by multiple people. Final week to get it in. Entries are due by April 24, 2019. Kevin running into a random women wearing a Mighty Ducks jersey in Minneapolis: Lake Calhoun, now called Bde Maka Ska, is the largest lake in Minnesota. There is a park around it. That's nice. Here is Calhoun Lake on the map. If we take that and graft it on Hans' map: It looks like we're looking at either District 6, which would be Hawks territory, or District 5, depending on what side of the lake Kevin's AirBnB was on. In fact, Lake Calhoun is probably the lake Hans refers to when he says "the lake is now the boundary." Bombay's address (450 N. Hennepin Ave.) is northeast of the lake, while Edina is southwest. This is what Tommy is referring to regarding the AAF. Ducks of Thrones roles: Ted Orion - A member of House Stark, will battle White Walkers The Hawks - House Lannister Gordon Bombay - Has a small rag tag bunch, sends them into a battle with the White Walkers Adult Charlie Conway vs. Euron Greyjoy How the Mighty Ducks fit into the Game of Thrones Hans and Jan - The Maesters. Dead. Gunnar Stahl - Bronn. Alive. Averman - Podrick the Squire. Alive. Adam Banks - Jamie Lannister. Alive. Charlie Conway - Dead Tommy Duncan/Tammy Duncan - The Freys. Dead. Julie Gaffney - Daenerys Targaryen. Alive. Guy Germaine - Tommen Baratheon. Dead. Greg Goldberg - Hodor. Dead. Jesse Hall - A member of the Greyjoys. Alive. Terry Hall - A member of the Greyjoys. Alive. Luis Mendoza - Oberyn Martell. Dead. Connie Moreau - Sansa Stark. Alive. Dean Portman - A reckless king. Dead. Fulton Reed - Jon Snow. Alive. Dwayne Robertson - Benjin Stark. Turned into a White Walker. Russ Tyler - A very loud Greyworm. Alive -- for now. Ken Wu - Syrio Forel. Dead. McGill - On the Knights Watch. Alive? Cole - The Mountain. A zombie. Larson - Tyrion Lannister. Who ends up on The Iron Throne? Thanks to @DuckTalks for the #QuackQuestion. Bigger sports comeback...Tiger Woods winning his first Masters title since 2005 or Mighty Ducks down 4-0 to Iceland in the Championship game? @QuackAttackPod— DuckTalks

Minneapolis and St. Paul, also known as the Twin Cities, are two cities that flank the Mississippi River in Minnesota. Since the winters in the Midwest of the United States can be long and brutal, locals and tourists are always looking for outdoor activities in the summer. Minnesota is also full of lakes and rivers, so there is always a plethora of water activities to do. Minnehaha Falls is a beautiful park that has trails, beaches, wading pools, and several other activities. Minnehaha Falls is located in Minneapolis, next to the river. This park is ideal for families or a solo trip out in nature. The park also has historical sites, restaurants, and gardens. Their gardens can be used for weddings or a beautiful place to rest during a hike. During the summer they hold music and movies in the park. The waterfall itself is definitely one of the best parts of the experience. Fort Snelling State Park is a historical site that sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in St Paul.  This is one of the original forts in Minnesota. It was used during the fur trade because of its proximity to the river. Now it is used for camping, fishing, biking, and hiking. They host historical reenactments and have a large amount of information on the local tribes in the area. It is really a sight to see and something that should not be missed. Chain of Lakes Regional Park is located in Minneapolis. Much like its name suggests. It is a chain of lakes consisting of Brownie, Cedar, Harriet, Lake of the Isles, and Bde Maka Ska, formerly known as Lake Calhoun. This park is breathtaking and boasts several different activities including archery, biking, hiking, and fishing. Chain of Lakes is good for both winter and summer. You can play hockey or ice skate in the winter, then play soccer or tennis in the summer. Amsterdam Pedals is a great adult activity to do in St. Paul. The tour allows you to see the city while sitting and you are able to have a great drink! It is a great way to cap of the day after visiting one of the many parks in the area. This would be fun to do with a group or on your own! There are many other places to visit in the Twin Cities during the summer. If you are planning a trip to the area make certain you look into all of these places! The post The Best Outdoor Places to Visit in the Twin Cities appeared first on DAPULSE.

Justice and Drew continue their conversation on problems in Edina public schools and also discuss the Lake Calhoun vs. Bde Maka Ska name change. They're later joined by Pete Hegseth to talk about the NFL needing more miracles and current events in D.C.

Gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson joins Justice and Drew to discuss his dissenting vote against renaming Lake Calhoun as Bde Maka Ska. Later, Jon and Drew talk about all the ways the Super Bowl is going to suck for Minnesota residents.