Minnesota has always been a land of immigrants. Successive waves have each made their own way, found their place, and made it their home. The Hmong are one of the most recent immigrant groups, and their remarkable and moving story is told in Hmong in Minnesota.<br /><br />Chia Youyee Vang reveals the colorful, intricate history of Hmong Minnesotans, many of whom were forced to flee their homeland of Laos when the communists seized po ...
The Red Lake Nation has a unique and deeply important history. Unlike every other reservation in Minnesota, Red Lake holds its land in common—and, consequently, the tribe retains its entire reservation land base. The people of Red Lake developed the first modern indigenous democratic governance system in the United States, decades before any other tribe, but they also maintained their system of hereditary chiefs. The tribe never surren ...
When Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye-opening experience. The correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal agents in the early twentieth century.<br /><br />While telling her own family's stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as well as stories of Ojibwe people a ...
Examines the complex and often suprising relationships between the participants in the sugar beet industry.<br /><br />Throughout most of the twentieth century, thousands of Mexicans traveled north to work the sugar beet fields of the Minnesota–North Dakota Red River Valley. North for the Harvest examines the evolution of the relationships between American Crystal Sugar Company, the sugar beet growers, and the migrant workers. Though ...
A boardinghouse keeper finds her kitchen in a mess after Saturday-night revelry and refuses to cook on Sunday. An iron miner pries frozen ore from a car in 40-below temperatures. A grocer makes sausage, brews wine, and forages for mushrooms and dandelion greens. In Italian Voices, Minnesota's Italian Americans share rich stories of everyday life in communities in the Iron Range, Duluth, and the Twin Cities between 1900 and 1960. Mary Ell ...
"I had a profoundly well-educated Princetonian ask me, 'Where is your tomahawk?' I had a beautiful woman approach me in the college gymnasium and exclaim, 'You have the most beautiful red skin.' I took a friend to see Dances with Wolves and was told, 'Your people have a beautiful culture.' . . . I made many lifelong friends at college, and they supported but also challenged me with questio ...
On June 27, 1868, Hole in the Day (Bagonegiizhig) the Younger left Crow Wing, Minnesota, for Washington, DC, to fight the planned removal of the Mississippi Ojibwe to a reservation at White Earth. Several miles from his home, the self-styled leader of all the Ojibwe was stopped by at least twelve Ojibwe men and fatally shot.<br /><br />Hole in the Day's death was national news, and rumors of its cause were many: personal jeal ...
"One day I realize that my entire back seat is filled with relatives who wonder why I'm not paying more attention to their part of the family story. . . . Sooner or later they all come up to the front seat and whisper stories in my ear."<br /><br />Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else's. Her Swedish American father was a salesman at Sears and ...
From the mid-1830s to the 1860s, the missionaries sent to Minnesota by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) wrote thousands of letters to their supervisors and supporters claiming success in converting the Dakota people. But author Linda M. Clemmons reveals that the reality of the situation was far more conflicted than what those written records would suggest.<br /><br />In fact, in the rough Minnesota ter ...
