Minnesota has a long and varied history of environmental justice campaigns. The intention of this series is to create opportunities for Macalester students to learn from and build relationships with local leaders, organizations, and communities in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota working towards a more just future.

Moving beyond the classroom, this series of site visits coordinated across Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 are designed to bring students off-campus and into communities to learn from them and to support their work through specific service projects and asks. These site visits are designed to introduce students to these organizations and community issues with the hope that many will develop relationships on their own to further deepen engagement and collaboration. 

This site based series consists of six partnerships primarily based in Minneapolis/St Paul. In the Fall, we will spend time learning about issues of racial and environmental justice in rural Minnesota and Minneapolis. In the Spring, we will focus on issues of racial and environmental justice in St Paul. During the site visits, students will work with the community partners on a select number of service asks.

These events are free and open to the Macalester student community. Transportation and food will be provided. Students are prioritized for registration, and registration for each event will open at least one week in advance. Service asks are part of the site visit experience and we will ask students to reflect on this experience through a short survey. 

For more questions and information, please contact Vivian Tran,  pb@macalester.edu .

This pilot series was designed by Vivian Tran, ‘24, American Studies major as part of her Summer 2023 research assistantship with the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange. The digital illustrations, graphic design, and publicity was developed by Amanda Wong ‘24. This program was designed with the advising and mentorship of Sedric McClure, Co-Director of the Community Engagement Center, Aisling Quigley, Digital Liberal Arts Librarian and Program Manager, Fleury Clark Girimana, Associate Director (Programming) in the Center for Leadership and Student Engagement, and Assistant Professor of American Studies, Kirisitina Sailiata.  This series wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of Media and Cultural Studies, American Studies, Environmental Studies, the Racial Justice Fund (Spring 2024), the Community Engagement Center, Macalester College Student Government Program Board, and the Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange.

How do I use the StoryMap? 

1. Choose which site you will be visiting from the header
2. Read a short introduction
3. Pick 2-3 resources to go through before the site visit, if you are able to, go through more! 
4. Service asks from community partners can be found after the resources.

How can I register for a site visit?

On the week of a site visit, a link will be open on Wednesday at 12pm. It will be in the MacDaily and on Program Board's  linktree  on instagram (@macalester_pb). It's a quick and easy google form that you'll fill out. If we are at capacity, please email  pb@macalester.edu . to be put on the waitlist.

Do I have to go to all the sites if I sign up? 

Nope, each site will require registration. 

What if I registered for a site visit and can't go anymore?

Please email  pb@macalester.edu  to let us know! We have limited capacity and we can let someone on the waitlist know that they can join us.

Is this program free? How do I get there? Is there food?

This is free to all students! We provide the transportation to each site, directions on where to find the bus will be in the registration form, in the confirmation email, and on our  instagram (@macalester_pb) . Food or snacks will be provided at most of the sites, details can be found on instagram.

What if I can’t make it to a site visit?

We’re sorry to hear you can’t join us, you can still use this StoryMap to learn about issues our community partners are working on from their section. Majority of our community partners are in the Twin Cities and can be reached by public transit from Macalester. If you’re interested in supporting their work, look at the service asks (found after resources) and reach out to them!

1. Honor the Earth Activist Camp | Saturday Sept. 23rd, 8am-6pm
2. Environmental Justice Tour with CMEJ | Saturday Oct 7th 1-4pm
   1. Chat with Activist-In-Residence Roxxanne O’Brien | Tuesday Oct 17th 3-430pm in Davis Court, Markim Hall
3. George Floyd Pilgrimage | Saturday Oct 21st 1-4pm

Saturday, September 23, 2023 8am-6pm

Throughout the fight to stop the construction of a crude oil pipeline on treaty lands and across the Mississippi River watershed, this space served as the Water Protector Welcome Center for frontline organizers and community members. Minnesota activist and artist Shanai Matteson and the Indigenous-led non-profit  Honor the Earth  worked to maximize Matteson’s family property in Palisade as a central location for direct actions, political education, and other movement-related work. Honor the Earth, now led by Krystal Two Bulls, has collaborated with  The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange  as the Headwaters Hub.

The focus of the center has shifted towards political education and direct action campaigns around the recent mining interests of Talon Mine corporation located in nearby Tamarack. At the heart of these environmental justice campaigns are the protection of water and manoomin and the upholding of tribal nation treaty rights. The Headwaters Hub consists of a collective of artists, organizers, activists, knowledge keepers, youth, elders and many Macalester students willing to dedicate their time and energy to the fight against extractive industries and the protection of sacred lands and waters in greater Minnesota. 

Macalester students have been invited up to the Headwaters Hub in Palisade located 2.5 hours north of the Twin Cities for a day-long excursion to learn more about their work and ways to get involved. Service asks will follow.

Saturday, October 7 12-3:30pm  

This last legislative session heralded major wins for environmental justice organizers across the Twin Cities but the fight is far from over. Roxxanne O’Brien is a long-time North Minneapolis community member and agitator and currently an Activist-in-Residence supported by the Macalester-Mellon funded initiative,  The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange . O’Brien co-founded  Community Members for Environmental Justice (CMEJ)  and has been fighting for more than a decade against extractive industries polluting the Northside and for greater community spaces as well as access to the Mississippi river. 

The Environmental Justice Tour of North Minneapolis is a place-based curriculum designed and co-hosted by Roxxanne and CMEJ team leaders who weave together art and activism based on their everyday lived experiences in North Minneapolis. The tour begins at Jxta Arts, a non-profit youth arts and education center, and co-collaborator/incubator for CMEJ campaigns, and moves to other community spaces, including the Terrell Mayes, Jr. Memorial Garden and industrial waste & development sites such as Northern Metals Recycling, GAF manufacturing, the Upper Harbor Terminal project, and the HERC waste incinerator. 

Macalester students are invited to connect and learn from Roxxanne O’Brien and CMEJ organizers about environmental justice in North Minneapolis. Service asks will follow. 

Tuesday, October 17 3-4:30pm

Join us for a campus chat with long-time northside community member and agitator, Roxxanne O’Brien. Over the course of this conversation we hope to learn from Roxxanne’s journey as an environmental justice organizer and about recent victories from the last state legislative session.

Roxxanne O’Brien is currently an Activist-in-Residence supported by the Macalester-Mellon funded initiative,  The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange . O’Brien co-founded Community Members for Environmental Justice and has been fighting for more than a decade against extractive industries polluting the northside and for greater community spaces as well as access to the Mississippi river. 

Saturday, October 21, 1-4 pm 

On May 25th, 2020, George Perry Floyd was murdered by members of the Minneapolis Police Department near the intersection of 38th St. and Chicago Avenue. People in the community and around the world came to the site of Floyd’s murder to mourn and pay their respects, bringing offerings and grieving the continued state violence perpetrated upon Black communities in Minnesota and across the United States. Thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets to protest; thousands more resisted and disrupted patterns of state violence by establishing mutual aid networks, forming political education groups, advocating for change at the ballot box, and fundraising for community alternatives to policing, among other tactics and practices.

Since the 2020 uprising, the George Floyd Global Memorial team has preserved offerings of plants and art, continues to care for the space, and has developed initiatives within the area to address long standing needs and reimagine community safety and care in South Minneapolis.

The George Floyd Square (GFS) Pilgrimage Journeys are guided by community members. Visitors are invited to position themselves in the sacred space to pay respect, grieve, and be inspired to pursue racial justice in their own lives. Guides share their own experiences, the stories behind offerings, and the ongoing fight for racial justice.

While the Fall 2024 engagements highlighted a few of many significant and ongoing environmental justice struggles in Minneapolis and Greater Minnesota, we originally planned for the Spring semester offerings to engage with St. Paul based community partners and struggles. 

Due to the shifts in leadership at the organizations, we shifted to bringing in community partners onto campus instead. Faculty, staff, and students across the Macalester community for many decades have built relationships with community members and organizers based primarily in the Midway/Rondo and East Side neighborhoods. These relationships are ongoing but shifted to a much longer timeline as both campus and community partners acknowledged their limited and shifting capacities this Spring. 

Our community engaged programming was reimagined as a speaker and event series based on campus. Engaged with Indigenous landback and restorying efforts along Haha Wakpa, the Mississippi River, we learned from Indigenous artists, cultural practitioners, scholars, and organizers from the Gulf to Bdote. This semester opened with Monique Verdin (Houma) visiting from Louisiana discussing her work in land recovery, sovereignty, and cultural projects along the Mississippi River. Dr. Vincente Diaz (Carolonian/Pohnpeian)  shares his work in ecological knowledge and canoe revitalization as part of new radical modes of knowledge production. Renowned Indigenous storytellers, Fern Renville, Sisseton Wahpeton-Seneca-Omaha, and Roger Fernandes, Lower Elwha S’Klallam-Makah, share stories as a form of teaching and learning. Our semester concludes with Stephanie Lindquist offering a sauna experience, Sweat Together: Health and Pleasure, as part of what she describes as “infrastructure of care”. We closed our year-long programming, in reflection and in community. 

Beyond tracing and naming the specific power relations that have and continue to actively diminish and expel Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and new immigrants people, world views and epistemologies, we argue for a radical environmental humanities approach that also must contend with ontologies and relationships with our more-than-human kin.  In 2018, Indigenous feminists Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy in a joint introduction for a special issue entitled,   Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water,  stressed this importance of water view: 

We argue for moving beyond studying the river as merely a site or object of knowledge towards a radical relationality with River as an ontological being. How are we accountable to River, to water view? What  have we learned from River? What does River continue to teach us about time, space, power and relationality? How will we continue this work with and for River from the frontlines and fencelines of environmental justice organizing here in Mni Sota Makoce?

Monday, January 29, 11:30am 

Monique Verdin (Houma), a transdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana will be talking about her recent land recovery, sovereignty, and cultural projects along the Mississippi River that seek to recognize and respect the interconnected and interdependent systems found in riparian and interface ecotones, from the coastal salt marshes where the bayous meet the Gulf of Mexico to the Northwoods of Minnesota.

Monique Verdin is a transdisciplinary artist and storyteller who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager. Monique is co-producer of the documentary My Louisiana Love and her work has been included in a variety of environmentally inspired projects, including the multi-platform performance Cry You One, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, and the collaborative book Return to Yakni Chitto: Houma Migrations.

Thursday, February 29, 12-1pm

In this talk, Vicente Diaz (Carolonian/Pohnpeian) will share theories, stories, images, and illustrations of how Native to Native relations in collaboration with cross disciplinary and even anti- disciplinary research around canoe revitalization, ecological knowledge, and social justice can lead to radical new modes of producing knowledge.

Vicente Diaz (he/him) is Distinguished University Teaching Professor and Waldfogel Scholar of the College Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Diaz is an interdisciplinary scholar (History, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Comparative and Global Indigenous Studies) who specializes in critical indigenous studies in North America and the Pacific Ocean region. He has researched and published in topics such as Indigenous Critical Theory; Traditional Outrigger Canoe Voyaging in Micronesia; Coloniality and Indigenous Christianity in Micronesia; Indigenous Masculinity and Sports in the Pacific; and Trans-Indigenous Theory and Practice.

Diaz is the Chair of the Department of American Indian Studies, and founder and director of The Native Canoe Program which uses traditional Indigenous watercraft and Indigenous water-based ecological knowledge and technology from across Oceania and the Native Great Lakes and Mississippi River to advance community-engaged research, teaching, and service. This program mixes hands-on, experiential learning and teaching with advanced visualization technologies of Virtual and Augmented Realities, through collaboration with UMN's Interactive Visualization Lab, headed by Prof. Daniel Keefe of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Tuesday, March 26, 5-7pm

Please join us at this special gathering as we share some of the stories whose paths crossed our paths as they make the journey our ancestors set them upon.

Storytelling is teaching. Storytelling is healing. 

Storytelling is a human way of teaching, learning, understanding and sharing philosophy. 

Generation after generation, our ancestors sent these stories to us so we can find the wisdom they developed and placed within the stories. 

It is said the stories come from the Earth itself and when we speak them, the moisture of our breath gives power and life to the story. The Stories are then, living things carrying the breath of our ancestors. 

And since they are alive, they change, from teller to teller, from generation to generation. And since all of us are storytellers, we must help the stories continue their journey.

Fern Naomi Renville (she/her) 

Sisseton Wahpeton-Seneca-Omaha 

Renville is a theater director, storyteller, teaching artist, and enrolled citizen of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, an eastern Dakota band of the Oceti Sakowin (the seven council fires of the great Sioux Nation), which recognizes our land base in accordance with the 1805, 1851, 1858, 1865, and 1868 Sioux treaties with the U.S. government. She is the great-granddaughter of Melinda Cayuga, a Seneca matriarch who exemplified the loving strength of the clan mothers. A long-time teaching artist in out-of-school spaces and former director of Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theatre and former director of SNAG Productions, a Seattle-based collective of Native artists committed to sharing traditional stories in contemporary settings. Renville is working on a Dakota youth theater company and works with many local organizations including Wakan Tipi Awanyakapi.

Roger Fernandes (he/him) 

Lower Elwha S’Klallam-Makah 

Fernandes is a member of the Lower Elwha Band of S’Klallam Indians. He is an artist, storyteller, and educator whose work focuses on the local Puget Salish tribes of western Washington. He is a member of the Lower Elwha S’Klallam Tribe and has a B.A. in Native American Studies from The Evergreen State College and an M.A. in Whole Systems Design from Antioch University. Fernandes has worked in a variety of arenas including Native education, social work, arts, and culture. As an artist he practices and teaches Coast Salish design and as a storyteller he shares storytelling as a foundational human process for teaching and healing. He has previously taught courses on storytelling and art at the University of Washington, Northwest Indian College, and other learning institutions. Fernandes currently lives in St. Paul, MN with his partner Fern Renville.

April 1-5, multiple sessions

As part of her residency with the Mississippi River Open School, Twin Cities artist, Stephanie Lindquist, hosted sauna sessions on campus and in North Minneapolis over the last two years. Her sessions, Sweat Together: Health & Pleasure, generates what she describes as infrastructures of care. Caring for the People, the land and waters often leads to burnout. Who cares for the protectors and defenders? Who cares for the caregivers? Collaborating with current Macalester students and alum, Stephanie offered a week of sauna sessions on campus. A few weeks prior she had also offered a week of sauna sessions at Terrell’s Garden. After witnessing the constant cycle of physical and psychic exhaustion of frontline organizing, Lindquist with guidance from community elders and knowledge keepers created this sauna series as a community offering and invitation. Deepening her relationship with plants and soil, Lindquist, an herbalist-in-training, merges her work with local plants and clay to create tinctures and scrubs for participants. The sauna series this year ran on campus outside the Law Warschaw Gallery and also at the Terrell Mayes Jr. Memorial Garden in North Minneapolis. 

Sweat Together: Health & Pleasure

Treat yourself and close colleagues to a couple of hours of sweating together. Physically, mentally, and emotionally detox what has accumulated inside that you no longer need. As a part of this experience your host will introduce you to a variety of plants that can support your respiratory, lymphatic, immune and digestive systems in and out of the sauna. They will include Calendula, Catnip, Chrysanthemum, Mullein, Sage, and a Fire Cider Shrub.

The sauna will be parked directly outside of the Law Warschaw Gallery and comfortably fits 4. The mobile sauna can accommodate larger groups that are willing to cycle in and out over the 2 hour window. It is equipped with a wood-burning stove and a small dressing room. 

Be sure to hydrate plenty the day prior, avoid drugs, and bring 2 towels, a mug, and a water bottle. When RSVPing be sure to include any allergies you or your guests may have, and remember to share the waiver with them too.

We look forward to hosting your sweat together,

Stephanie & Sara, Aisyah, Meira, and Nicola (student and alumni assistants)

Stephanie Lindquist 

Plants led me here to Mni Sota Makoce. I first felt the magic of picking beans for dinner in a city far from Minnesota. I find pleasure and respite with these plants, who I have learned communicate to us through their oils, awaken our senses, numb our pains, balance and support our bodily systems. My love for and awe of plants who so tenderly feed and heal us in incomprehensible ways compelled me to learn more and find others who recognize their gifts–cultural specialists, scientists, and herbalists. This land where the water reflects the clouds has blessed me with the chance to nixtamalize dent corn, roast dandelion roots, harvest fresh okra and potato greens to cook my mother’s dishes and soften my hair, smoke mullein, and spend more time outside acknowledging the gifts of all plants. I am grateful to live at this time in the land of Dakota and Anishinaabe who forthrightly tell the true history of this place despite settlers’ ongoing deceptions. For me Mni Sota is the prairie, forest, bog, lake, river, and garden in which I and many other newcomers try to listen closely to Indigenous leaders around us and tune our ears to all living beings. Thank you for the plant magic that you so passionately share, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Waheenee, Linda Black Elk, Sean Sherman, Mary Siisip Geniusz, Erica Fargione, Gregory Cajete, and so many others. What a privilege it is to learn how to observe the depths of plants’ power. 

To learn more about Stephanie and her work visit www.stephaniealindquist.com or follow her @StephLindquist on Instagram.