North Star Journey MPR News

The Minneapolis American Indian Center's two-year renovation is now complete. The redesign reflects both a sense of belonging and history and showcases ways the Minneapolis Indigenous community embraces its future. 

The happy chatter of excited visitors filled a large rotunda inside the center as executive director Mary LaGarde walked through the crowd to greet guests at a soft opening held last Thursday. 


“It’s just really exciting for all of us — for community and just for everyone who has been involved in the project all along,” said LaGarde. 

The center’s renovation cost $32.5 million and is the result of a decade-long process to bring people back into the center. 

Located on East Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis, the center provides social services to the urban Native community and has served as a central gathering place — a place for boxing matches, basketball tournaments, powwows, conferences and more. 


Over the years, the building showed signs of aging. Water dripping through the roof had become a steady stream inside the center the year before renovation. 

Through a series of community listening sessions, LaGarde and her staff acknowledged the center was underutilized and needed repairs, so they began planning the organization’s future.

At the soft opening, elected leaders, civic leaders and community supporters applauded Mary LaGarde for her work in securing the necessary funding for the renovation. The center’s board of directors and staff honored LaGarde with a star quilt for her dedication and leadership.  


Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan was among the elected leaders who honored LaGarde’s work. 

“This long-awaited grand opening sets the bar where it should rightfully and always be, because we are worthy and deserving of capital investments,” said Flanagan.  

The expansion added 20,000 square feet to the building, for a total of over 66,000 square feet. The organization also expects the building to support 10,000 visitors a year, according to a fact sheet released by a spokesperson for the center.


The heart of the community 
Architect Sam Olbekson said he was a 4-year-old kid living in the neighborhood when he attended the center’s first grand opening in 1975. 

Today, Olbekson serves as chair of the organization’s board of directors. As an architect working in collaboration with several partners, he helped to redesign the building to reflect the community’s cultural identity. 


Just before the community gathered in a conference room for the afternoon’s program, Olbekson stood inside the center’s large, drum-shaped rotunda. He spoke to MPR News about how the rotunda’s design speaks to the community’s cultural identity. 

“It’s intended purpose is to be the heart of the facility where people gather. It’s off the new main entry. Every public space from the building opens up from the space.” 

He said all the center’s public spaces, including the new café, the gymnasium and fitness center, the art gallery and meeting spaces and conference rooms are all visible from the rotunda. 


The center welcomes visitors through a main entrance through glass doors and a large bank of windows. The rotunda, along with other features, opens up to the street and, according to Olbekson, is intended to assert an urban Native American presence on Franklin Avenue. 

“We put this as a prominent form on the outside of the building too. This curved space has its expression on the outside,” said Olbekson. “So, people know the space is here, and it’s for them, and they’re welcome.”  


There is also an emphasis on activities for youth and elders. The gym, along with a new teen tech center, will be used by youth for recreation and learning. Overlooking the gym is a new dining area for elders who eat lunch together daily at the center. 

The refurbished gym is dedicated to the memory of the late Frances “Frannie” Fairbanks, the center’s form

At a dance studio in Minneapolis recently, Leila Awadallah reflected on what Mizna means to her. 

“When I found Mizna, that’s when I unlocked this portal into this beautiful world of Arab Americans and of stories from countries that I longed to know deeper,” Awadallah said. 

The choreographer and dancer is half white, half Palestinian and grew up in South Dakota. 

She’s one of the many artists who say they’ve found a place of belonging and cultural connection through Mizna.


Kathy Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh founded Mizna in the late ‘90s as a platform for contemporary literature, film, art and cultural production — highlighting the work of Arab, Southwest Asian and North African, or SWANA artists.

Its cornerstone event is the annual Arab Film Festival. 

As the organization marks its 25th anniversary in the Twin Cities, Haddad looks back on what motivated her to start it all. 

“I wanted to see stories about our experience, about my experience. I read, and was inspired by Asian American writers, African American writers and lots of writers. And I didn’t see any Arab American writers,” Haddad said.


Mizna Executive and Artistic director Lana Barkawi is Palestinian and joined the organization in 2011. She says the organization has played a critical role in connecting creatives to their cultural identity.

“The things that motivated the establishment of the organization still hold true today that we exist in a cultural context that marginalizes us and really, you know, boxes us into stereotyped ideas of who we are,” Barkawi said. 

Since its founding, Mizna, the Arabic word for ‘a desert cloud that holds the promise of rain,’ has featured more than a thousand Arab and SWANA writers in its literary journal both locally and internationally. 


One of those writers is Marlin M. Jenkins — a half Lebanese, half Black writer and high school English teacher who’s been published by Mizna.

“I think Mizna has really helped me find that I think there’s a lot of what I have learned about myself and about the world of what it means to be from Southwest Asia that wasn’t able to come from my immediate family. A lot of that comes through the arts, especially through writing and poetry,” Jenkins said. 

Awadallah says she was visiting family in the Palestinian town of Beit Jala in the occupied West Bank in October but had to leave and come back to the U.S. 


She says she feels her body is still in her ancestral land. A recent performance for Mizna helped connect her to the part of herself that’s still in Palestine. 

“My body started coming back and my voice started coming back and I was held by the Mizna community and so many others, the room was so full of people who are just ready, you know, to sob and to let the feelings be real together,” Awadallah said.

Barkawi says times have been exceptionally tough for the organization and its artists. 

“Well, you know, we’re marking our anniversary, and it feels difficult to be in a very celebratory mood because we’re witnessing a shattering and grotesque cruelty in Gaza,” she said.


Her hope is that she no longer feels the need to emphasize a heightened importance of the organization’s work. 

“We’re more than our traumas, we’re more than the portrayals of us,” Barkawi said.

She says the goal is to reclaim narratives and tell stories without always responding to tragedy, and to create an unburdened place for artists to create work on their own terms. 

As a child in Georgia, Reatha Clark King picked cotton for $6 a day to help her family make ends meet. Then, buoyed on the hopes and expectations of her family and church, she blazed a trail from a one-room schoolhouse in the segregated South to college.  

She pushed past gender and racial barriers as a Black woman to become a research chemist in the 1960s, contributing to NASA’s moon landing. She went on to become a college dean, university president and a philanthropist and a vice president of a major corporation.  

Earlier this week, she was honored at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota with a reception and celebration of her recent biography, “Find a Trail or Blaze One.”  

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with Minnesota trailblazer Reatha Clark King about her life.

Guest:  

Reatha Clark King worked as a research chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. In the 1960s. She moved to Minnesota to become president of Metropolitan State University from 1977 to 1988. She was a vice president of General Mills Corporation and president and executive director of the General Mills Foundation until she retired in 2002. Her biography “Find a Trail or Blaze One” was published in 2021.  

In Korea, people often get together for kimjang, a gathering to make large batches of kimchi, the traditional spicy fermented cabbage delicacy.

Recently, I joined about a dozen people gathered for kimjang at a house in south Minneapolis. Unlike traditional kimjang, most of the participants were complete strangers, albeit with a shared interest in kimchi. 

We rolled up our sleeves, pulled on gloves and got to work on the 14 cabbages at our disposal. 


The process is labor-intensive: we tore each cabbage in half and salted them all. Then we set them aside to let the salt draw the water out of the leaves.  

Next, we chopped vegetables and mixed them into the seasonings. And, of course, the fun part is done by hand. I could feel the heat from the thick spicy paste seep through my gloves as I churned the aromatic mixture in  the bowl. 

To Koreans, kimjang represents the spirit to survive tough times. You make yourself resilient. 

Neighbors would make kimchi together then store it for  the long harsh winter ahead. Without this preserved food, they wouldn’t survive. Nowadays, kimjang is usually a family affair. Of course, Kimchi is available in Minnesota grocery stores. But it can get pricey. 


Our south Minneapolis kimjang host was Douglas Choi. He started making his own kimchi as an experiment during the COVID-19 years. Post-pandemic, he wanted to get to know his community. He decided to ask strangers via social media to come to his house and make kimchi together.

Choi, 39, said newer generations are putting their own spin on some Korean traditions, including kimjang. 

“You get to form new contexts around that practice, and hold onto some of the things, but it just evolves,” he said. “I’m happy that had happened. And, I’m happy that we were able to kind of get that to work and I’m excited to sort of see where this goes.”


While I make kimchi, I think of my family: Halmoni, my grandma, and Umma, my mom, made kimchi together in big metal bowls, just like the ones in this south Minneapolis home. They’d feed my brother and me pieces straight from the bowl. 

I find it comforting making this dish with complete strangers new to kimjang.  

Everyone in the room has their own reasons for taking part. 

Vaughn Powell came with her friend, Alicia Jackson. Powell finds the communal act rejuvenating. 


“I was excited to see what it was like because I do a lot of cooking on my own, but I do it by myself as my own meditative process,” Powell, 32, said. “So, I was interested to see what it would be like to do that with other people. That’s not something that I’ve experienced before.”

Standing by her side, Jackson, 36, said kimchi and other fermented foods sometimes get a bad rap. 

“But, I think that age does something really, really inspiring to food,” she said. “Transforming it from what it was to what it could be. And I’m a big, big fan of what that becomes.”


Across the room, Tony Muras-Scherber, 32, helps another group make kimchi. He and his brother are Korean adoptees. 

Making kimchi, Muras-Scherber said, is an act of reconnection. Plus, he loves the taste. 

“It kind of brings us a little bit more close to our culture and our heritage,” he said. “Doing these types of things, making Korean food and trying different Korean dishes that we normally would not have here in Minnesota and the Midwest.”


After a couple of hours the salted cabbage is limp and ready for seasoning. Powell washes every leaf under running water to remove the remaining salt. Then we coat each one with the spicy seasonings.

Finally we squash the precious, multi-colored mush into the kimchi jars, and seal them.

Everyone takes a moment to admire the swirling hues of red and orange in the freshly-made kimchi, with Choi comparing it to “the whole galaxy.”


The next part of the process is to let it ferment in the fridge for a couple of weeks. 

I find out later that there may have

As parents, we teach our children how to move through the world. But as our children grow older, we learn from them, too.

That relationship can grow into a real partnership and friendship — and a positive support system pushing each other to be better and do better.

Our next Power Pair is a good example of that transition: Mother-daughter duo Rose McGee and Roslyn Harmon.

It’s part of our new series on the show about prominent Minnesotans you may know about individually, but who also have a close relationship.

Guests:

Rose McGee is President and Founder of the Sweet Potato Comfort Pie organization, which brings people together for hope, healing and dialogue around race. She’s also a facilitator, author and recent Bush Fellow.

Roslyn Harmon is the mayor of Golden Valley — the first Black person to hold that position. She is also an educator, counselor and ordained pastor.

Cherise Ayers was president of the student council at Central High School in St. Paul in the late 1990s. Two years ago, the St. Paul native returned to Central in a very different leadership role: as principal.

Central is the oldest high school in Minnesota, founded in 1866. Known for strong academics, it was one of the first schools in the state to offer an international baccalaureate diploma program.

Its graduates, including Ayers’ classmate St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, have gone on to be prominent leaders in business, education, sports and politics.  

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with Ayers about returning to lead her alma mater, her vision for the school and what it’s like to follow in the footsteps of longtime Central High School principal Mary Mackbee, who retired in 2019.

Guest:  


Cherise Ayers was named principal of Central High School in St. Paul in 2022. She graduated from Central in 1997 and holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Spelman College and a master’s degree in secondary education and teaching from Brown University. A lifelong educator, she’s worked as a middle and high school English teacher in Georgia and Minnesota, as dean of students for Richfield Public Schools, as an assistant principal in St. Paul Public Schools and as an equity supervisor and interim principal for the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District.





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