Minnesota Now

The 32nd annual Black Master Storytellers Festival kicks off Thursday at the Perpich Center for the Arts in Golden Valley.

It's organized by the Black Storytellers Alliance. This year’s festival features legendary storytellers Charlotte Blake Alston, Dr. Amina Blackwood Meeks, Dylan Prichett and more.

Host Melissa Townsend talks to festival director Vusumuzi Zulu about the festival, the making of a Master Storyteller and what makes a story great.

Click the audio player above to listen to the full episode. 

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We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here. 

Early voting in this year's midterm election begins Friday, September 23. After a surge in voter turnout among Indigenous Minnesotans in 2020, guest host Melissa Townsend talks with Nancy Beaulieu her outlook on turn out for this election. Beaulieu, who works for the environmental group M-N350, was instrumental in voter turnout in the 2020 election.

Kids are settling back into a school routine and, for some, that’s great. For others, it’s tough.

There are a lot of reasons kids don’t feel good in school. For some BIPOC students, it’s because they don’t feel included, they don’t feel treated fairly and they don’t feel safe to be themselves.

That’s tough emotionally and physically and can lead to academic struggles, too. So what can school staff and parents or caregivers do about that? We ask early childhood expert Dianne Haulcy.

If you’re a regular at a public library, you’ve probably noticed that public libraries are used for a lot more than checking out books these days. Libraries have a mission to serve the public but a lot of librarians have not been trained to do all that is asked of them.

In response, a number of public libraries have chosen to hire social workers to further support library patrons. Allison Carpenter is a social worker at the Rochester Public Library. She talked with Minnesota Now producer Ellen Finn about her role at the library.

Click the audio player above to listen to the full episode. 

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. 

A few decades ago, a person named Jean-Nickolaus Tretter in Little Falls, Minn., started collecting documents and objects related to LGBT culture and communities. They were concerned those artifacts might be lost to history and with them an understanding of the history of LGBT communities.

In 2000, that collection came to the University of Minnesota and it's now called the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies.

Producer Britt Aamodt was curious about the collection and she spoke with its new curator, Aiden Bettine.

The Tretter collection is an all LGBTQ or queer archives. We hold books, periodicals, magazines, journals and then personal collections, organizational records, and then other types of ephemera relating to queer life. So T-shirts, buttons, different types of posters, maybe some hats. So we're really about the materiality of LGBTQ life. We certainly prioritize the Twin Cities in Minnesota, but also collect broadly across the Midwest, the nation and internationally.

One that I'm kind of particularly fond of that I've found in the collection is actually the gay and lesbian postal employees network collection. I'm a big USPS enthusiast and avid correspondent, so I love mail. This postal employees network started in the Twin Cities in 1992, so 30 years ago, and it was for gay and lesbian postal employees who wanted to meet each other, but also advocate for their rights as federal employees locally in the Twin Cities.

And then in 1993, they went to the national march on Washington for gay and lesbian rights. Going to the march and meeting other LGBTQ postal employees turned into a national organization. And it looks like from reading their newsletters, they were advocating for things like domestic partnership benefits through USPS, working with different unions and associations, as well as an end to discrimination or harassment for same-sex attraction.

So again, we see a Minnesota first where the postal employees network started in the Twin Cities that really had a national effect until the early 2000s when it disbanded.

So there certainly were early collectors and I think Jean Tretter, the original curator and founder of this collection, is a great example of individuals who are kind of personally and privately collecting LGBTQ history, really, from the 1940s and probably a little earlier through today.

We have a lot of private or personal collectors that are building apartment archives and keeping records. But we don't see any kind of formal organizations, whether they're, you know, community archives, or become part of institutions like the Tretter collection, emerge until after gay liberation.

So we're looking at the early 1970s lesbian Herstory archives in Brooklyn, New York in 1974 who were one of the first in the U.S. to open their doors and collect lesbian history very intentionally. We have a few that opened in the 1980s, like the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago.

As you can see, through just some of that naming these places, they were in big urban cities and often on the coasts in San Francisco in New York. It really became the pinnacle of where we understand and come to know LGBTQ history. So I think that's why you see something like Jean Tretter’s collection moving to the University of Minnesota in 2000, as a kind of younger, more Midwestern-grown collection, although Jean was collecting well before the year 2000.

Everything has been kind of an independent grassroots effort by LGBTQ community members who may or may not be librarians or archivists by day, doing this work in their community historically, and intentionally on volunteer time may be unpaid. And that trend has really continued and I think it's because we as LGBTQ people, especially in the library in history, really are aware of whose history is being collected, and whose is not.

It was really evident to these early kind of ancestors of LGBTQ libraries and archives, that if nobody, if no other institutions, were going to collect LGBTQ history, we were going to lose it. So we're gonna lose the stories, the materials, the photographs, the memories, there's a lot of oral history projects around the country, including here at the Tretter that really do capture the lives and stories of everyday LGBTQ people. And we would lose this because other places don't essentially value it or prioritize it.

Or sometimes when you look in the archives and are trying to find LGBTQ people in their history, it's simply just not labeled that someone was part of the community. They're not identified as part of the community. They might have been a significant author, maybe a famous actor, or done something important their local community that got them into the archives, but it wasn't because of their queerness or their identity. And so they're kind of hard to find.

LGBTQ archives really make it easy to know that the material you're moving through and the people and organizations you're looking at are a part of the LGBTQ community and part of our history.

It was a really transformative moment in my in my personal life, but also in my career. So I'm originally from Milwaukee and went to undergrad and did a master's in Chicago. So I've been very, very much part of urban LGBTQ life in the Midwest for most of my like young adulthood as a teenager and then in my 20s.

So moving to Iowa City, I won't say it was a culture shock, but there was an evident absence of LGBTQ spaces to inhabit. It was really hard to find LGBTQ-owned and operated businesses, support groups, there was only one gay bar in town. And a lot of organizations, you either had to be an undergraduate student on campus or maybe affiliated with a church group.

For me, I went from urban spaces that had a lot of affordances for what it meant to be queer and trans and have time and space in community to a place that I knew there were LGBTQ people around me. But it was really hard for us to find each other. I think Iowa more broadly demanded building queer community space.

It is very similar to the Tretter, it is definitely smaller scale and a very young community archives. So there's a lending library and community space where things like queer threads or craft circle happen board game nights, book clubs and different meeting meeting groups. But then, on the archive side, there's a really intentional effort to collect Iowa's LGBTQ history and ensure that it's preserved across the state.

We received six gowns from a female impersonator named Sonne Teal who was active in the 1960s in North Dakota. These dresses were collected by Sonne's mother after she tragically died in a plane crash in 1966. That is just a really rich and beautiful collection to have these gowns from queer history before the 1970s.

There's too many areas I'd love to grow. Definitely the intentional efforts to collect Black, Indigenous and communities of color collections and history in the Twin Cities but also around the country and internationally.

As an urban-raised queer person, Iowa really opened my eyes to what it means to be in rural spaces and living out your LGBTQ life. I want to do more intentional collecting around rural life but also queer farmers.

Click the audio player above to listen to the full episode. 

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. 

Former Minneapolis police officer Thomas Lane was sentenced Wednesday morning to three years in prison for his role in George Floyd's death. He was one of the officers who held Floyd down on the pavement under the knee of Derek Chauvin.

We hear more about the sentencing from MPR News reporter Jon Collins.

Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis yesterday announced charges against 48 people in connection with what the Justice Department says is the nation’s largest COVID-19 fraud scheme.

Authorities say instead of feeding hungry families, the group behind "Feeding our Future" embezzled roughly $250,000 dollars through shell companies and spent it on things like travel, luxury goods, jewelry and property. Reporter Matt Sepic has been keeping up on the details and he tells us more.

Federal prosecutors in Minneapolis have charged 48 people in the nation's largest COVID-19 fraud scheme. We'll hear more about the charges and who they say was involved.

The United Nations designated today as the International Day of Peace — one woman shares her story about bringing international peace keeping efforts to Minnesota communities.

Most Minnesota voters say they have high confidence in the state's voting system but county officials are still hearing from election skeptics. We'll find out how they are securing our votes.

And an archive at the University of Minnesota is the Midwest's largest treasure trove of artifacts and documents in LGBT history. We talk with the collection's new curator.

The first day of early voting is Friday, September 23rd and there’s a lot of conversation about election integrity. How sure are we that our vote is being counted accurately? MPR reporter Kirsti Marohn speaks with guest host Melissa Townsend about what’s happening in some counties in greater Minnesota.

John Bargaard — the central character of Peter Geye’s new novel — possesses powerful muscle memory from his days as a ski jumper. He remembers the intensity of focus, the feeling of flying through the air, the shattered glass moment of landing.

But he’s just been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, and he faces the real prospect that his memories — and the secrets he harbors — will dim with his future.

That’s the launching point of “The Ski Jumpers,” Geye’s latest book. Like many of his earlier works, this one is set in Minnesota, with winter as a backdrop to many pivotal scenes. But unlike books like “Wintering” and “Northernmost,” this one is personal.

MPR News host Kerri Miller talks with Geye about what makes “The Ski Jumpers” so intimate to him on a special Big Books and Bold Ideas. Hear why this book took decades for Geye to write, how his own history of ski jumping inspired him and why the central questions of this book are the gateway to Geye’s truest religion.

Guest:

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