Arts & Culture

For white Americans, the discovery of children's bodies in unmarked graves near Indian residential schools is awful - but not a surprise.

But again, for white Americans, this may be the first time they've heard of residential schools, even though Johnson says, "When any group of Indians is asked who had relatives taken, every single hand goes up."

No one asked the 19th century farmers how hard it was to harvest their crops on that day in 1888, but painting the scene apparently took an awful lot out of Vincent Van Gogh:

This Saturday women artists take the spotlight at  Woman-Made: Marvelous Things Made by Northland Women

In anticipation of the 2021 Bayfront Reggae Festival coming up on July 17, Caribbean Roots host David Woodward spoke with Cat Coore of Third World, who will be performing. The Jamaican band is one of the longest-running reggae bands of all time, forming in 1973.  Coore shares talks about his experiences as a founding member of the band and as part of Jamaica's reggae scene and how he's seen the music evolve.

Imagine a couple of college kids, out in the middle of the night, trying to figure out how to catch loons.

Fraternity pledging, Northern Minnesota-style?

Actually: grad-school project.

Jim Paruk joins us this morning to share the story of how one night's work helping out a friend set the course of his life.

Daniel Oyinloye is a Nigerian-Born creative who moved to Minnesota in 2003. He operates DanSan Creatives where he is a producer and filmmaker but has also started his own musical project Seyi Stories which performs at Glensheen's Music on the Pier the same evening as this interview.

Phil Fitzpatrick and John Herold wanted people educated - and fired up to take action - about climate change.

They took an unconventional approach: engender action through ... poetry.

Kirsten Aune Textiles will host a fashion show on Saturday, July 17th, featuring apparel made from Aune's hand-printed fabrics, paired with shoes crafted by Candace Lacrosse of Hemlocks Leatherworks and earrings crafted by Hattie Peterson of Tumbled Hearts Design.

Sigurd Olson is kind of a hero around here.  From his work to establish the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park, helping draft the Wilderness Act of 1962, to the founding of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute and his teaching at what is now Vermilion Community College, Olson influenced the world with his writing and activism on behalf of the natural world.

Three of Minnesota's finest poets - Joyce Sutphen, Connie Wanek, and Thom Tammaro - offered poetic commentary on life in the time of climate change during the most recent episode of Climate Emergency Poetry.

And Connie Wanek channeled another one when she read a piece from the late Louis Jenkins, and offered one of her own, Old Duluth, that she wrote about her friend.

Linda LeGarde Grover has turned her hand to telling some old stories in her latest book, Gichigami Hearts
Stories and Histories from Misaabekong: some imagined, some from her family's history.

In part, she says, because she's come to believe "we're reliving the old-time stories every day."

UMD student Hooriya Habib is at home with her family in Qatar, but she's getting ready to return to Duluth at the end of August.

Hooriya speaks English and Arabic as well as Urdu, a language she says draws from other Arabic languages and that's called the lingua franca of Pakistan.

She chose to share a poem by Sir Muhammed Iqbal, sometimes called "the spiritual father of Pakistan," that she finds uplifting, even as she confesses, "I'm not a really good Muslim."

Perfect Duluth Day turns 18 tomorrow.

It can get a tattoo,  a license to be an auctioneer, vote, marry without parental consent, buy cigarettes, possess a stun gun, and buy lottery tickets in Minnesota.

  But one thing it's been doing all along is drawing attention to art and artists, and Annie Dugan thinks that's just grand.

Read about the Frank Lloyd House that used to be in Cloquet and is now in Pennsylvania, and find out more about the one and only gas station the famous architect designed.

Karen Diver knows there's a certain amount of backstory  non-Native people need to understand where tribal communities are now and how they got there.  And that a lot of that backstory is grim.

But it's not the whole story.  And she's excited about using traditional knowledge  and formerly thriving Native communities to bring solutions to modern-day problems like climate change.