Residents of Minneapolis continue to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown this week.
Native American leaders have been a key component of that resistance.
Stewart Huntington is the director of video journalism at ICT, formerly Indian Country Today. He lives in Carbondale and traveled to his hometown of Minneapolis last month.
Huntington spoke to Aspen Public Radio’s Sage Smiley about his recent report on Indigenous organizing.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Sage Smiley: You spent a week in Minneapolis. Tell us about that.
Stewart Huntington: I went back to Minneapolis in large measure to go and check in with the urban Native community there. It's a really vibrant — perhaps the country's most vibrant — urban Native community. And I had been in touch with members of that community before I went, and the people there had organized really quickly. They came together really cohesively, gathering supplies for frontline activists and for families scared to go outside for fear of being caught up in the immigration raids.
Smiley: And what did you find when you were there on the ground?
Huntington: You know what, the the entire feeling in that city was was really profound to go back and feel that. What I didn't know from talking to people on the phone or reading about — every point of purchase, coffee shop, a bookstore, a hardware store, there were bowls of whistles that said, "Take one, free." Didn't say, "Take this out and follow the immigration officials around and blow the whistle to alert the community." It just said, "Take one, free." Really moving and startling was was to see the burrito stores locked. You had to knock on the door to be let in. And [a] real sense of fear in the community, but a real sense of community cohesion, and that was particularly poignant in the Native community.
Smiley: Tell us more about that. How did you see that cropping up in this urban Native community in Minneapolis?
Huntington: Okay, Franklin Avenue is the heart of the urban Native community in South Minneapolis, and at right in the center there is the Powwow Grounds coffee shop, one of the great names of a coffee shop in the entire country, Powwow Grounds. The coffee shop, transformed itself from being a place to get coffee and snacks to a communication hub — a distribution hub — a collection point for goods and supplies. The community started a fire as a warming hut and as a healing process, a fire going almost 24 hours a day outside of the coffee shop. The community really came together in a strong, cohesive way.
Smiley: Minneapolis is a flash point in this broad nationwide pushback on federal law enforcement tactics recently. How do you see what's happening, what you saw on the ground in Minneapolis extending to this region, where you live?
Huntington: Okay, well, we see people putting up signs. We see people out protesting, "No ICE" placards. Minneapolis feels to me like the center of this notion that the pushback against this federal immigration law enforcement crackdown has to come from the communities. States and local law enforcement are hindered in many ways from responding, but the community in Minneapolis is standing up very, very strongly, and we're seeing that at that example spread. It's going on right now in Portland, Maine. And what was really exciting for me to see in Minneapolis was that that community effort is being led by the strong Native community in that town.
One thing that the Indigenous leaders that I spoke with mentioned repeatedly was that Indigenous communities and nations in this country are no strangers to standing up to federal oppression, federal pushback, federal policies that adversely affect the community, and that's putting it gently. They see themselves as being in a place to provide leadership to the broader community that is maybe for the first time seeing and experiencing this kind of federal pressure.
Smiley: Absolutely. Well, thanks for joining us Stewart.
Huntington: Thank you for having me.
Read or listen to Stewart Huntington's report from Minneapolis here.
