Star Tribune
New U.S. ambassador to Haiti has held to Minnesota roots through many far-flung posts
Roving U.S. envoy Dennis Hankins’s diplomatic career has carried him from a Bemidji childhood to postings around the world.
Though he hasn’t lived in Minnesota for nearly half a century, Hankins said he always declares it to be his current home state each time the White House sent his name to the Senate for nomination.
“The first time I was nominated for ambassador about eight years ago, going to Guinea, you do an extensive interview with a lawyer from the White House, and he was talking about background,” Hankins said. “He said, ‘You seem to have an attachment to Minnesota. So, you know, so when they nominate you, they say, Dennis Hankins of state. You know, you don’t have to put where you pay your taxes. If you got an emotional attachment to Minnesota, just say Minnesota.'”
The 1977 Bemidji High School graduate abided by this advice: “The three times I’ve been nominated as ambassador, I’ve cited Minnesota.”
The Senate confirmed Hankins last week as U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, a nation badly wracked by gang violence and struggling to find enough political footing to allow its citizens to choose their owner leaders.
Hankins moved to Bemidji as a boy in the early 1960s. The family had been living overseas, where his father was working for Esso on oil refinery projects, but chose to return to his mother’s hometown in pursuit of a more stable educational experience for Hankins and his older brother.
Hankins credits his upbringing and public education in Bemidji as building blocks for his many decades in the Foreign Service in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.
“I did competitive speech [in high school], so they had contemporaneous speaking, which turned out to be a good foundation for my future work,” he said. “It’s like, ‘OK, here’s the topic. You’ve got five minutes to get ready to talk about it.”
While a high school sophomore, Hankins took a trip on his own to France, where his father was working on an oil refinery project.
“But he was really busy,” Hankins said, “so as a 14-year-old, I did a Eurail pass through Europe. On a train ride between Vienna and Denmark, I happened to meet an American diplomat, a Foreign Service officer, and that’s the first time I ever heard about the State Department.
“I figured, ‘Ah, that sounds interesting: overseas, and I don’t have to be that good at math and science.’ “
After high school, Hankins got degrees at Georgetown University and the National War College.
Hankins, 64, spoke fondly of his Bemidji memories: sledding, pond hockey, taking walks in the forest and riding his bike 10 miles one way to a friend’s resort.
Doing those types of things, he said, “gives you a real good grounding, that Minnesota ethic I’ve seen over the years. Every time you run into a Minnesotan in a professional setting overseas, they are always hardworking, trying to do their job well.”
While ambassador in Guinea, he said, “we had a big, robust Peace Corps operation. And once we had 20 new volunteers come in of which 12 were either from Minnesota or Wisconsin. That’s still, I think, reflective of that social engagement that you see over the years. … I think that’s still a little in my psyche.”
Looking ahead to working and making a difference in Haiti, Hankins said he has always seized on the challenges of working in places suffering unrest and uncertainty.
It’s in those hotspots, he said, “where a foreign diplomat can actually affect the country, and you have pretty fast feedback. Sometimes it’s as simple as you open the door to hear gunfire or not hear gunfire. If you don’t hear gunfire, you probably did a good job today.”
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
