Star Tribune
Fond du Lac Band commemorates new cemetery after graves desecrated in road project
DULUTH — In 2017, yards from the site of an important Ojibwe treaty signing nearly 200 years earlier, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) disturbed Native American burial grounds as it worked to build a new bridge in Duluth’s westernmost neighborhood.
On Friday, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa commemorated the completion of nearly five years of painstaking recovery efforts, in which more than 125 of its citizens and others sifted earth by hand to find remains of their ancestors. About 200 people gathered at Chambers Grove Park near the newly defined cemetery, which includes the desecrated burial grounds. It was a day to honor the work, offer closure and spend time in prayer. A long line of attendees snaked through the park, waiting to offer tobacco to a crackling fire.
Tribal Chairman Kevin Dupuis told the crowd that the work done to find and protect the deceased was hard on those who undertook it.
“You have to understand what they went home with every day was powerful,” he said. “What they had to deal with was powerful.”
MnDOT began work on replacing the Mission Creek bridge without consulting the Fond du Lac, stopping a couple of weeks after the band learned of the project from a local historian, Christine Carlson. Days later, human remains were found in the dirt already excavated. It wasn’t the first time bodies were unearthed in the same area, where Anishinaabe had settled along the St. Louis River since the 1600s. Bodies found during railroad construction in 1869 were reburied at Roussain Cemetery in Jay Cooke State Park. Construction of Highway 23 also led to a cemetery disturbance in 1937.
Many Fond du Lac members are only four generations removed from those buried on the hill, about a block from the river, said Vern Northup, a citizen of the band.
“This location had everything they needed,” he said, pointing to the river. “Food, fresh waterways, all the game they wanted. This was paradise for the Ojibwe.”
With so much documented history, it’s hard to accept that the state agency failed to consult with the tribe, he said, and it still feels “raw” to many.
“It’s trauma, added onto trauma, added onto trauma. We are starting to get some closure, and this is a big step,” Northrup said.
A construction project meant to cost about $2 million ballooned to a current estimate of $24.6 million, including recovery work and costs for the bridge that has yet to be built. It will be constructed in the same area in 2024, but work will avoid the cemetery. Fond du Lac will be involved.
“You can never correct the wrong of excavating the cemetery, but our goal was to do what we could to make it right,” said Duane Hill, district engineer for the department’s northeastern Minnesota office.
The desecration happened because of “a gap” in MnDOT’s processes, Hill said, and today, it has a clear plan for coordinating with tribal governments. MnDOT now also works with tribal monitors, who oversee projects and stop work in real time if a bone is found. Fond du Lac now employs 17 cultural monitors working throughout the state. Skye Northbird, who spent three years on the Highway 23 project, is one of them.
“I wanted to bring my people home,” she said, and that work led to a more permanent calling. She now monitors projects for companies throughout the region.
“I see changes,” Northbird said. “It’s not always easy, but there is a change, and it’s why I like being out there — to make sure it happens.”
As for the Fond du Lac neighborhood, a new, park-like cemetery lined with a stone wall along Highway 23 is nearly finished, and the band is now caretaker of that land.
The years of difficult collaboration with state agencies taught lessons to the band, said Roger M. Smith, a member of the tribal council.
“What we did was for Fond du Lac, but most importantly, it was for Indian Country,” he said, as tribes that navigate similar desecrations can learn from them.
The commemoration day was chosen to align with the 168th anniversary of the signing of the 1854 Treaty and a day of remembrance for those who were victims or survivors of Native American boarding schools.
Indigenous graves aren’t protected the way others are, Dupuis said, but all human beings have in common final ceremonies “to send our people home” to their resting places.
That’s not what happened here, he said.
“For 530 years we’ve been told to stand by, [were[ set aside, pushed over, stepped over for progress,” Dupuis said. “Hopefully … we can say we’re not going to be disturbed anymore.”
Star Tribune
Celebrity chef Justin Sutherland gets two years of probation for threatening girlfriend
According to the criminal complaint:
Police were twice called on June 28 to an apartment in the 800 block of Front Avenue. During the first call, a woman told officers that everything was fine despite previously reporting that Sutherland had choked her and tried kicking her out of the apartment.
During the second call about 90 minutes later, the woman told police that Sutherland had briefly squeezed her neck with both hands, said “I want you dead,” pointed a gun at her and hit her in the chest with it, and at one point said he would shoot her if she came back after running off. Officers then arrested Sutherland.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Alex Chhith contributed to this story.
Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.
Changes come in the wake of a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches, due to a lack of personnel rather than bad behavior.
In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.
The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parent visits and other privileges to children in their custody.
“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors. “Programming is only cancelled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”
In a Dec. 4 email to the County Board, Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of Hennepin’s Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured elected officials that they had begun taking corrective actions but asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.
Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when multiple correctional officers were sitting in a nearby office. She explained that, during the dates of the inspection earlier this fall, several officers observed in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.
She also contended that while programming has been modified by staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques, or restrictive procedures.”
Tired of surging gun violence across St. Paul, community leaders and police are asking residents to help create a safer city.
The call for community support came Thursday night when officials from the St. Paul NAACP, St. Paul Police Department, Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and the African American Leadership Council gathered at Arlington Hills Lutheran Church to talk about ways to decrease gun violence in the city.
St. Paul has recorded 30 homicides so far this year according to a Star Tribune database, two fewer than last year. But four of this year’s homicides happened in the same week, frustrating law enforcement and alarming residents.
St. Paul NAACP President Richard Pittman Sr. said that solutions to gun violence are “right here, in the room.” But without the community’s help, Pittman said their efforts could fall short.
“Over the last several weeks and months, we have experienced an uptick in violent crimes in our communities. [That’s] turned on a light bulb that it’s time [to] not have the police feeling like all the pressure is on them,” Pittman said. “Nobody wants to the responsibility of having to shoot someone down in the street. Nobody wants the responsibility of hurting somebody’s family. We all want the best outcome.”
Attendee Carrie Johnson worried generational trauma is derailing youth’s behavior, adding that she’s seen boys in middle school punch girls in the face. Migdalia Baez said mothers living along Rice Street feel they have nowhere to turn for help in redirecting their children. Some worry that their child would be incarcerated if they ask for help.
Larry McPherson, a violence interrupter for 21 Days of Peace St. Paul, said some issues stem from youth with no guidance. McPherson and others patrol hot spots for crime across the city, including near the Midway neighborhood’s Kimball Court apartments where fentanyl drove a spike in robberies and drug violations.
“We’ve got a lot of mental health [struggles]. We’ve got a lot of doggone drug addiction that’s going on in our neighborhoods. We all got the best interests at hand for all people in our community, but we’re just not working fast enough,” McPherson said. “Until we get feet on the ground, people coming out of their own community and standing up for this real cause to take back the community, we’re going to have the same outcome.”
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