Star Tribune
A Hmong’s family journey takes them to the banks of Plum Creek
WALNUT GROVE, MINN. – Gao Vang smiles shyly as a woman in a pioneer-style floral dress approaches her ticket counter on a rainy afternoon, hoping to learn about a young girl who lived in a little house on the prairie here 150 years ago.
Vang works a summer job at the gift shop of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, a veritable mecca of Americana. She hands the woman and her family their tickets and directs them toward the exhibits — the covered wagon, the little red school house and memorabilia from the Hollywood stars in the “Little House on the Prairie” TV show.
Vang, a 14-year-old Hmong American girl, said she loves talking to these visitors who come to her small town in rural Minnesota from all over the world — from Japan, from France, from across America. Later this week, celebrities from the 1970s TV show will arrive in Walnut Grove for the 50th anniversary celebration, including cast members such as Dean Butler and Alison Arngrim, who played the antagonistic Nellie Oleson.
They make the pilgrimage here for Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the series of now-famous books, fictionalized but based on her life on the frontier, that made Walnut Grove famous. Vang is a fan of the books, she said, with its themes on the importance of family and self-sufficiency.
In the books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family comes to Walnut Grove as her father searches for a parcel of fertile land. Charles Ingalls brought the family from Wisconsin to New Ulm, Minn., which he thought was too crowded, a town history says. He decided to keep moving, bringing his family to Walnut Grove, where he purchased a sod dugout on the banks of Plum Creek.
A century and a half later, Gao Vang’s family, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, would come to Walnut Grove in search of a better life, as part of a story that echoes the town’s past and present.
Journey to Plum Creek
Her father, Ger Vang, brought his family to Walnut Grove after a long journey that began in Laos more than 40 years ago.
Ger Vang is 57, although he is unsure of his exact age. Memories of his youth visibly pain him. Death and bombings is how he describes it. During the Cold War, the U.S. secretly armed Hmong militias in Laos to fight communists in southeast Asia. Then U.S. forces withdrew in 1973, leading to massacres of those who helped them. Ger Vang wound up in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to America as part of a wave of immigration in 1982, supported by Lutheran church organizations.
He arrived in St. Paul as a teenager with little understanding of English, Ger Vang recalled. In the coming years, he’d get a job driving elders in the Hmong community to their doctor appointments and translating for them. He’d meet his wife, Ka Ying Yang, and they’d have eight children together.
But the pair wanted to raise their children somewhere quieter than in St. Paul. They feared their children would follow the path of other Hmong teens by dropping out of school or joining gangs. Ger Vang feared he escaped the violence back home only to find another kind of danger in America. He said he asked friends and relatives where the family should go. They told him to go to Walnut Grove.
Somewhere safe
Walnut Grove saw an influx of Hmong residents in the early 2000s. Only one person was listed as being solely of Asian descent in 2000, but that number would jump to 305 a decade later, according to an account of the Hmong community by local historian Daniel Peterson.
Today the town of about 734 residents is 43% Asian and 22% foreign born, according to the latest census data from 2022. Walnut Grove has a Hmong grocery store on Main Street, with a mural on the side depicting Laura Ingalls Wilder and a Hmong girl in traditional attire.
The Hmong families that first came to Walnut Grove, like Ger Vang, said they were drawn by inexpensive real estate and a desire to raise their children somewhere safe.
Gao’s mother, Ka Ying Yang, 43, is a paraprofessional at the local school. When the Hmong community first moved to Walnut Grove in the early 2000s, there were a few reported incidents of frostiness by longtime residents, including an anonymous letter that suggested that the newcomers should leave.
But Yang said the town has welcomed her family since they arrived in 2018. “I feel safe here. Everyone knows each other,” she said.
Not all of her children like the small-town feel of Walnut Grove. The second-oldest child, Mau Vang, 15, said he misses the family’s home in St. Paul, where there were more people and more things to do. Many children of the original Hmong families who moved here in the early 2000s have left for larger cities for school or better work, a dynamic that has bedeviled many rural communities.
Gao Vang, for her part, said she likes how everyone knows each other in Walnut Grove. She said she’s encountered some racist teasing by other schoolchildren. But when this happens, she has friends who can talk with her in the Hmong language, she said.
She plans to enroll in a Hmong language program at school next year and hopes one day to be an emergency medical technician and save lives.
On any given day, Ger Vang can be found puttering in his garden 5 miles outside town, past the dugout where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family once lived. Well-known around town as a good gardener, he and his children this year are growing squash, cucumber, cilantro, eggplant and corn, which they sell at farmer’s markets across southwest Minnesota.
Not many Hmong residents participate in Little House on the Prairie events in Walnut Grove, such as an annual pageant or this weekend’s 50th anniversary cast reunion.
Gao Vang’s parents said they’re proud that their daughter works at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum.
Her mother hopes she can be an example for others in the Walnut Grove Hmong community. “Hopefully, it will inspire more Hmong people to join in,” Yang said.
Ger Vang joked that he is happy that his daughter makes more money at her part-time summer job than he did at full-time jobs when he first came to America.
“I just say I’m lucky I come to the right country, you know?” Ger Vang said. “The best country in the world.”
Star Tribune
Man charged in shooting, armed standoff with police at south Minneapolis apartment building
A 40-year-old man was charged Thursday with three felony assault counts for allegedly shooting up his south Minneapolis apartment building last weekend, prompting a standoff with police before an officer shot and disarmed him.
According to the criminal complaint, Nathan Mellstrom Matz fired numerous shots with an AK-47 rifle sometime before 4:30 a.m. Saturday at the apartment building, in the 4000 block of Minnehaha Avenue in the Longfellow community. Several 911 calls summoned the police, who evacuated residents before finding Matz in a stairwell holding the rifle.
An officer gave Matz a minute and 20 seconds to drop the gun before firing a single shot at him. The suspect was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where he was expected to survive his wound. No one else was injured in the episode.
One resident told police he heard gunfire, stepped out in the hall and ran back into his apartment when he saw the gunman down the hall, who fired and nearly hit him. Another resident said he heard gunshots through his floor and found bullet holes there. A homeowner across the street said her house was hit by bullets and that she believed it was targeted during the shooting.
Matz is charged with three counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, but prosecutors may seek an aggravated sentence because, among other things, the shooting occurred in a densely populated area.
During the hearing, the Mille Lacs Band backed away from its original route and aligned with the Upper Sioux Community, which proposed an even longer route but also stated that it preferred the pipeline never be reopened.
The Yankton Sioux Tribe and the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe also opposed the project.
And on Thursday, Nina Berglund, a member of the Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota tribes brought a sample of pipestone for the commission to see as they deliberated in a downtown St. Paul hearing room. She shed tears as the monument superintendent described the significance of the area.
“To have it be able to represent itself in a room where everyone’s talking about it and no one knows what it looks like,” Berglund said of the pipestone.
Nina Berglund, a member of the Northern Cheyenne and Oglala Lakota tribes and a Minneapolis resident, holds a piece of pipestone from Pipestone National Monument and a bunch of sage on her lap during a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission meeting at the Metro Square building in St. Paul, Minn. on Thursday, Sep. 12, 2024. The commission discussed options surrounding a permit for Magellan Pipeline Company to build a pipeline near Pipestone National Monument. ] ALEX KORMANN • alex.kormann@startribune.com (Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Brusven said granting a route permit would make it easier for Magellan to survey the route because they would be less reliant on landowners granting them access to look for items of cultural significance.
Tuma said if Magellan runs into anything, including catlinite, they would have to route the pipeline to avoid it. He drove the site personally as he researched the issue and was confident the ruling will bring a “thorough examination” of the route before construction.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said Thursday that sheriff’s deputies were legally justified when they killed a man in Minnetonka during a shootout at his home.
Clint Lavelle Hoyhtya, 28, was shot multiple times during the firefight late in the morning of April 10 at a home in the 13400 block of E. Crestwood Drive. Two deputies at the scene were shot and survived their wounds.
Deputies were serving an arrest warrant when gunfire erupted. Hoyhtya died at the scene. Dispatch audio and a law enforcement source also confirmed that Hoyhtya was not the subject of Wednesday’s warrant.
County Attorney Mary Moriarty said that her office reviewed the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s (BCA) investigation and office found no evidence of unlawful conduct by law enforcement during its encounter with Hoyhtya.
Two of the four deputies who shot at Hoyhtya were wounded during the firefight. Christopher Heihn was hit multiple times, was taken to HCMC for treatment and has since been released. Keith McNamara was treated at the scene after being hit by shrapnel.
Moriarty said her office determined that the deputies acted lawfully, initially retreating to find cover, calling for a negotiator and attempting to persuade Mr. Hoyhtya to stop shooting. She said the deputies exercised restraint and did not resort to deadly force until it became necessary, namely when Mr. Hoyhtya shot at them.
“In our review of the BCA’s investigation, we found no unlawful conduct by law enforcement,” a statement from Moriarty ready. “This was a terrifying incident that left [a sheriff’s] deputy hospitalized with a gunshot wound, endangered the lives of several other deputies and community members, and led to the death of Mr. Hoyhtya.”
