Star Tribune
Hundreds of Minnesotans march for missing and murdered Indigenous relatives
As Ana Negrete read the names of Indigenous relatives missing and murdered in Minnesota, a deep silence fell over a room dressed in vibrant red at the East Phillips Community Center.
Due to gaps in data and reporting the list was not comprehensive, Negrete said Wednesday at a memorial and march meant to honor those lost. As she neared the end of the long list, audience members, overcome by emotion in the overflowing gym, began to shout out names of their own, the air filling with ceremonial smoke and loss.
“There’s so many.” Negrete said. “Today we remember you. Today we call out your name. today my hands have been removed from my mouth … it is my responsibility to speak for those who cannot. I will not stay still and do nothing.”
Hundreds of families, organizers and supporters of efforts to end an epidemic of murdered and missing people in the Indigenous community gathered this Feb. 14, known as a day of remembrance for those lost.
Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited people disproportionately face violence in Minnesota. Though Indigenous people make up just 1% of the state’s population, 9% of all murdered girls and women from 2010-2019 were American Indian, according to a 2019 report from the Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Task Force.
Senator Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, a Standing Rock Lakota descendant, sponsored legislation to address the violence faced by Indigenous community members. That led to the establishment of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office in 2021, the first of its kind in the U.S.
“We’re meeting to address this historic pandemic of violence, of missing and murdered relatives across this nation and across any nation that was colonized by non-Indigenous people,” Kunesh said.
Kunesh announced that the office has a special license plate, available Wednesday through the Department of Vehicle Services, bearing a red handprint and ribbon skirt. Proceeds from the plates will go toward the Gaagige-Mikwendaagoziwag fund, which translates to “they will be remembered forever” in Ojibwe. Funds collected will support local investigations and community efforts to find the missing and murdered.
Supporters packed the streets of the Little Earth neighborhood in Minneapolis, donned in their own ribbon skirts and red-t-shirts, with matching scarlet palms painted over their mouths. People held signs reading ‘Not One More,’ and ‘no more stolen relatives’ with photos of their loved ones. Other carried small empty red dresses for girls no longer with their families.
Busloads of children from local schools marched as well, also dressed in red, some tossing a football.
Binesikwe Means attended the event along with students she works with at Migizi, an educational support group for Indigenous students. The day hit close to home for Means as well: in 2015, her aunt Sheila St. Clair went missing in Duluth. St. Clair has not been seen since, Means said as she marched.
“I believe walks like this bring a sense of peace our family doesn’t get otherwise,” Means said. “Because there’s been no justice and no end to how our family has suffered the loss of our aunt.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
