Coming To Mni Sota

(gentle music) -

Woman

For as long as we have memory of this place, this has been home where we were created out of the land around us and out of the water that's here. We became Oyate ki the people. -

Man

Why do people leave where their families have lived for a long period of time? They don't leave just because the grass might be greener somewhere else.

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

profound impoverishment, the disruption of civil war, the persecution of religious narrow-mindedness, or racial oppression. -

Erika

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

Helps to highlight the disparate welcome of certain groups. And then as we will see later, exclusion, expulsion, deportation of others. -

Man

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

There are many dimensions to arrival. And no person or group of people is static. We've changed over time and we have the right to change over time. -

Woman

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

This is a complex history. We can't just pull one little thread out and say, this represents everything. (gentle music) (Dakota Language Spoken) The language I spoke was the language of the first Minnesotans, the Dakota people. The word "Bdote", means confluence like here, where the Minnesota river flows into the Mississippi river.

It's significant because our origin story is here. (upbeat music) It's a welcoming place to be. It's a place of abundance. This is a land of coming and going.

And I think shaped by a river, that's the genetics, the history of this place. The Ojibwe creation story is a little more ambiguous. It still has this spiritual creation. And we do have an understanding of our sacred places throughout the region, but the Ojibwe came later.

The first Ojibwe who came to this region settled through peaceful arrangement with the Dakota. And then several decades later, began displacing the Dakota in military conflict. One group could be at war with one another and you could go not so many miles away, and people would be intermarrying still. -

Anton

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

The Ojibwe and Dakota carried a kind of war that was never genocidal, even though there was territory at stake. For as long as people could remember, Dakota were in that place. When we talk about Mni Sta Ma3oce, we're talking about our original homelands. And that goes along the St.

Croix, the Mississippi, up to the southern shores of Lake Superior into what is now Canada, out into what's now North and South Dakota, Nebraska. That's Mni Sta Ma3oce. To have the arrival of people from the colonies is not any kind of surprise. The classic immigration story is one of coming to a new land and making a new world.

If you really look at European migration into this upper Mississippi, those people came hoping to insert themselves into the culture that was already existing. When Europeans came, they weren't just coming with the idea that they wanted to find religious freedom and prosperity in a new world. They came to colonize. It was about, you need to speak the language I speak.

You need to worship the God that I do, the way that I do, in the language that I do. The part of Minnesota history that we're often missing is that 200 year stretch, where native people and Europeans found a way to live together and create kind of a multivocal society. There was no organized settlement desire by the French government. They didn't want settlers there.

They only wanted to use the North country as an extractive resource where they could take the furs out. They needed the Ojibwe and Dakota people more than the Indian people needed the French. The big shift that occurs is when land becomes real estate. When it's land, people belong to the land.

When it's real estate, the land belongs to people. And those are antithetical concepts between native people and Euro Americans. The process of what gets called Americanization is to teach the immigrants not to have a spiritual relationship with the land, but to have an instrumental commodified relationship with the land, because that's what it means to be an American. What we as an entire country have lost by erasing that knowledge and that connection.

(gentle music) What does Fort Snelling represent? Fort Snelling, an icon of US imperialism, empire building, racial hatred. When settlers were stealing our lands and our people were fighting back, the Fort would house the troops that would come out and help shoot and kill us. And we're talking about nine square miles, where the first negotiations for use of that area.

Sure, you can use this. We all use it. You can use it. We'll make an agreement with you.

You can use it. And then they go away and nobody comes back for 15 more years. And then it's to build a fort and to claim that land as property. The perpetual right to hunt, fish, gather and use all of the land here to foresee.

And what the Ojibwe were saying is I don't understand you people, but what matters to us is that we get to use all of the land. We're willing to share usage of this part, but we retain the perpetual right to also use the land. And Europeans are like, hooray, we got the signatures. Open it all up for white settlement and kick the natives off.

It was a totally different understanding. When we talk about first contact, we talk about economics right off the bat, trade. The Dakota thought they were coming into contact with the man. Oh, hello, welcome.

That other person is convinced, I got him. It has nothing to do with being French or Russian or German or whatever. It's how you are in here. How do you see people?

The misunderstanding there from the very beginning is that these Indians don't value anything. They give it away as soon as you give it to 'em. (upbeat music) When I was looking at the national archives and found a letter about my father's mother, who was asking the Indian agent for money to get from Granite Falls back to Sisseton, and the Indian agent wrote, this woman doesn't value anything we ever do for her. If you give her money, she gives it away.

So don't give her anything. There is conflict and there is disagreement, but there are relationships being made. Even through those turbulent times, our Dakota relatives who would go out hunting around the area of Mankato, this woman would always put pie on her window sill. And they thought, oh, well, she's putting this out here for us.

So they would bring a rabbit or they would bring fish and they would leave game under the window and they would take a pie or they would take a loaf of bread. It's in our genetic makeup to help and to share. By the 1830s, the fur trade was no longer a profitable enterprise. And there weren't that many people living here until 1849 when Minnesota became a territory.

In the space of 12 years, which culminated in the US Dakota war of 1862, a whole raft of government officials and judges and clerks came up the river. That put the structure in place that made this a very profitable bet for land grabs. The greed and the demand for land was overwhelming. The relationships with native people ceased to have any value to the colonizers.

On a global scale, you had some major shifts going on throughout the 1800s. You have the emergence of industrialization, gold rushes, not just the California gold rush, but a whole bunch of 'em. America goes to the largest producer and exporter of agricultural products on planet Earth. Timber products, the largest deposits of virgin iron ore.

You get the railroad boom. All of these things crashed into the area at the same time, created a flood, an overwhelming flood of human migration. When the first Western Europeans came to the Americas, they had no land. And in four centuries, they had almost all of the land.

And we were left with remnants. What are those factors that were really pushing, driving the Swedes? There was poverty, there was famine, religious differences, some wanted do avoid military service. And there was a shrinking land supply.

There was growing population. Hans Matson had a very robust career in serving as an immigration land agent, placing advertisements in Swedish newspapers, encouraging people to come. 'Cause here in Minnesota, you could find the possibilities for a rich and successful life. Before 1850, the international migration into the state is pretty small.

Economic circumstances in Northern Europe as capitalism advances changing the realities for that middling class of people. That's a huge decision to pack up everything you have and especially pre steamboat era, pretty much knowing you're never gonna see anybody that you love or care about again. Frederika Bremmer was Sweden's most well-known novelist. She came to Minnesota in 1850.

And when she returned to Sweden in 1853, she wrote some rather prophetic series of essays that really extolled the virtues of Minnesota. She wrote, oh, what a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become. And over the next eight decades, more Swedes came to Minnesota than any other ethnic group. African Americans have several generations of family ancestry in this country prior to that of most European or white Americans.

Most European Americans are not descended from the colonial era population. They are descended instead from that huge wave of immigration from Europe that took place between the war of 1812, and the First World War in 1914. During that 100 years, more than a hundred million Europeans immigrated to the United States. It was the largest mass movement in human history.

Their part of the process of so-called Americanization is really gonna be a cultural war between the mutualism that they brought with them and the every man for himself that the dominant culture is gonna try to teach them to absorb. So those concepts, whether we're talking about Irish and Swedish and Norwegian and German immigrants in the 19th century, Serbian and Polish and Greek and Italian immigrants in the early 20th century, Oromo, Eritrean, Amharic, Mexican, Salvadoran, Hmong, Karen, Bhutanese immigrants today. So if we look at immigration to the United States over the long haul, we see that it actually tends to fluctuate with the economic cycles. People don't come during a depression.

And immigrants tend to operate with very good information because they're putting their lives at stake. We tend to uplift the success stories, but it was a brutal experience. Lots of immigrants really suffered. There was discrimination, that could have led to unemployment, family abuse.

There was crime, and some people left. One of the things that was very attractive to Germans coming to Minnesota in the 1850s was the opening of primarily what were Dakota lands. When the US legislature passed a law saying that all the Dakota, the Wahpetunwans, the Sissitunwan, the Bdewakantunwan and the Wahpekute, will be removed from the state of Minnesota beyond the borders. Minnesota is very efficient in their killing and removal of Dakota people.

-

Woman

They leave because they're in a pretty difficult situation

Prime farmland available for $1.25 an acre. You begin to see Germans coming directly to Minnesota. They were told that this is open land and they're welcomed with open arms. The railroad companies and even the state are sending out agents into German speaking countries, trying to encourage immigration here.

Germans settled in quite easily. They came here not knowing the history of native people, not knowing that that land was already a homeland. Maybe they make a decision that they're gonna try to assimilate as fast as possible. And so they try to get rid of those cultural traditions.

And then what's really the most common path of what the anthropologists call syncretism, that they blend some of those cultural values with some of what's expected of them here. The issue, what are the values that they bring into the world of work, and particularly the values of individualism on the one hand, which employers are going to be promoting and mutualism or cooperation or collectivism, that tends to be the way that the culture that they've brought with them, that tends to be in that cultural baggage? The majority of German immigrants were already literate. They were well prepared to live in a capitalist society.

The Germans did a really good job of working with other groups and maintaining their own identity. Stearns County was something like a little Germany. They had no incentive to change. German would be spoken on all the main streets.

They taught their schools in German. Germans came not to escape anything in their homeland except economic circumstances for the most part. But they wanted to bring their culture with them. And culture was extremely important.

The language was important. And in fact, in the struggle about how the Catholic Church was going to go forward, their watch word was language saves the faith. (upbeat music) John Ireland was a major figure in the American Catholic Church. The Holy Blizzard of the Northwest, they called him.

Very controversial figure, well known in Rome. I studied in Rome and was always amazed when Italians knew a lot about John Ireland. He was a great believer in the American experiment. He believed, I think accurately that America was where Catholics would be finally able to prosper, away from the dead hand of Europe, the dead hand of monarchy, that they would be able to come into their own.

He said at one point that the American constitution is the 10 commandments written into law. Bishop John Ireland, in close partnership with the great Northern railway and the expansion of the railroad, he started this Catholic colonization effort to bring Catholic immigrants to Minnesota and settle them in farming communities as the railroad expanded. In many cases, this worked. We saw Polish, Irish, German, Catholic immigrants establishing lives for themselves and then becoming successful farmers.

But with the Connemaras of course, it wasn't quite the case. About 50 Irish families in the Connemara region of County Galway in the West of Ireland, suffered from the second wave of the great famine in the late 1870s. Through the connections with the Catholic church, they were afforded the opportunity to come to Minnesota. The great immigration historian Dennis Clark said, when the Irish came to America, the first thing they discovered was that the streets were not paved with gold.

Second, they weren't paved at all. And third, they were expected to pave them. They were incredibly impoverished. They were starving.

They didn't speak English. When they did get to Graceville, they arrived in June of 1880. They didn't really have time to plant crops for the season. They didn't have enough time to stockpile for the winter.

And then the winter of 1880 to '81 was one of the coldest, snowiest worst winters in Minnesota history. When not only did we get back to the twin cities that these newcomers were struggling really hard, it actually spread nationally. Like this was kind of a big deal. The Connemeras eventually started migrating back to St.

Paul, where they knew they could find day laborer jobs. And that's when they arrived at the Connemara Patch. Swede Hallow is generally said to be North of Seventh Street and Connemara Patch is South of Seventh Street. You're living on swampy land that flooded regularly where you couldn't build anything sturdy or permanent.

These neighborhoods no longer exist for obvious reasons because it was completely unsustainable. They were shantytowns. I think the story of Connemara Patch shows that it's bumpy and maybe an intended homeland or an intended landing spot is not your final destination at all. I think there was a pretty serious willed forgetting in the Irish community.

My mother is from a small town in the Minnesota River Valley, Green Isle. She didn't know there was such thing as the Irish language, Gaelic. Her own grandparents would have been Irish speakers. That kind of rupture, I think, is distinctive to the Irish in America.

Even from territorial times, Minnesota became a home to German Jews. They were absorbed into the community rather seamlessly. Middle class, literate, they participated as well in these inter-ethnic partnerships. In Minneapolis, it's quite different.

Minneapolis was really known as a bastion of antisemitism. In the 1920s, there was the American Automobile Association, the AAA. But it's not like the AAA we think of today. It was kind of a club, a motoring club because driving around in your car was kind of country clubby kind of thing.

In St. Paul, the president of the automobile club was Jewish. In Minneapolis, Jews were not allowed to become members. Steamboats began to bring immigrants and temporary workers to the area.

Certainly there were a lot of lumberjacks, worked in the St Croix river Valley. If you took the famine immigration of the late 1840s and translated those numbers to America today, you'd have 13 million illiterate indigent people washing up in about a four-year span. You can imagine the social turmoil that that brought on to the American establishment. (ominous music) The Hayes Tilden compromise in the election of 1876 involved withdrawing federal troops from the states of the former Confederacy and effect, turned control back over to the ex Confederates who spent the next four decades building the Jim Crow system.

Disfranchisement, economic impoverishment and white terrorist organizations began to push African-Americans out of the Confederate States, both North and West. My own family, George Hall came here as a young man in his early twenties as a barber. Worked in a shop in the Merchants Hotel, which was the grand hotel in downtown St. Paul.

In terms of community, cohesion and communications, barbershops like churches and social clubs were major staging points for civic action, for discussion. African-American newspapers offer an ongoing record of African-American reactions to the waves of European immigrants who came to this country in increasing numbers after the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, and so on part in the wake in the European context of issues like the crop failures, the potato failures. In the late 19th century, the price of wheat collapsed in Eastern Europe because flour from Minneapolis was being exported to Eastern Europe and Eastern European farmers in Poland, in Germany, Austria, and Hungary couldn't get a price for their wheat that allowed them to pay their mortgages. Even somebody who comes empty handed actually comes with a very complicated set

of invisible luggage

religious values, folk ways, recipes, and comfort food, music. They create organizations to maintain it. Maybe they make a decision that they're gonna try to assimilate as fast as possible. And so they try to get rid of those cultural traditions.

There's also wanting to look like a success. The technological stage of photography in that moment was that if you try to use flash photography in the house, you would set the house on fire. So the Norwegian immigrants would schlep every piece of furniture that they owned out of the house and onto the lawn. And they would pose with the furniture and they would mail the photograph back to some relatives in Norway and say, see how well we're doing.

Swan Turnblad, the founder of the American Swedish Institute was a colonel in the Minnesota National Guard. He was a close advisor to Governor John Lindh, a Swedish immigrant. Ultimately he acquired ownership of Svenska Amerikanska Posten. Turnblad built it into the most successful newspaper published in the Swedish language in the United States, of which there were more than 300.

There was a fair degree of interaction that happened naturally as a result of daily life. In Minneapolis, you would have found a lot of Swedes on the Cedar Riverside, Snus Gatan, Snuff Street, where there were also lots of Danish and Norwegian people.

There's a variety of Germans

Catholic Germans, Protestant Germans, Jewish Germans. The whole diversity of the German speaking world lands in St. Paul. In St.

Paul, you would find Swedes on the East side. Swede Hollow, this important little ravine, right below Hamm's Brewery, a newly arrived Swede could find cheap housing, get a job, then have the possibility of moving up to Payne Avenue. In the rural areas, you would have found a lot of Swedes in the Santee and Chisago County, areas around Scandia, Lindstrom. All of these little decisions that were made about where to go changed the course of people's lives.

If you were an immigrant, you were learning English as you went. They often speak about the reason for all the streets of Northeast being listed up with the presidents was to help the citizenship tests that were taken. The church in these ethnic communities in Minneapolis, played a role. It's where they drew their sense of identity.

It provided the platform on which they lived their entire lives, from their baptism to their funeral. And everything in between was connected with church life. (ominous music) We're in St. Mary's Orthodox Cathedral.

It is the first major Orthodox parish in the continent of the United States. Immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Carpathian mountains, Rusyns or Carpatho-Rusyns, they're not Western Europeans. They're not using a Latin language. They're not Roman Catholics generally.

Many people from the Carpathian mountains felt that they were second or third class citizens. They dreamt of course, that they would get rich in the United States and go home. One of the founders of this community, he actually walked from disembarkment to Minneapolis. He walked.

Northeast Minneapolis was sort of a catchment area for Bohemians and Poles. I know in Minnesota, a lot of the earliest Polish immigrants came to Winona. But then in Northeast, they're starting becoming a critical mass. A church like this one is magnificent and it holds nearly 1,000 people.

It didn't start like this. This is the third church of the Holy Cross. And the first two were much humbler. The first one was just a wood-frame church that probably held less than 100.

There were others from other parts of Europe, certain Ukrainians and Rusyns and Lebanese Maronites. They describe it as a sort of Catholic Epcot center with a little presence from each of these ethnic traditions in the food, in the restaurants, church and a bar on every street. The change is how do Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Poles, how do all of these people become white? What does it mean to no longer be Swedish, but to be white?

Americanization and being white are really one and the same thing. When the white man came here, one of the notions they brought with them, and were that, they were a chosen people. Yeah. And our lands were promised land.

And that's taken from the Old Testament. There was also this court, "Courts of Indian Offenses". They deemed all of our ceremonies. They criminalized them.

And that's what churches and the schools, white man schools have done to our people. We're talking at this very moment in an era where race is such a huge issue. The 19th century was the era of racial science. The people that wrote and made policy tried to say that there was something called race and that it was hierarchically arranged.

And they introduced this noxious idea into Western Europe. Race science developed of course in the Academy primarily, but also through pseudo sciences, serving the ideological rise of white supremacy, founded on the notion that there was a tight link between biology and cultural and intellectual development. -

Man

There's a variety of Germans

In the 1880s here in Minneapolis, all the leading, intelligent, elite people understood that a hierarchy of race was science. There was competition and cooperation, intermarriage and conflict, particularly for those European immigrant groups who were not considered white. Out-groups like the Irish or Southern and Eastern Europeans of Slavic groups, African-Americans have been in this country for many generations, but who are not accorded full citizenship rights. And conflicting with European immigrants, Irish and German barbers began getting statutes passed through the state legislature that forbid barbering on Sundays.

It led to a police raid on the group of black barbers operating at the Merchants Hotel until they're being arraigned in court. Other immigrants are not necessarily so enthusiastic about the following groups of immigrants. Identity politics is a phrase that you hear a lot today, but the Rusyns and the Poles and the Germans and the Italians, they didn't get along very well there. They just didn't.

The young man had a rumble from time to time. But that wasn't necessarily as bad as trying to navigate a banking system, run by English and then Scandinavians who have fit into the English banking system, to try and get a mortgage when you're a Slav. The Iron Range opens up in the late 19th century. It's a technologically, a form of mining that's overwhelmingly open pit as opposed to deep shaft.

So it's more like unskilled construction labor than the kind of work that miners do underground, which may not seem like skilled work to us, but we would die if we tried to do it in a day. We'd kill ourselves. Open pit mining was pick and shovel work. Those mines began to open on a large scale at the time when there was tremendous conflict in the Austro-Hungarian empire.

And so being pushed out of what would become Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Romania, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, all of these places that people were fleeing because of the conflicts, both political and religious within the Austro-Hungarian empire. And in many cases, they tended to come first as those young, single older sons of families. And so there was this great demand for physical labor. Boarding houses were opened.

These so-called locations, which in other parts of the country would have been called company towns where there was no democratically elected local government. And gradually by the time we get, say to World War One, there's more family formation. There's children being born. -

Man

There's a variety of Germans

Yeah, one of the arenas for solidarity 'course has been the labor movement. Progressives in Minnesota of whatever racial or ethnic background have found common cause for collective cooperation. When Finnish women arrived in Minnesota and discovered that they didn't have the right to vote, they were furious. The industrial workers of the world and the Western Federation of Miners send organizers who are themselves, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian.

The economy has entered World War One by 1916, the demand for labor, the demand for iron, the booming of the steel industry. They begin to organize and they begin to demand better wages and safer working conditions and have this tremendous strike in 1916, across the Iron Range. During the 1916 strike, the Duluth newspaper, coined the term for Finns, Jack pine savages. And so they reached back to the ways that the Dakota and the Anishinaabi had been depicted in popular culture.

Why are these Finns unhappy? Why are they on strike? Aren't they thankful? After all they speak a language that we can't understand.

-

Woman

There's a variety of Germans

World War One changes everything, of course. When World War One came along, President Wilson talked about hyphenated Americans. You can't be a German-American. You can't be a Polish-American, an Irish-American.

Minnesota Public Safety Commission advanced an anti German campaign that was more severe than in any place else in the country. Once war was declared and the Public Safety Commission got into power, everything German was anathema and had to be eradicated and destroyed. One of the most famous images is that of the statue of Germania on top of the Germania Life Building being hauled down and melted down into scrap. All four of my grandparents were German.

But when I was growing up, I would never have known it. They were much more interested in being middle class than being German. (dramatic music) Minnesota is a really wonderful microcosm of both this binary of old and new migration. The old immigrants who are presumably of European descent, they were the good ones.

They came in the right way, which means legally. They wanted to become American. They wanted to assimilate. They learned English quickly compared to the new immigrants and refugees who are largely from Latin America, Asia, Africa.

These are seen as the exact opposite. Not assimilating, not wanting to become American, even dangerous to America, either in taking away resources or wanting to do harm. When we think about immigration history, it's often the two coasts or the border. And Minnesota often gets glossed over.

But in that exact moment of settler colonialism, of the literal recruitment of certain kinds of immigrants, it helps to highlight the disparate welcome of certain groups. And then as we will see later, exclusion, expulsion, deportation of others. (gentle guitar music) The Chicano historian, Rodolfo Acua's phrase, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." Then that's a starting point for thinking about Mexicans in the United States. About 100,000 Mexican origin folks overnight became members of the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, were given citizenship, but the history of Mexican Americans really is reflective of the failure to fully practice that on the ground.

With many Mexicans being indigenous or being mixed race, with indigenous ancestors, but also migrating, all that comes up. In Minnesota in particular, it's interesting to think about how Mexicans were by and large recruited to come to work, particularly in the agricultural complex in Minnesota. A lot of them picking beats. In this very racialized regime, where living conditions and pay were very difficult.

The stereotype of Mexicans as transient and migrants that are gonna leave and are not here long, stigmas of not participating in politics, of not being citizens, even though many of them were from Texas actually, and were already US citizens. They were not transient. They were permanent. And at this point they've been here for a good century.

More recent migrants from Southeast Asia from central America came as a result of US intervention in their societies, that disrupted those societies. (gentle guitar music) The Korean War had a significant impact. Economically the country was really struggling, living at a level of poverty. There was a lot of shame within Korea, so they didn't really push too much for domestic adoptions as opposed to allowing those children to leave.

And that was really the beginnings of international adoption from Korea. Korean adoptees have a unusual place in history. We've straddled these two worlds in living with these very white families, knowing very little about our culture, but knowing from a physical standpoint, that we are very, very different. We've always known that we're adopted.

It's pretty hard not to recognize that. We're placing all of these Korean children or even Amerasian children into these white families and we're literally stripping them of their culture because what these families were told was we just need to assimilate the child and not treat them any differently. When you strip that cultural identity, I don't look like my parents, I don't look like my siblings or my cousins, that goes more into the deep seated feelings of abandonment. It's scary and it's terrifying and it's exhilarating.

It's much like a roller coaster with the ups and downs. And it's a journey that never ends. I'm here in the US as a product of war, as a product of empire building. I grew up in California as well as Minnesota.

I've never heard of a secret war until I came to Minnesota. When we talk about secret war, when we use the terminology secret war, whose narratives are we talking about? Whose perspective? How do we shift that narrative?

I try not to use the word secret war, because that's really from the American narrative. Like the American Secret War in Laos. That Hmong were only pawns for Western superpower to use. (ominous music) Sometimes, we need to think about these things in global perspectives.

And the African-American population of this country has never been ethnically monolithic. From the West and East Africa, various parts of the Caribbean, amazingly rich array of peoples from East Africa, Ethiopians, Somalis, West Africans as well, Nigerians and Ghanaians, and a long list of others. Before I came to Minnesota, I was a student in Djibouti and I came to Minnesota in 1997. I've been Minnesotan for the past 20 some years.

Minnesota, it's been home for a lot of East African, especially from Somalia, Djibouti and Kenya. So it was a place that I kind of feel home. Education, work, it was a great place for an immigrant to move to Minnesota. There was a civil war in Somalia.

There was a lack of work in Djibouti. This curious thing I had before I moved to Minnesota, was the snow. Coming from 110 degrees, living in minus 50, it make me tough. If you're running an office in Djibouti or in Somalia or in Kenya, your first stop will be Minnesota.

You wanna talk to Somali Minnesotans first. Minnesota is part of Africa. We are at East Africa, we are located at Horn of Africa. So the problem right now going to Somalia is because of tribalisms.

I don't remember how it started. I was still young boy. But what I have seen is seen that dying people, shooting each other, our country was collapsed. Somali government was collapsed, and then we are been killing because of your tribe, my tribe.

Which tribe are you? Certain tribe. I will kill you. When the civil war broke out then, myself, I ran away and I get lost.

And I found myself in Kenya. One of the camps called that we came was called Ifo. United Nation start providing food, shelter, water, then later, education. In 1993, then it started these kind of programs going to all over the world like Europe, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Why Minnesota? First of all, I have to ask where the Somali are? One Somali man was here and working. And then he called the rest.

He say, this is a good place. I work here. And that's how we come is because of that way. And right now from 1993, till today, I was lucky to resettle through to Minnesota.

But most of the Somali community, they don't. They go to different 50 states. Let's say California, oh, can I stay only this week or can I move right now? Where?

Minnesota. Why? Because of Somali. So I'm a Minnesotan.

I belong here. This is my first place that even I had documentation that's recognized me. Have a picture. Ever since I born, I never had a document that belongs to me.

So this ID, whenever I look it right now, it's my name, it's my picture. And really am I existed? This is what makes me to exist. Only Minnesota make me to exist.

I'm a human being. It's fascinating that the Hart-Celler Act, the 1965 Immigration Act is the still the main body of law. And I don't think there's another immigration law that can mean such opposite things to so many Americans. So for some people, especially immigrants, it's the law that allowed them to come.

It's the law that opened up America's doors. To a other group of Americans, it's exactly because of that opening up to mostly immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, that it is the law that's described as the end of America. Particularly very vocal white supremacists who have for decades called for a return to a white America before 1965. The law, as we understand it has gone through a number of different interpretations.

And it absolutely was a revolutionary law. It ended 40 years of explicitly discriminatory national origins quotas. These immigrants coming in, they have to know about the US constitution. So these immigrants, fresh to the US, they know more than the citizens know.

The white citizens who wanna keep them out. And they forget that they came here looking for a better life, just like the indigenous peoples from the South, Mexico and Guatemala and Peru. They're coming here for a better life. (bright guitar music) Ramona Rosales, who was a member of the West St.

Paul, Mexican-American Barrio that were engaging both rural migrant farming, but also urban issues who insist that Mexican Americans were a long-term community that had existed here and deserved the same rights and recognition as other groups. She was one of four Mexican origin students and I believe, two Puerto Rican students at the University of Minnesota who were part of the Latin Liberation Front and were able to negotiate with the administration to create the Chicano and Latino studies. Another person, Gilbert de la O, a member of the West side community, that was the leader of the Brown Berets at the time, all the Chicano movement organizations. There's a lot of overlap.

That term Chicano, which is referencing the Mexican experience in the United States, but it's also highly politicized. A sense of that is that the Brown Berets saw their goal to rectify the 150 year oppression of Mexican origin people since the conquest of North Mexico, as I put it. Occupy America, sometimes they called it. They were not just immigrants.

They were actually indigenous to this continent. These radical demands for self-determination and attempts to kind of control your own communities, and how that balances with participating in more formal institutions. The first Hmong in Minnesota came in late 1975. The reason why there were so many Hmong in Minnesota is because of the Hmong caseworkers, Shoua.

Shoua Yang was one of them. He started working at International Institute, I believe in 1977. But at one point folks in the Hmong community, instead of calling it International Institute of Minnesota, they call it Shoua's House. We want to go to Shoua's house.

Folks didn't know about Lao or Hmong at all. For example, in job placements, the men were pushed toward jobs as soon as possible. And they were only focusing on men from the Lao community. It was very matrilineal.

When the woman were actually often the entrepreneurs. Olga Zoltai. - Yeah. A refugee herself who was working at the International Institute, got word of people who needed assistance, who needed a safe place, a refuge, questioned, what are we doing?

Are we doing anything? And she took it upon herself to convince those who were heading up the resettlement program. We needed to actually do something. That commitment has been paid forward to other refugee groups.

Minnesota still has a higher proportion of resettling refugees compared to other states. The 1980 Refugee Act was an evolution of US immigration policies. It started from the Displaced Person Act, Refugee Relief Act, in 1975 in the Chinese Assistant Act. After the 1980 Refugee Act passed, the number of refugee admissions coming into the United States actually decreased.

Minnesota had strong churches, strong social service organizations who responded to this call, but also incentive of the federal government to resettle refugees. The other part of federal refugee policy was forced assimilation directive. Gerald Ford administration was very concerned about Southeast Asian refugees already sort of wrapped up in these stereotypes of being poor, needy, warlike, that they would create ethnic enclaves. We need to spread refugees out like a thin layer of butter across the United States to promote assimilation.

And so they were looking for states that did not already have very diverse populations. Minnesota's immigration history had been largely from Europe. And so when the federal government is looking for states that don't already have large nonwhite populations, Minnesota rises to the top. Part of the reason why the Southeast Asian American community in Minnesota is so robust and larger than one would think is because people voted with their feet.

They might have been resettled in another state like North Carolina or California, but we see the second migration, movement of peoples in the early 1990s. Those communities have been successful. -

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There's a variety of Germans

The history of immigration to Minnesota is a result of expansion. It is a result of exile of folks who were here before. It is a result of war and empire building. -

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There's a variety of Germans

The history of immigration in Minnesota is a question mark, whether the masses of people that live in the society are put in a position where they have the power to change the society, to make it better. So much is about ideas, and how do we engage people to change their ideas? And I think all the ideas that we need are available. They're in the history of Dakota people.

They're in the history of enslaved Africans. They're in the history of Irish and Swedish immigrants. The ideas are all available and there is a constant cultural war to keep those ideas in the box. I love the way in which more recently we've become better at recognizing that tension in Minnesota history and not just thinking about it as something that's Midwestern or specific to our local history, but more of a microcosm of the US's role in migration and native dispossession in general.

It forces us to ask, how do you build bridges between silos? And sometimes they need to be built intergenerationally within communities. Sometimes they need to be built cross-culturally within communities. Sometimes they can be built across communities.

The conversations that we've seen here, these are conversations that are inspiring because people bring both their difference and their similarity to the conversation at the same time. And I don't think that we can have a productive conversation if we don't recognize both the difference and the similarity. (gentle music) (Dakota language spoken) (bright music) -

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There's a variety of Germans

Moving Lives Minnesota, stories of origin and immigration is made possible by the state's Arts and Cultural Heritage fund.