Race/Ethnicity

An effort to help Native American children retain ties with their tribal communities if parental rights are terminated awaits action by the governor.

I was searching for a certain Chinese grocery store near Rice Street in St. Paul when I spotted the sign: "Golden Karen Grocery." I thought I might have read it wrong, so I did a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot. I’d read it correctly. I hadn’t known that there was a Karen grocery in the Twin Cities. As it turns out, there are two of them. I’ll visit the second one in the future.

The American Indian Movement will open its first exhibit telling the story of its history on May 10th at the All My Relations Gallery. Planning for the exhibit has been underway for months, as Executive Director Clyde Bellecourt and AIM’s board of directors worked to narrow down thousands of choices to a fraction of the holdings that depict the history of the Movement. They chose a photographic exhibit, featuring the work of Dick Bancroft, long known informally as the “AIM photographer,” and Roger Woo, a photographer who worked in black and white in AIM’s earliest years.

The MSR last year published a series of stories on the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) about unfair discipline of Black employees and other discriminatory concerns (“Black employees call Mpls Park Board a ‘toxic’ workplace,” Jan. 5, 2012 and “Park Board leaders, NAACP claim progress,” Sept. 13, 2012). The Minneapolis NAACP last summer received numerous complaints from Black MPRB employees, and its investigation later found a history of discriminatory practices there.