from the artist:

I am not an anti-racism expert or leader or teacher. I am not telling anyone else how to do this work, as I am stumbling through it myself. It is certainly not my place to claim myself an ally or accomplice. I share my personal experience here as a means of connecting the message of this project to what is needed in this moment of time. Epigenetics can impact our understanding of the trauma all of us carry within us. At a time when Black and brown bodies are able to prove the modern-day expressions of centuries old violence through smart phone video footage, white bodies can no longer look away or claim ignorance. We must begin a personal practice of unweaving from the insidious system of white supremacy and the construct of whiteness/ colorism / anti-Blackness in our efforts for social justice, human rights, and land rights.

My personal awareness of race, racism, and the people’s history of the US began after high school through my first serious relationship and college electives that introduced me to Black culture and history. By the end of college (a few relationships later) I had married my husband who opened my eyes to Southeast Asian culture and the refugee experience in Minnesota. Over the past twenty years since, I considered myself engaged and vocal about the struggle for racial equality. I thought I was on the right side of things, that I was doing a good job, but there was so much that I still wasn’t seeing … about myself.

In recent years, the national conversation around racism changed my understanding in significant ways. Visiting the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama in 2018 was profound. The museum helped me recognize that the injustices of the past simply go by different names today. The memorial brought the lessons home viscerally, with increased urgency, as the 1920 lynching of three black men in Duluth, MN was put into the national context of over 6,000 documented lynching across the country. The North is not exempt, Minnesota is not exempt, and Duluth is not exempt from the hatred and racism that I had so easily relegated to the South. It is simply packaged differently here.

The words began to change, too, with powerful distinctions between ‘being racist’ and ‘being anti-racist’. ‘Diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ gave way to deeper inquiries about the social construct of whiteness and the systemic structure of white supremacy and my role within them. When I understood the function of white supremacy, I began to see its tendrils in every aspect of societal pressure that I was personally trying to unweave in my life, and furthermore, how I have unknowingly functioned to hold up the structure. My ongoing self-education, my good intentions, my love for my multi-racial family did not exempt me, a white American woman and mother, from wearing my whiteness and unconsciously embodying implicit biases, displaying subtle attitudes, or inflicting microaggressions on people of color in my life, including those that are part of my family fabric.

Minnesota Nice is not nice. Simply being nice isn’t enough now, either. I have had to learn to see what I was trained to not see. By not seeing I have been complicit and have likely, obliviously, perpetuated nuanced emotional harm towards people whom I whole-heartedly care about. Beginning a process of unweaving myself from these social constructs is vital and ongoing.

As a teenager, growing-up in Duluth, I didn’t interact with the Indigenous community in my daily life. The Fond du Lac reservation is outside the city, and they understandably have their own schools and community. The physical separation from their community allowed my veil of ignorance to remain intact. The physical not-seeing strengthened the subconscious not-seeing that’s woven into the construct of whiteness.

“For the past 500 years, Native Americans have faced genocide, dislocation, and various forms of physical, mental, and social abuse. These factors have led to high rates of violence, assault, and abuse among the Native American people today.”

- Native Hope website

How does the history of this place fit within the national context? It is one thing to be aware of the vicious ways settlers ravaged the Indigenous people, language, culture across this nation and another to understand the impacts within a local, personal realm. I do not know enough about the Indigenous history of this place were Gichigami meets the rocky hill, but I want to learn.

When learning to see, and particularly through the lens of epigenetics, the perpetual harm is evident. It is our collective burden to repair. The resilience of the Anishinaabe people is also evident, as is the richness of their ancestral knowledge, culture, and relationship with the land - all extremely vital for the future we are facing. How do we unlearn and then begin to learn how to move forward differently? I humbly yearn to make space.