Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition and the Education for Liberation Minnesota are excited to organize Nurturing Ethnic Studies: Honoring & Teaching Truth in Minnesota, Friday October 18, 2024 at Academia Cesar Chavez, St. Paul, MN from 8:30 am to 3 pm. We want to use this one day gathering to develop connections and resources to teach critical Ethnic Studies in Minnesota through a keynote talk, workshops, assemblies, and youth artist showcases that focus on Ethnic Studies content, pedagogies, and activism. We envision this one-day conference as part of the ongoing efforts in the state to honor and build from the radical roots of Ethnic Studies education as rooted in youth and community.

Panel with local organizers and activists about popular education efforts in the Twin Cities. We are so grateful to Stephanie Autumn, Louis Alemayehu, and Dr. Rose Brewer for sharing their time, wisdom, knowledge, and stories with the EdLibMN crew. It was a beautiful way to start a new school year and be reminded that while the struggle is long, we are not alone. We have our elders, each other, our youth, and our ancestors.

We held two organizer retreats this year to clarify our expectations for each other, to take stock of all that we have done so far, and where we want to head in the next few years.

We continued to build connections with each other through kinship activities throughout the year, including a Bdote walk where we shared our gratitude to Dakota educator Ramona Kitto-Stately; a pottery session at Mudluk Pottery, and a zine making event where we tried to distill some of our important learnings from political education this year.

In fall 2023, our political education study focused more internally–we wanted to do a deeper dive into our origins as well as reading about organizing in general. In September, we listened to interviews with some of the founding members of the national Education Liberation Network and their vision for Free Minds, Free People and the network. October’s session focused on learning more about LeftRoots and their process of cohering towards a political ideology. In November, we had a great time digging into Let this radicalize you by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Haynes. In the spring, we focused on studying examples of communities self-organizing schools/educational opportunities for/by themselves: The Highlander Center; the Zapatistas; and the Young Lords. We explored definitions of political and popular education and to consider the possibilities and constraints of doing political/popular education in state-controlled schools and institutions.

The Let’s Get Free Saturdays consisted of five Saturdays in July of intergenerational liberatory educational programs in July 2023. The goal was to create spaces to teach, learn, exchange ideas and strategies, and develop networks. 

CHECK OUT A PLAYLIST OF RECAP VIDEOS FROM LET’S GET FREE SATURDAYS!

July 1: Healing

It was amazing to be a part of a community sharing their gifts and talents. We engaged in deeper dialogue around liberatory education as we moved our bodies, participated in artistic endeavors such as singing, and broke bread together. We thank Black Youth Healing Arts Center for hosting us!

July 8 2023: Advocacy & Agitation

We learned about the practices of community, sharing, and intergenerational learning through a workshop on Capoeira Angola and engaged with ideas about how to parent against white supremacy. Thank you to Sabathani Community Center for giving us a space!

July 15, 2023: Cultural Traditions & Resistance

We looked to our past cultural traditions to learn about how we have and continue to resist! We’d like to thank Academia Caesar Chavez for collaborating with us for a successful day.

July 22, 2023: Justice & Solidarity

We reflected on the themes of justice and solidarity through movement, writing, and play! We thank the Minnesota Humanities Center for hosting us.

July 29, 2023: Land & Kinship

We learned about the Philadelphia Community Farm’s philosophy that distinguishes between land conservation, land access, and land back. We learned about indigenous agricultural practices. For many of us, being out in nature helped us reframe our notions of safety and community. We learned about the possibilities and challenges of flat leadership models. We learned about the farm’s practices to sustain life, land, and interdependence. We would like to thank the farm for their ongoing collaborations with EdLibMN.

The internal political education committee hosted a hybrid book talk by the three co-authors of The School-Prison Trust, a book that explores the relationship of school-prison relations for young Native people, touching on important issues of Indigenous sovereignty, refusal, creativity, and survivance. The authors’ distinction between resistance (which still entails recognition from the settler-colonial nation-state) and refusal (which is about refusing the terms of the debate and asserting sovereignty) gave us a framework for analyzing the kind of work that we do as EdLibMN and which category our work might fit into. 

Link to book talk video

As the kickoff event for the internal political education committee, EdLibMN organizers and members attended a talk by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly titled “The ‘Late’ W.E.B. Du Bois and the Practice of Mutual Comradeship” at the University of St. Thomas. In a discussion following the talk, we discussed how the concept of mutual comradeship informed the work of EdLibMN as a space with a shared political analysis, shared expectations, and shared political goals for education.

The EdLibMN organizing crew spent a weekend at Philadelphia Community Farm reflecting on their work for the past two years and planning for the next year. We decided that we wanted to pursue a few different projects for the year and have created three committees to do so: (1) community healing/kinship building, (2) internal political education, and (3) political education with/for the broader community.

In May 2022, we celebrated the end of the second cohort of the BIPOC Ethnic Studies Cohort with a gathering at Minnehaha Park. In our second year of the cohort, we learned from outside speakers and artists such as Thomasina Topbear, Ricardo Levins Morales, Keith Mayes, Sydney Latimer and Leigh Patel. We also learned from our youth cohort members, Amina Smaller and Shaunassey Johnson, about Youth Participatory Action Research, and about critical art from Nic Salazar. The cohort members worked in small groups to focus on the intersections of Ethnic Studies and (1) curriculum, (2) pedagogy, (3) self/community care, (4) creative resistance, (5) policy, and (6) grassroots organizing.

On Saturday, October 16, 2021, the new cohort of the BIPOC Ethnic Studies learning/mentoring cohort kicked off their year of work together by attending the Learning from Place: Bdote trip through the Minnesota Humanities Center. The group learned about Dakota history, philosophy, and contemporary life from Dakota educators, Ramona Kitto Statelyand Ethan Neerdaels. It was a beautiful day to be in community with those educators and with each other.

On Friday, April 30th, EdLib MN hosted a public event that focused on centering social justice in labor education movements. We heard from Jesse Hagopian, co-editor of Social Justice and Teachers’ Unions, and Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who is in the running to be Minneapolis’ first Black Socialist City Council member.