In recognition of 2024 Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the MPR Archive Portal presents a curated sampling of varied stories, documentaries, arts, interviews, and reports on Native people, their culture, and history.
Please note: Most content related to this topic that is contemporary or created after 2005 can be found on our main content pages of MPR News, YourClassical MPR, The Current, APM Reports, and Marketplace.
September 16, 2010 - MPR’s Kerri Miller interviews Minnesota writer Louise Erdrich about The Guthrie Theater production of Erdrich's novel "The Master Butchers Singing Club." Francesca Zambello, internationally renowned opera and theater director, is also interviewed.
March 14, 2011 - MPR’s Euan Kerr talks with Ojibwe writer Jim Northrup. For almost 22 years, Northrup has entertained and chastened readers of his syndicated “Fond Du Lacs Follies” newspaper column. He's covered everything from the rise of casinos and treaty rights, to his love of tapping trees for syrup, and harvesting wild rice…and he always included lots of jokes.
October 4, 2011 - MPR’s Julie Siple reports on the fight against hunger on the White Earth Reservation. Tribal officials estimate up to 50 percent of American Indians on the reservation live below the poverty line. For some, ensuring there is enough healthy food to feed themselves and their families is a problem. There is a growing effort to return to traditional foods to help alleviate hunger and improve the health of people on the reservation while reconnecting them with a diet that served their ancestors.
November 8, 2011 - MPR’s Dan Gunderson reports on creation of four Native American radio stations in Callaway, Nett Lake, Cloquet and Cass Lake. Gunderson interviews tribe members behind the efforts to provide service to American Indian audiences in the northern Minnesota area.
November 8, 2011 - Native American activist Winona LaDuke speaks about the importance of Native American radio stations. LaDuke is one of the individuals behind starting station for White Earth reservation.
April 3, 2012 - David Treuer, an Ojibwe author from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, speaks at the Minneapolis Central Library as part of the Hennepin County Library's Talk of the Stacks series. His book is titled, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life."
May 4, 2012 - Morning Edition’s Cathy Wurzer talks with Ojibwe author Anton Truer about his book "Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask."
September 7, 2012 - MPR’s Marianne Combs sat down with author and fiber artist Gwen Westerman, painter and sculptor Jim Denomie, actor and spoken word artist R. Vincent Moniz, Jr., and poet Heid Erdrich. The discussion included what it means to be a contemporary Native artist working in a world that still has stereotypical notions of what it means to be an American Indian.
November 20, 2013 - In this episode of Appetites, MPR’s Tom Crann talks with Minnesota poet and writer Heid Erdrich about the local food movement. Though seen as a relatively recent phenomenon, Erdrich argues in a book that the local food movement goes back to the indigenous populations of our region.
January 30, 2015 - Anton Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake reservation with a deep interest in history and language. He writes in the introduction to one of his books on Native history: "The borderland I grew up in was more than an awkward physical nexus of races and communities." Today-a conversation about how that "nexus" still influences his work and writing.