Diverse Radio for Minnesota’s Communities

Reporter Melissa Townsend sits down with Dr. Arne Vainio and Dr. Mary Owen to talk about the rising rates of diabetes in Native communities and other issues in culturally appropriate Native healthcare.

Dr. Vainio is from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. We is a physician at the tribal clinic on the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation.

Dr. Owen is Tlinket from southeast Alaska. She is a family physician at the Leech Lake tribal clinic in Cass Lake. She is also the Director of the Center on American Indian and Minority Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School. She is based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Marcia Hyatt is a leadership and life coach who provides a weekly feature on WTIP’s North Shore Weekend titled “The Best of Ourselves,” which explores how we can be resilient and creative in these turbulent times.

The Minnesota wolf hunt has killed 1,000 wolves in the past two years, and this sport hunt has shown blatant disrespect to tribal nations. As the economic, social, and political situation of tribal nations becomes more desperate, the gray wolf is delisted from the Endangered Species Act in 2011. Tribal nations agreed on a wolf management plan with the State of Minnesota, but the state broke their promise. In this program we hear from Anishinaabe elder Robert Shimek and Reyna Crow, who is Director of the Northwoods Wolf Alliance.

A landmark Supreme Court decision protecting freedom of the press has its origins in Minnesota. In the 1920s, a Minneapolis man named Jay Near began writing articles, many of them tinged with racism and anti-Semitism, about the influence organized crime had on Twin Cities’ government and law enforcement officials. Under Minnesota’s gag law, the state shut down Near’s proposed new paper, the Saturday Press, before it could be published. Near sued. His case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931. The court sided with Near, overturning Minnesota’s gag law, and affirming censorship to be unconstitutional in most cases. MN90 producer Marisa Helms has the story.

For over a decade, the prescription pain killer and heroin abuse crisis has had a hold on communities across the U-S. Opioid overdoses tripled between 2000 and 2015.

In 2015, Minnesota had more American Indians dying from overdoses than any other state. That same year, well over half of pregnant Native women gave birth to babies with opioids in their systems.

Many American Indians in Minnesota are wrestling with how best to help people heal from the addiction and the historical trauma at the root of this crisis.

Over this hour, reporter Melissa Townsend explores the unique nature of addiction in Native communities, and how it is – or is not – shaping a response to the current crisis.