Listen to the first episode of the North Shore's 'It Happens Here' podcast
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Audio transcript
CATHY WURZER: Say, in the early days of this show, we talked with Leah Lemm and Staci Drouillard about a project they had embarked on. It was a series examining the past and present of racism on the North Shore. They work for WTIP North Shore Community radio. The series, It Happens Here, The Roots of Racial Inequality on the North Shore, is now a reality, and their hard work recently won the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association Award for Best Radio Series. I'm excited to be able to share some of these episodes over the next few weeks on this show. Here are Leah and Staci with their first episode entitled "Insulated."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LEAH LEMM: [OJIBWE] Hello. My name is Leah Lemm. I'm a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and I'm a host and producer of the podcast Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine.
STACI DROUILLARD: And this is Staci Drouillard, a Grand Portage Ojibwe descendant and WTIP producer. Today, we're exploring where we as a community fit into the bigger picture when it comes to racial inequality and racism. To start, we're going to ask the question, who are we anyway?
LEAH LEMM: Cook County isn't necessarily known for its diversity. But in reality, its racial makeup might be more varied than you think. According to the most recent census data, more than 15% of the county residents identify themselves as a person of color, meaning they selected Asian, American Indian, Black, Hispanic, or two or more races on their census form. That might seem small, but it's a figure that ranked Cook County as 18th out of 87 Minnesota counties for the highest percentage of residents identifying themselves as non-white.
STACI DROUILLARD: It's an interesting statistic for what some may describe as an isolated region in northern Minnesota, even more so in a year that sparked a lot of conversation about the idea of race and the prevalence of racism in our community.
While some of the major news happens far from the North Shore, like the murder of George Floyd and mass protests in big cities across the country, the people of Cook County also took to the streets-- in our case, along Highway 61 where some people lined up in support of Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement while others lined up on the other side of the Highway to show their support for Blue Lives Matter, a movement which advocates for making it a hate crime to target police officers.
Our divisions, it seems, are on display in Black and blue. And other movements have arisen in response to Black Lives Matter as well, including all Lives Matter and other support for firefighters and EMTs. And so WTIP wants to explore how we got here in the first place and how we might fit into the larger story of racial inequality in the United States. Here's what some of you said about that.
SUBJECT 1: Outside of what you see on social media or TV is about what I've witnessed. I've never really witnessed it firsthand here in Grand Marais, but I'm not out in the public a lot either. I work and go home.
SUBJECT 2: It happens here.
SUBJECT 3: We are insulated against-- I mean, I just never met up with that many of different nationalities or colors or ethnic backgrounds. I guess I have no reason to treat anybody differently because I don't have a history of thinking of them differently.
SUBJECT 4: It happens here.
SUBJECT 5: It just doesn't exist in Cook County. If anything about it-- anything having to do with racism and Cook County is to me, if you want to talk about it, why it exists or where it's coming from, I think it's from people that have moved to Cook County. I don't see any kind of racism things at all with the Native people that have lived in Cook County, say, for the last 30 or 40 years. None at all.
SUBJECT 6: It happens here.
LEAH LEMM: John Morrin is a member of the North Shore Anishinaabe community and serves on the Grand Portage Tribal Council. WTIP asked John how racial inequality affects the community and what inspires his work as a trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.
JOHN MORRIN: People are dying. People are dying because of racism. I've had family members die because of racism, whether we're talking about different types of racism, health care racism. I've had people die in a hospital because of the way they were treated.
I've had people have negative experience with social service systems. So it's really about understanding how systems and institutions, how they were established in this country, who they were established for, who they were established by, and how they're being maintained.
LEAH LEMM: There are different ways to define racism and even different forms of it. Racial prejudice plus power is one definition of racism that incorporates sociological factors like economic and political power. There's also Merriam Webster's second definition to consider, which is racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, or political advantage of another.
It's an aspect of racism that doesn't always show up on the surface. It can be deeply embedded in the day to day operations of the institutions we all rely on, whether on purpose or not, simply based on the way they were built. And as John Morrin says, it is these systems that benefit some people more than others.
JOHN MORRIN: Systems and institutions are working better for some people and not others by the statistics that come out every year. And those people who institutions and systems were created for and by have the best outcomes.
STACI DROUILLARD: It's this facet of racism, the systemic kind, that we'll be diving into in the coming episodes of the series. To do that, we'll go back in time before the founding of the towns along the North Shore and even before the founding of Cook County as we know it. We'll look at the area's past and the creation of systems that evolved into the institutions and way of life that exist on the North Shore today.
LEAH LEMM: For WTIP, I'm Leah Lemm.
STACI DROUILLARD: And I'm Staci Drouillard. This series is a production of WTIP North Shore Community Radio. Special thanks to Kelly [? Schoenfelder ?] [? Geier ?] and Rhonda Silence for reporting assistance in this episode as well as to the community members who shared their thoughts with us. Support for this series comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
CATHY WURZER: That was Leah Lemm and Staci Drouillard with the first episode of It Happens Here, The Roots of Racial Inequality on the North Shore. This from WTIP North Shore Community Radio in Grand Marais. By the way, the series recently won a first place for Radio Series from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association. You can catch Episode 2 next Wednesday right here on the program.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LEAH LEMM: [OJIBWE] Hello. My name is Leah Lemm. I'm a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and I'm a host and producer of the podcast Native Lights, Where Indigenous Voices Shine.
STACI DROUILLARD: And this is Staci Drouillard, a Grand Portage Ojibwe descendant and WTIP producer. Today, we're exploring where we as a community fit into the bigger picture when it comes to racial inequality and racism. To start, we're going to ask the question, who are we anyway?
LEAH LEMM: Cook County isn't necessarily known for its diversity. But in reality, its racial makeup might be more varied than you think. According to the most recent census data, more than 15% of the county residents identify themselves as a person of color, meaning they selected Asian, American Indian, Black, Hispanic, or two or more races on their census form. That might seem small, but it's a figure that ranked Cook County as 18th out of 87 Minnesota counties for the highest percentage of residents identifying themselves as non-white.
STACI DROUILLARD: It's an interesting statistic for what some may describe as an isolated region in northern Minnesota, even more so in a year that sparked a lot of conversation about the idea of race and the prevalence of racism in our community.
While some of the major news happens far from the North Shore, like the murder of George Floyd and mass protests in big cities across the country, the people of Cook County also took to the streets-- in our case, along Highway 61 where some people lined up in support of Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement while others lined up on the other side of the Highway to show their support for Blue Lives Matter, a movement which advocates for making it a hate crime to target police officers.
Our divisions, it seems, are on display in Black and blue. And other movements have arisen in response to Black Lives Matter as well, including all Lives Matter and other support for firefighters and EMTs. And so WTIP wants to explore how we got here in the first place and how we might fit into the larger story of racial inequality in the United States. Here's what some of you said about that.
SUBJECT 1: Outside of what you see on social media or TV is about what I've witnessed. I've never really witnessed it firsthand here in Grand Marais, but I'm not out in the public a lot either. I work and go home.
SUBJECT 2: It happens here.
SUBJECT 3: We are insulated against-- I mean, I just never met up with that many of different nationalities or colors or ethnic backgrounds. I guess I have no reason to treat anybody differently because I don't have a history of thinking of them differently.
SUBJECT 4: It happens here.
SUBJECT 5: It just doesn't exist in Cook County. If anything about it-- anything having to do with racism and Cook County is to me, if you want to talk about it, why it exists or where it's coming from, I think it's from people that have moved to Cook County. I don't see any kind of racism things at all with the Native people that have lived in Cook County, say, for the last 30 or 40 years. None at all.
SUBJECT 6: It happens here.
LEAH LEMM: John Morrin is a member of the North Shore Anishinaabe community and serves on the Grand Portage Tribal Council. WTIP asked John how racial inequality affects the community and what inspires his work as a trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.
JOHN MORRIN: People are dying. People are dying because of racism. I've had family members die because of racism, whether we're talking about different types of racism, health care racism. I've had people die in a hospital because of the way they were treated.
I've had people have negative experience with social service systems. So it's really about understanding how systems and institutions, how they were established in this country, who they were established for, who they were established by, and how they're being maintained.
LEAH LEMM: There are different ways to define racism and even different forms of it. Racial prejudice plus power is one definition of racism that incorporates sociological factors like economic and political power. There's also Merriam Webster's second definition to consider, which is racism is the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, or political advantage of another.
It's an aspect of racism that doesn't always show up on the surface. It can be deeply embedded in the day to day operations of the institutions we all rely on, whether on purpose or not, simply based on the way they were built. And as John Morrin says, it is these systems that benefit some people more than others.
JOHN MORRIN: Systems and institutions are working better for some people and not others by the statistics that come out every year. And those people who institutions and systems were created for and by have the best outcomes.
STACI DROUILLARD: It's this facet of racism, the systemic kind, that we'll be diving into in the coming episodes of the series. To do that, we'll go back in time before the founding of the towns along the North Shore and even before the founding of Cook County as we know it. We'll look at the area's past and the creation of systems that evolved into the institutions and way of life that exist on the North Shore today.
LEAH LEMM: For WTIP, I'm Leah Lemm.
STACI DROUILLARD: And I'm Staci Drouillard. This series is a production of WTIP North Shore Community Radio. Special thanks to Kelly [? Schoenfelder ?] [? Geier ?] and Rhonda Silence for reporting assistance in this episode as well as to the community members who shared their thoughts with us. Support for this series comes from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
CATHY WURZER: That was Leah Lemm and Staci Drouillard with the first episode of It Happens Here, The Roots of Racial Inequality on the North Shore. This from WTIP North Shore Community Radio in Grand Marais. By the way, the series recently won a first place for Radio Series from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association. You can catch Episode 2 next Wednesday right here on the program.
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