Meet Melissa Olson
Melissa Olson is a reporter for the MPR News Native News Initiative and a contributor to the North Star Journey series. She is also an essayist and community archivist.
Her long-form audio documentary “Stolen Childhoods” was produced in collaboration with KFAI community radio and aired statewide on Minnesota Public Radio in 2017. She is a recent contributor to “We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World,” an anthology of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Melissa has also worked with MIGIZI Communications on a long-term project to preserve MIGIZI’s historic legacy radio archive, a digitization project encompassing 15 years of radio programming by Indigenous radio makers. She attended the Third Coast Audio Festival as an Association for Independents in Radio (AIR) 2019 fellow. In 2018, she attended AIR’s Full Spectrum Audio Storytelling workshop at Union Docs in Brooklyn, New York.
Melissa’s work has received several awards and accolades, including multiple awards from the Indigenous Journalists Association, numerous Page One Awards from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists, an award of merit from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association’s Eric Sevareid for her work on North Star Journey.
Melissa is a citizen of Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and lives in Minneapolis with her partner, John.
Recent Contributions
- Two Ojibwe tribes say 45-year timeline for Minntac pollution is too long
- Upper Sioux Community wins solar array fight, utility says it will likely appeal
- Federal rule change may pressure Minnesota’s historic Pipestone quarry, advocates warn
- Feds assume control of some Red Lake Nation child welfare services following search
- Native entrepreneur continues to build EV charging stations on tribal land across the Midwest
- How a Native-owned company helped tribes bridge the digital divide
- $150 million tribal loan advances Minnesota company’s plan to build magnets without rare earth minerals
- A tribal nation reclaims reservation land through much-debated carbon credits
- Tribal nations in Minnesota push back on federal proposal for prediction markets
- At the Walker, Indigenous actor Dallas Goldtooth explores masculinity through movies
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