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.