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The event this afternoon to mark the 10th anniversary of Sen. Paul Wellstone's death will take place at the Wellstone memorial near the crash site near Eveleth, Minn.


The memorial site will be busier today, but on a normal day, it's a quiet place in northern Minnesota.  Daily Circuit producer Marc Sanchez went there on a quieter day and spoke to people who helped create that memorial.


LeAnn Littlewolf wrote the poem that you'll see at the entrance to the memorial.  She interned for Wellstone in 1993 and later Paul and Sheila Wellstone would pay visits to the youth organizing group Littlewolf started in Virginia, Minn.  


The poem belongs to the people, Littlewolf said, but it's also her way of saying thank you to the Wellstones and was a tool for her to remedy her grief. 


Littlewolf, an Anishinaabe from Leech Lake, drew from the symbolism of her culture, which uses the eagle to represent the spirit's journey home. When rescue workers approached the plane wreckage, they spotted eagles soaring above the crash site. 


She calls her poem "The Wellstone Poem:"


Pam Costain, a friend of the Wellstones, helped found Wellstone Action. If you've never been to the memorial near Eveleth, it's down a quiet road, a few miles off the highway. You come to a small dirt parking lot where you'll see Littlewolf's poem. Then you follow a path to a circle. There are six stone benches carved from Virginia slate - five monuments representing six people. 


St. Paul sculptor Phil Rickey spent months trying to shape the stones just so. His process started by digging through discarded rocks at a nearby mine.

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Marc Sanchez

Author

The event this afternoon to mark the 10th anniversary of Sen. Paul Wellstone's death will take place at the Wellstone memorial near the crash site near Eveleth, Minn. The memorial site will be busier today, but on a normal day, it's a quiet place in northern Minnesota.

10 years after crash, a visit to the Wellstone memorial

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