Program Guide
6:00 Doors open
6:30 Program welcome and introductions
6:45 Robin Wall Kimmerer in conversation with Myron Medcalf
7:30 Audience Q&A (in-person audience only)
7:45 Book signing
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Myron Medcalf is the founder of the Mary Ann Key Book Club and valued partner to Hennepin County Library. The book club is named after the matriarch of Medcalf’s family who was enslaved in Georgia in the 1850s.
He is currently a senior college basketball reporter and nationally syndicated radio host with ESPN. He also writes a semi-monthly column for the Star Tribune.
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Program Survey
Please take a few minutes to complete our online survey after the program. Your feedback will help us improve the Mary Ann Key Book Club and tell the story of how the program impacts our community. Thank you.
Mary Ann Key Book Club Survey
Additional Thanks
For pre-program smudging and starting us off in a good way tonight, we want to thank Allison Waukau (Menominee/Navajo), tribal liaison and Native relations coordinator for Metropolitan Council and co-host of the Books are Good Medicine podcast.
If You Like "The Serviceberry," Check Out More Titles Like This
"The Serviceberry" speaks of gift economies, a practice of Indigenous communities, and how we can learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to interact with one another and save our planet. Explore more books about climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice and racism.
Resources for Further Learning About our Native Communities
In our reading of Hennepin County's Land and Water Acknowledgement we ask that community members take action to learn more about our Native communities. Resources below are curated by the library’s Makoce Team of Native staff and allies.
Books and Literature
Podcasts
Minnesota Radio
Videos
Local Native and Sustainability Organizations
Our call to action for all attendees is to learn more about the incredible helpers in our community, specifically those who serve the Native communities and combine the values of "The Serviceberry" into their daily work. Please consider learning more about the following organizations:
Ain Dah Yung Center (which means “our home” in Ojibwe) supports seven programs that provide a healing space within the community for American Indian youth and families to thrive in safety and wholeness.
All My Relations Arts (AMRA) operates the All My Relations Gallery, Minnesota’s premier American Indian owned and operated contemporary fine arts gallery. It seeks to provide education to the public about American Indian history, culture, and contemporary experiences through the arts. AMRA’s mission is to honor and strengthen relationships between contemporary American Indian artists and the living influence of preceding generations, between artists and audiences of all cultural backgrounds, and between art and vitality of the American Indian Cultural Corridor. AMRA is an initiative of the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI).
American Indian OIC seeks to empower individuals to achieve economic independence and personal growth by providing individualized education, career training, and supportive services within a culturally grounded and community-centered environment.
Dream of Wild Health seeks to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways. The intertribal, independent non-profit owns a 30-acre farm in Hugo, Minnesota, where it provides educational programs that reconnect the urban Native American community with traditional Native plants and their culinary, medicinal, and spiritual use.
Indian Health Board of Minneapolis seeks to ensure access to health and wellness services through culturally grounded care. Guided by traditional beliefs and practices, it approaches healthcare as a complete system that ensures balance between mind, body, and spirit.
Four Sisters Farmers Market - Native American Community Development Institute is an Indigenous-focused farmers market that provides increased access to affordable, healthy, culturally appropriate local foods within the American Indian Cultural Corridor and strives to celebrate Indigenous pride, health, and well-being.
Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF) – Founded in 1987, the IPTF has grown from an organization dedicated to HIV education and services to one that provides resources and support for a holistic range of needs for Native residents. It regularly collaborates with Hennepin County and provides services directly to residents at multiple libraries.
Little Earth is a subsidized housing complex in Minneapolis, the only American Indian/Native preference project-based Section 8 rental assistance community in the United States. It seeks to empower residents by creating a culturally strong, supportive, healthy, and unified Little Earth community, and provides residents with holistic, culturally relevant programming that honors traditional Indigenous values.
Owámniyomni Okhódayapi is an organization devoted to restoring the area known as “Saint Anthony Falls” to its rightful status as a place of ceremony and offerings, a sacred place. It is working with Minneapolis Parks and Recreation to reimagine the space, and it offers informational tours, education, and engagement with the “turbulent waters” of the Ȟaȟa Wakpá (Mississippi River).
MIGIZI | Empowering Our Youth | Minneapolis (“bald eagle” in Ojibwe) is a Minneapolis organization that provides a strong circle of support that nurtures the educational, social, economic, and cultural development of American Indian youth here in the Twin Cities.
Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (MIWRC) is a non-profit social and mental health services organization committed to traditional ways of being and support of Native women and their families, providing a broad range of programs designed to educate and empower Native women and to inform and assist those who provide services to the community. It seeks to empower Native women and families to exercise their cultural values with integrity, and to achieve sustainable lifeways, while advocating for justice and equity.
Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi (formerly known as Lower Phalen Creek Project) is a Native-led East Side environmental and stewardship non-profit that seeks to foster land restoration and stewardship, cultural connections and healing, and environmental education. It will be holding a grand opening for the Wakan Tipi Center in St. Paul on Friday, May 29.
Learning from Place: Bdote - Minnesota Humanities Center is an independent nonprofit organization that offers participants immersive experiences tied to sites of great significance to Dakota people in the Twin Cities and allows individuals to learn from Dakota community members through stories and histories that have been too often omitted by others.
About the Mary Ann Key Book Club
The book club was inspired by a Star Tribune column written by Myron Medcalf – the great-great-great-grandson of Mary Ann Key.
“I’m honored to partner with Hennepin County Library to launch the Mary Ann Key Book Club, named after the matriarch of my family, who was enslaved in Georgia in the 1850s. Purchased for $1,000 at the age of 14, Mary Ann Key persevered. Her body was in bondage, but slavery never stole the freedom of her heart, mind and soul. This book club is about focusing on the truths of the past, our challenges in the present and the possibilities of the future…”
– Myron Medcalf
This program is supported by Friends of the Hennepin County Library. Their generous financial support is helping to provide greater access to print and eBook copies of the featured books. Media partner: Star Tribune.
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