Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Stay in touch
Sign up for The Flyover newsletter
Love Love? Hate Buckthorn?
Each Sunday a brilliantly imagined new group meets at the East River Parkway Trail in Minneapolis: the Buckthorn Removal Singles Club. Attendees wear gloves, name tags, and long pants tucked into socks while cutting up shrubs and looking for love. It’s the perfect thing for anyone who hates both invasive species and dating apps.
A mission statement on the club’s throwback website says the events are focused on both “environmental and community restoration” in a time when “the capitalist landscape has led to natural spaces which are polluted” and “capitalist management of our social environment has resulted in an online dating scene which is toxic.” Bleak stuff, but BRSC seems to be succeeding in its mission.
Nicole Ki of MPR News spoke to several excited attendees at last Sunday’s gathering. Over 50 people showed up. Shoutout to attendee Corinne Buie for my favorite quote: “I figured there's got to be some gays out here trying to help the Earth.”
Club organizer William Cooke tells MPR that he plans to keep holding the (relatively) popular Sunday meet-ups until it gets too cold.
“There's just a real culture in Minneapolis right now of trying to do things a little different and trying to find ways that the community can care for itself,” Cooke tells Ki. “And I think people are excited about that.”
Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe vs. Mille Lacs County: A Long, Bitter, Ongoing Fight
For over two years journalist Allan Kew has traced the history and current goings-on of a land battle between the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and Mille Lacs County. At the core of it: whether the sovereign tribal nation possesses 61,000 acres of reservation territory or just 4,000.
Unsurprisingly, the long-simmering dispute dates back to "treaties, laws, [and] tricks" from the 1800s that more or less stole the vast acreage initially promised to the tribe. Dozens of interviews, countless hours of searching court records, and weeks of on-the-ground reporting culminated with Kew's 12,000-plus-word story published last week in The Delacorte Review, which takes readers from frontier times up to a legal decision this year that left the tribe "deeply disappointed."
Topics like casinos, walleye, family resorts, self-governance, and centuries of mistrust percolate throughout the diligently reported article. There's even a photo, believed to be previously unpublished, of a forceful eviction from 1911 that quite literally illustrates the historical stakes.
“We will keep fighting for our land, our people and our future. This ruling does not change who we are,” Virgil Wind, the Band's chief executive, said following February's court ruling. "We are now, and always will be, the non-removable Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.”
Council News: Yay on Lyndale Reno, Nay on New Drones
Minneapolis City Council nixed plans to sign up for a free 75-day Skydio trial at Thursday's meeting. Had it passed, the security company's drones would have been deployed as first responders on the North Side. Skydio has been criticized for its contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as with Israel.
“We cannot trust a police department with a pattern and practice of racist policing to responsibly implement a drone program,” organizer Jae Yates told Ria Gupta for Minnesota Reformer during a Wednesday anti-drone protest downtown.
We probably shouldn’t trust Skydio, either. This Wired story documents how the California-based company accidentally livestreamed footage via its website for two days, sharing images of suspects in addition to views into nearby apartments and businesses. St. Paul, Minnetonka, Brooklyn Park, Duluth, and Rochester currently have contracts with Skydio.
At that same meeting, Minneapolis City Council voted 8-4 to adopt the proposed Lyndale Avenue overhaul, which features new bike lanes and bus lanes, plus street and infrastructure repairs that will hopefully prevent another sinkhole summer. Critics include business owners, who believe construction will tank the area’s economy. Council Member Pearll Warren is also not a fan, voicing concerns that the road needs some sort of emergency vehicle lane.
“Leave these streets alone, my goodness,” she said before voting no. “I just want to drive down a normal street.”
Please Don't Call 911 About the Air Quality
Hey, friends? We know the air is bad out there. We know it's really bad. Minneapolis was the major city with the poorest air quality in the world for a while there on Thursday afternoon. It's not fun and it's dangerous.
But you know what we shouldn't do? Call 911 to tell them about it!
Yes, yes, I assume you and I, people who were raised right and have relatively good reasoning skills, wouldn't do this. But apparently it needs to be said; as Mary McGuire reports for Bring Me the News, dispatchers in regions like the city of Ramsey and Chisago County have been pleading with people on social media to stop calling about the smell of smoke in the air.
To quote a Facebook post from the Crow Wing County Sheriff's Office: “No need to call we got this one figured out!"
