Troubled Hearts on the Land

Minneapolis under siege, in images and words.

By David Treuer, Jaida Grey EagleFebruary 22, 2026

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

I guess you know me well, I don’t like winter
But I seem to get a kick out of doing you cold

IN 1996, OPRAH WINFREY traveled to the Minneapolis suburbs to interview Prince at his recording studio, Paisley Park. And what a pity, for those of us outside and looking in, that when sitting with the godhead, she asked if he ever felt weird or different in any way. Prince Rogers Nelson said yeah, “but understand everything’s relative. I’m not weird to me.” Having missed one bus, Oprah got on another one: “And you’re living in Minneapolis of all places.” Prince relaxed a bit, but only a bit. “Minneapolis, yeah. I will always live in Minneapolis.” Oprah asked why. Because “it’s so cold it keeps the bad people out.”

But not even Prince could make that true, any more than he could will the cold to hamper the bad within. It didn’t keep ICE out this January, when they took the lives of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Five years earlier and several blocks south, it didn’t keep the Minneapolis police from murdering George Floyd in the street, outside of Cup Foods. In 1997, the cold didn’t keep the Minneapolis police from assaulting Charles Lone Eagle and John Boney and stuffing them into the trunk of a squad car, just north of where Good and Pretti were murdered, and it didn’t keep the police, working at the behest of big business, from opening fire on striking Teamsters in the Market District in 1934, wounding 67 and killing two. The cold didn’t keep the US military, after the Dakota War of 1862, from interning nearly 1,700 Dakota elders, women, and children at Fort Snelling, just south of Minneapolis, where hundreds died of disease and starvation and “an Indian squaw” was shot for target practice, the same Fort Snelling where, at the time of writing, four Lakota men were among those being interned by ICE. The cold didn’t stop a group of Dakota from killing and scalping 14 of my ancestors in 1850 and parading our scalps through the streets of Stillwater, Minnesota, nor did it stop my ancestor Bagone-giizhig from taking retribution, killing and scalping a Dakota man in front of his family the next week, then hiding behind Saint Anthony Falls to escape capture before canoeing to our homelands in the north.

Baby, I just can’t stand to see you happy
More than that, I hate to see you sad

In 1994, around the time Prince told Oprah he’d never leave Minneapolis, I arrived. I lived on the corner of 3rd and Franklin, across from a convenience store, next to a trap house, and around the corner from the Electric Fetus, a record store on 4th that Prince still visited when searching for new music. The Windsor, where I lived, was a big brick apartment building bounded by the rich neighborhood of Kenwood to the west and the Franklin Avenue American Indian Center to the east. Despite the trap house and the gunshots, despite my car being broken into and me losing all my Prince and Toto CDs along with the player on which to spin them, and despite not having grown up there—or in a city—I felt like I was home. More than that, I felt, somehow, that I’d “made it,” because the Windsor was made of solid brick, and brick was, in my imagination, classy. I’d not often lived in a building that was older than I was.

I was taking classes at the University of Minnesota and working on my first novel and I lived in the motherfucking Windsor, and although I didn’t have an agent or a publisher and my stipend amounted to less than $500 a month after taxes, I was walking the streets of South Minneapolis and I lived around the corner from where Prince bought his records and I was breathing the air he breathed and I was, after a long separation, surrounded by my fellow Indians again. Every day, I’d drive down to the U for my Ojibwe language class with Collins Oakgrove, who was from Red Lake. Sometimes my classmate Julie from North Dakota, who was Korean German, would ride with me or I’d ride with her. Julie always carried a big folding knife in the back pocket of her jeans. She was way cooler than I was. In class, I’d hang with Keller, Ojibwe from Red Cliff, Wisconsin, and Nora, whose family came from Bad River, Wisconsin. After a year, I moved back home to the Leech Lake Reservation, in the north of the state.

While I was there—breathing my air rather than Prince’s, around the corner from my mother’s house rather than the Electric Fetus, in a cabin not much more solid than a shack rather than the Windsor—I became a star, if only to myself. I got the agent, my book was published, and I finished grad school. The novel was published by Graywolf Press (then based in Saint Paul, but it wasn’t long until they moved to Minneapolis). My second novel was published in 1999 with a New York press, but it was set in my old neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Then I moved back to the Cities but couldn’t afford to live on the Southside, so I bought a house in Northeast and was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, where I had so recently been a student with Nora and Keller and Julie. I lived there for 10 years. Two of my children were born in Minneapolis, very close to where Pretti and Good and Floyd were murdered. I loved teaching in my tribal homelands. Like Prince, I swore I would never leave. But then I did. In 2010, I moved my family to Los Angeles. My relatives worried for me. Minnesota is safe, they said. Los Angeles isn’t.

Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling off a church and killed everyone inside
You turn on the telly and every other story is tellin’ you somebody died
A sister killed her baby ’cause she couldn’t afford to feed it
And we’re sending people to the moon
In September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time
Now he’s doing horse, it’s June

I’ve felt my own absence as I’ve watched the occasional eruptions of violence in Minneapolis in the years since I left, with the feeling, however irrational, that while of course the cold couldn’t have kept the bad people at bay, somehow (Prince and) I could have. I wasn’t there in July 2016 (and neither was Prince, who had died of a fentanyl overdose a few months earlier at Paisley Park) when Philando Castile was murdered by officers in Falcon Heights simply for driving home. We weren’t there when Justine Damond was killed by a police officer responding to her 911 call (a rare case in which police “overreach” led to a conviction—and it escaped no one’s notice that the officer was Black and the victim was white). We weren’t there when Chiasher Fong Vue, who may or may not have been in mental distress, was shot and killed by no fewer than nine police officers. We weren’t there when, a few months later, George Floyd was murdered and the place really blew up. We weren’t there when Good and Pretti were murdered by ICE.

Everybody’s looking for the answers
How the story started and how it will end
What’s the use in half a story, half a dream?
You have to climb all of the steps in between, yeah, yeah
I say everybody, everybody’s looking for the ladder
Everybody wants salvation of the soul
The steps you take are no easy road (It’s not that easy)
The reward is great for those who want to go

Minneapolis is the heart of the heartland, and as such, it has many chambers, some of them known, others secret. Some let the blood in, and some let it out. Prince began learning music in North Minneapolis and continued, obsessed, at Bryant Junior High School, just a few blocks, again, from where Good was murdered. Blood in, blood out. George Floyd Square, which marks the site of Floyd’s killing, became a hub where neighbors come together to build deep and broad and lasting networks to fight for structural change. Blood in, blood out.

It’s no surprise that Minneapolis is giving hope to the rest of the country in its stand against hatred and brutality. That struggle has been happening for a long time, and while the cold clearly doesn’t keep the bad out, it does bring people together: it’s always been our common enemy, resisted with grassroots organizing and the help of sympathetic civic leaders. In 1945, when police raided the Dreamland Café—owned by Anthony Brutus Cassius, the only African American to have a liquor license in Minneapolis at the time—and dragged the patrons to jail, one of the arrestees, Emma Crews, worked for the Cities’ jointly owned Black newspapers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder. She called the editor, Cecil Newman, who had been cataloging police brutality against Black Minneapolitans for 15 years. Newman called the newly elected mayor, Hubert Humphrey, who came down to the station personally and dismissed the charges. He then set about trying to reform what he saw as “the bigotry, the abusiveness, and the inbred culture of the Minneapolis police.” In our own moment, Peggy Flanagan (White Earth Ojibwe), lieutenant governor since 2019, has fought to address the whole rotten system, from fair housing to fair policing to Indigenous rights. During her time in the state’s House of Representatives before that, she pushed a raft of legislation: 12 weeks paid family and medical leave, free public college tuition for low- and middle-income families, increased child tax credits, free breakfast and lunch for all public school students, stronger worker protections, and driver’s licenses for all residents regardless of immigration status. Now she is running for the US Senate. We’ve been doing it—imperfectly, incompletely, with heartbreaking setbacks—for a very long time. Blood in, blood out.

The ground in Minnesota moves. During winter, it freezes and contracts, and then it expands in the spring thaw. It doesn’t break, not exactly. It undulates, slowly, almost imperceptibly. Forest, field, sidewalk, road, all of it moves. If you stood there long enough—I’m talking years, decades—rooted in one spot, it would feel like you’re riding waves of cold, waves of ice. Frost lifts the roads to spring, if not the future. But the ground will thaw, not to worry. It will freeze again, not to worry. And even after the thaw and before the next one, sometimes it snows in April.

Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad (So bad)
Sometimes I wish that life was never-ending
And all good things, they say, never last
All good things, they say, never last
And love, it isn’t love until it’s passed

Minneapolis, we’ve always ridden the frost. We’ve always broken the ice. Newman called Humphrey and he came. The neighborhood called Pretti and he came too. Prince and his Revolution grew up close to where Good would be killed. The Sioux Chef’s brilliant restaurant, Owamni, stands watch over the falls where my ancestor hid after his crimes against the Sioux Chef’s people. We’ve learned to be good to one another even though winter will be here for a while yet. And the ice with it. But we know how to ride the heaves. Blood in, blood out. Minneapolis, you know what to do because you’ve been doing it for ages. While you’re raising your voice to tyranny, I’ll scream along, scream ’til you hear it: Baby, you’re a star.

Oh, baby, I’m a … (Star!) Ooh …
Might not know it now
Baby, but I are, I’m a star (Star!)
I don’t want to stop ’til I reach the top
Sing it! (We are a star!)

¤

Featured image: Healthcare workers gather for a vigil honoring Alex Pretti. Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle.