Totalitarianism at 38th and Chicago: A Minnesotan lie

Minnesota’s ‘don’t-cha-know’ country of hockey try-outs, picket fences, and swing sets has blood on the leaves and death marches in the cracks of the sidewalk.

Minnesota, like every other US state, begins with a lie. Explore Minnesota tourism ads present the state as a natural paradise, as if the US military-occupied land of Mni Sota Makoce is God-country, some blessing bestowed upon God’s own settler-colony. Popular culture presents a narrative about the state as pure and as white as the opening scene of Fargo. The upper Midwest is full of hearty, plaid and parka-wearers and white homemaking mom’s you betcha and don’tcha know-ing over a stack of unfinished pancakes as the ruddy-cheeked children grab their hockey sticks and run out to the frozen-over pond. Like the myths of Southern hospitality, with its tea service smudged with the flogged slave-girls’ blood, or of the lone and noble cowboy from out West who knew the rapist was one among the runaway negro-hunting party, the prairie has a genocidal history and the little houses on it have always been settlers’ posts.