34th Street & Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard

On Tuesday night, January 6, 2026, the lesson at the Introduction to Judaism class my girlfriend, Greta Gaard, and I are taking was “Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Before the Tuesday night class at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we’d started watching Shoah. In the interviews of Polish villagers in Chelmno and Treblinka, we saw that they knew what lay in store for their Jewish neighbors when the gas vans came to take them away. The Polish women spoke openly about their envy of the beautiful Jewish women, of the wealth their families had accumulated, of the homes that they had. After their Jewish neighbors were crammed into gas vans and rolled off to be cremated, the Polish villagers moved into Jewish houses and apartments and took over their businesses.

Greta said, “How is it that the Jewish families out-earned their Polish neighbors? Weren’t they also Polish?”

“I’ve never heard of a Jew described as a Pole.”

“What else would they be?”

The next morning, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good at 34th and Portland Avenue. Portland Avenue is a southbound one-way street with a wide bike lane and on-street parking, that, at 34th Street, features duplexes, apartments, and single-family houses: domiciles, private residences, homes. The people who live in these homes are White, Native, Asian, Latine, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They are poets, visual artists, prose writers, sculptors, musicians, political activists, family members, friends, neighbors.

For many years, I lived in this neighborhood, and I still know people who live there. Three miles east, where I live now, everyone was affected by the aftermath of George Floyd’s death by cop-suffocation on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue—only a few blocks away from 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Less than two miles from my house is the torched police station, still surrounded by a fence festooned with signs promising a new Democracy Center and mocking graffiti next to the signs. When it burned, I could smell it.

What I understand now is that, like my dad’s Jewish family in Eastern Europe, I live in the Bloodlands. Today, the Twin Cities are occupied by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). All that is missing are checkpoints.

When the news and videos began to circulate, especially the video from the poet and musician Lynette Reini-Grandell, a Portland Avenue resident, we learned a more detailed story about the latest murder event in the Minneapolis Bloodlands.  Renee Good’s son is not an orphan, as originally reported. Renee, her wife, Becca, and their dog had just dropped off their son at school and pulled over to check out the commotion caused by ICE vehicles and agents on Portland Avenue.

We also learned that Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a poet. Soon, the link to her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” was posted everywhere, easily accessible  via “Poem-a-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.

Dissecting fetal pigs is a standard assignment for many high school and college biology students. Beyond the title, fetal pigs do not appear in Good’s poem, but they do not have to. The mere words in the title evoke fear, panic, and revulsion. Fetal pigs stink. What’s the point in cutting them to pieces? I can just hear the students at my big suburban high school complaining and clamoring until the assignment was removed from the curriculum. In my biology lab at the Catholic women’s college in St. Paul, we also didn’t dissect fetal pigs—probably because of the fetal implications. Renee Nicole Macklin did it and wrote a poem about it. In her poem, the consonants hiss and pop-pop-pop like gunshots in phrases such as “tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches” and “the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures.”

Now, I’m wondering if there’s anything more traif — more unkosher, more unfit for human consumption— than a fetal pig. Certainly, the ICE agents, with their masks and their guns and their light-brown outfits, are law enforcement traif, outnumbering the police forces of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

Even so, in the Minneapolis Bloodlands, people are not looking away. We are not moving into our neighbors’ houses or apartments, taking over their businesses, or turning their places of worship into furniture warehouses. We are blowing whistles, holding up signs, marching, protesting, cussing at the masked thugs in ugly light-brown shirts, witnessing and recording and testifying.

On the Sunday morning after Renee Good was murdered, Greta and I stopped at our neighborhood Target—the one that was looted and rebuilt. We were both trying on sunglasses, looking in the mirror and at each other. Greta found a pair she liked, and we turned toward the store’s main aisle toward the check out.

Then, we heard voices, wafting like plumes of pepper spray, saying, “ICE is here. ICE is here.”

A young person in a red Target T-shirt was pushing a cart down that main aisle. “ICE is here. ICE is here. ICE is here,” she said. She was not shouting; she was not raising her voice, but without being alarming, she was speaking at a pitch that got everybody’s attention.

“ICE is here,” I repeated. I thought, “What are they doing here? They’re not coming after me, but they weren’t going after Renee Good the other day, and they shot her in the face. They’re coming after all of us. Who is ICE targeting in our Target?”

Two of the front-end people were patrolling the area between the self-service section and the check-out lanes. Neither one looked panicked nor even disturbed, but they never, ever do. Nearby, an employee huddled with a Somali dad and a few other nonwhite folks.

 I said to the Somali dad, “Where are they?”

Was ICE was getting ready to nab somebody, or were they in our Target to grab a coffee at Starbucks before they nabbed somebody in the parking lot, as they did the other day at the Target in Richfield, about six miles away? Was somebody going to get killed?

The dad said, “They’re here.”

In that moment, everybody in the store clicked into action mode. We looked at each other, nodded, and moved to the front of the store.

Ellen Lansky lives in Minneapolis and taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Inver Hills Community College.  Her fiction includes Golden Jeep and Suburban Heathens, and her essays on literature and addiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

Greta Gaard’s creative and scholarly writing emerges from intersections among ecofeminisms and queer studies. After 35 years in academia, she is completing a creative nonfiction narrative, She UnNames Them: Mindfulness, Ecofeminism, Dementia.

The post Renee Nicole Good – Minneapolis, Minnesota appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

If I didn’t already respect Egan’s environmental and social consciousness, I might not have given Pilgrimage a second glance. Books on a formalized religion? A religion I grew up with and later left behind? Not really my thing. But prompted by the event, and alone in a new city, I bought the hardback and started reading it immediately. What I found is that Egan provides background and language for a non-theologian seeking a more fluent understanding of Christianity’s troubled history. Two days later, I made my own little pilgrimage from the wine bar across from Watermark down to the church, only to find that I was a week early. By then I was already hooked on the book and finished it anyway.

See, religion might not be Timothy Egan’s thing, either. Like me, he left his church for philosophical and personal reasons, which emerge throughout his story. Nevertheless, he walks the Via Francigena pilgrimage trail from Canterbury, England, to Rome “in search of a faith,” using the route to examine Europe’s history of Christianization — while opening up about his own doubts and hopes for new beliefs. “You’ve prepared for a journey of more than a thousand miles by walking hills and stairs . . . by shedding weight and inconvenient thoughts,” he tells himself in a pep talk during the book’s opening paragraph. “The goal is to be fresh, open to possibility.” The personal tone marks a major departure from his past six books and welcomes readers like myself to be openminded as well.

Egan has spent a career documenting how underdogs survive social and environmental stresses. I was surprised to realize that in this book, it’s Christianity itself that’s the underdog. While 7 in 10 Americans are Christian, the same ratio of young people in Europe say they have no religion. Thousands of places of worship stand shuttered or demolished. “If White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother land is nearly barren,” Egan writes.

So off he goes to not only examine how Christianity is crumbling but discover places where faith has endured. While the spine of this narrative is geographically linear, each location along the route invokes remarkable tales of “martyrs, madmen, or monarchs.”

For instance, Saints Jerome and Augustine lived like hedons in their early lives yet translated the Bible from Greek to languages evoking condemnation. Their interpretations influenced centuries of Christian-on-Christian killing where power swung hard from one branch of Christianity to another, often accompanied by bloodshed. This faith built on a nonviolent Jesus has justified rape, murder and large-scale wars (17 million people died in World War I alone, Egan notes at a French city wiped out during the war). It’s impossible to ignore the hypocrisy.

In Corbe ́ny, where Joan of Arc stayed the night with King Charles VII (in separate quarters), Egan pauses in front of commemorative plaque to ask, “What if Joan had made love to one of the men who worshipped her?” Would she still have the same place in Christian mythology? “Not likely. For the story of Joan the Virgin is also the story of a faith trapped in a logical and biological incongruities.” In this way, the author uses Via Francigena’s every site — marking miracle or massacre — as a chance to explore the Christian story.

Egan never exactly shakes off the factual, self-assured tone of a history and opinion writer, but he softens his account with travel, art, architecture and food writing. Joined at times by his wife, son, daughter, fellow pilgrims, ghosts of the past and worries about the future, the author does his best to weave his own personal journey in with the historical terrain he explores.

Egan also articulates his own desire for spiritual truth. In a time when society seems especially polarized, Pilgrimage sympathizes with those whose inclination is not to turn away from each other but rather to dig deeper and find our common hopes, traumas and possibilities. Toward the end of the journey, Egan ceremonially discards a talisman representing the “chips on my shoulder.” After hundreds of miles reflecting on humans’ experience as long ago as the Iron Age, his grievances against others seem unimportant.

Eagan’s obvious enjoyment of the embodied aspects of pilgrimage helps the reader to live vicariously through his experiences. His detailed descriptions of meals create breathing room around heavier topics while making us aware of physical here-ness. In a particularly joyous passage in Italy, rain falls and mushrooms emerge and cooks sing while making that night’s supper. When his wife surprises him by eating pork, she reminds him they walked 20 miles that day. Pilgrimage pushes you beyond boundaries. Surely that’s another way to spiritually grow.

I suppose I saw something of myself in the author, despite our generational, gender and religious background differences. We both grew up in churches. We rejected the dogma. And although we occasionally look back, we seem resolute in living without a religious community. But like me, Egan wonders what we lose when we distance ourselves from religion. Wonder, understanding and devotion top the list. He wants to believe the pope when he says, “Allow yourself to be amazed.” He expresses disappointment at his children’s ignorance of basic religious traditions. And he writes admiringly about monks who illuminated early manuscripts and others who perfected champagne, monks whose “labors were a form of prayer — doing something good and well and dutifully until it was close to perfect, a tribute to the creator.” As his son and daughter come to join Egan on the trail, he checks in on their spiritual grounding and expresses regret that he parented them with a distanced view of faith.

Those of us who think we’ve left religion behind might be tempted to skip reading about this particular journey “in search of a faith.” Don’t. Whether we directly participate in a church or not, the rhythms of Christian religion drive existence in the Midwest and the Western world. Learning more about how our society got to where we are can only help us learn and grow. And pushing our edges to examine our own faith (or lack thereof) is a step toward self-understanding. As Egan quotes Pope Francis, “Our kids should be open enough to allow themselves to be surprised, and not foreclose on the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths.” Reading this book could prompt us expand our spirituality — and it might just inspire readers to make their own pilgrimages, whatever that means to them.

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