Yellow-painted All My Relations gallery front with two bicyclists riding on street in front

Heid E. Erdrich

All My Relations Art Gallery

Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Elizabeth Wilkinson

All My Relations Art Gallery is on Franklin Avenue, 1.1 miles from my house, in the Ventura Village neighborhood of Minneapolis. This section of Franklin Ave is called the American Indian Cultural Corridor. The corridor starts just as you cross over Cedar Avenue, is interrupted by Hiawatha Avenue, and extends west toward an end point near Maria’s Café on 11th Avenue. The art gallery shares space with the Pow Wow Grounds Coffee Shop. During the summer months, their joint parking lot becomes the Four Sisters Farmers Market, selling produce from Indigenous farm cooperatives. Much of what goes on, on the corridor is under the umbrella of the Native American Community Development Institute. Heid E. Erdrich, National Poetry Series Award recipient and poet from the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, until just recently served on their board and now works as curatorial mentor for All My Relations.

Heid’s work weaves through the Twin Cities and the cities weave through Heid. When I first came to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, a non-Native moving from North Carolina into Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, Heid Erdrich and her poetry welcomed me in. Only a few weeks into my life in the cities, fall of 2008, a colleague took me to hear Heid read poems from her collection National Monuments, which would come out in November. Now, I weave that book of poems over and over again into the classes I teach and smile at the sharp wit:

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects

that appear or disappear at will

or that appear larger in rear view mirrors,

include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,

well-ness circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

The Pow Wow Grounds is in the same building as All My Relations, and you have to go through the coffee shop to get to the art. Well, to get to the gallery. There is always some community art hanging on the coffee shop walls and some community artists hanging around drinking coffee. At Pow Wow Grounds, you can tuck into a warm corner with a cup of tea and a wild rice blueberry muffin, baked by Bob Rice, the owner. World-class poets write in Pow Wow Grounds. Heid’s newest collection, Little Big Bully, has poems that sprang up inside the bright yellow walls of the Grounds. Heid has been connected with the gallery for over a decade. It makes sense; her work — both poetry and prose — is often intertwined with performance and with visual art.

On her homepage, Heid includes links to her video poems. “Pre-Occupied” takes viewers from the comic cosmos into the churning Mississippi River, turned brown and frothy at the point of the St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam in central Minneapolis, just a scant two miles north of All My Relations. “River, river, river,” she says, “I never, never, never…” Her poem spills out over city scenes and archival photos and clips from a 1950s animated Superman comic, while the Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” plays.

She wrote and recorded “Od’e Miikan / Heart Line” for an award-winning art project; her voice autotuned with wolf sounds and then with moose sounds echoed into the Minneapolis night sky while giant animated wolf and moose art installation sculptures, made from chicken wire and scrap plastics, howled and pawed the ground.

A few years ago, Heid taught ekphrastic poetry — poems that describe art, and its impact on the viewer, in vivid detail — to a small group of Indigenous women at All My Relations. Those writers traveled the gallery, pulling imaginative language-meaning out of the artistic visual-meaning pieces all around. Heid sat, as she often describes herself, bear-like, watching and listening with a fierce-gentle-art-love. Inside the warm yellow walls in Minneapolis, a name that combines mni, the Dakota word for water, with polis, the Greek word for city, Heid connected words and images and women across space and time in the heart of the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Liz Wilkinson is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, MN. She researches, writes about, and teaches women’s literature — more specifically Native women’s literature and the literature of women and sports. She finds that these areas pleasantly collide more often than most people imagine.