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.

Photo courtesy of All My Relations Arts.

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Vanishing Monuments, the debut novel by Canadian/Kansas City writer John Elizabeth Stintzi, bears the imagery of this form. But in the case of their story, the thread hangs in a darkroom of the mind, and the details strung along its length are less the facts of reportage and more the dripping enlargements of ever-developing photographs. For Alani Baum, the non-binary photographer and narrator of the novel, these murky and blended frames make up their life’s journey, a maelstrom of escape and rumination that, despite Alani’s serious efforts, remains ill-defined, ever open to interpretation. This pain becomes a catalyst for great personal metamorphoses in Alani, and a powerful force that moves readers through a novel that Stintzi frames, reframes, and frames again.

After running away from home and life with their mother almost thirty years ago, we meet Alani Baum at a point of relative stability. A successful artistic career, a professorship, long-standing relationships, the works. When news of their mother’s accelerated dementia arrives, though, Alani is spirited from the world they’ve created in Minneapolis and back to the life from which they fled as teenager. Now, in Winnipeg MB, Canada, the novel straddles a fraught history: the to-do list of obligations the child must contend with on behalf of their aging parent, the haunted world of their shared past, its abandonment, and the ways in which all these elements touch and alter the other. Further, Alani must contend with their own sense of plurality, the membrane through which everything past and present filters—every sigh, every act of love or neglect. 

As readers will learn, perhaps the narrator we’ve met is more rightly named Sofia. Or Al, as Alani later identifies themselves. Or simply, “the girl who runs away,” the girl who threatens to come back into Alani’s bones and “take over, like a surfer on a wave of fear.”

Whether they’re wearing a packer and jeans, or a sun dress, it seems readers have met all and none of these people. Alani navigates the worlds they leave behind and the ones they create, introducing and reintroducing themselves in a variety of forms and names, never exclusively one or the other. For Alani, the multiplicity is the point, and represents a hard-won balancing act in a life spent striving toward truth of identity. Like the story of Icarus that Alani carries around Winnipeg, their identity is an ascension to middle space in their interior life, a space threatened always by rising too far and burning up, or by submerging so low as to lose any sense of the self.

Even that relative stability Alani has achieved by the start of the novel can become a strange and alienating thing—the discovery that they’ve begun to show up on time, dutifully fulfilling obligations to the erasure of other, less punctual aspects of the self still writhing within.

“I’d figured out how to appear ordered, found a way to make my body become a thing I could hide in again,” Alani says. “I was stowed away. Exiled.”

This sense of exile is manifold, at times self-imposed, and emerges from within as much as without. Alani’s first, and most important, escape was from their mother, out of their city and a situation that threatened to sink them both. Later in a new life, Alani would flee again, this time to Hamburg, Germany, a setting which provides another of the novel’s well-woven plot lines. Time moves forward, exiling everyone from the people they used to be, and in an effort to bar against these effects, Alani constructs an elaborate “memory palace.” It is a mnemonic structure, based on their childhood home, and so tangibly imagined and intentionally populated as to be almost indistinguishable from the book’s physical landscape. Indeed, readers will spend a good portion of the novel here, walking its halls with Alani as they examine the memories they’ve hung on the walls, or buried in the back room. Winnipeg itself is often a lively, well-described beast, but it is this palace, both of memory and hard, physical reality, that steals the show. This duality of setting becomes a charged and ethereal center for the narrative, structuring and mirroring the many recurring plot threads and timelines—just as it does for Alani.

For readers, the device provides the imaginative space necessary to fully inhabit Alani’s life, focalizing and framing their story’s ever-developing snapshots, and allowing the time and environment for them to clarify in the darkrooms of our minds. In this, Vanishing Monuments presents a compelling and suspended kind of portrait, a space in which multiplicity of truth can coexist, can even contradict, and still be, at its core, the truth.

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