Meet Melissa Olson
Melissa Olson is a reporter for the MPR News Native News Initiative and a contributor to the North Star Journey series. She is also an essayist and community archivist.
Her long-form audio documentary “Stolen Childhoods” was produced in collaboration with KFAI community radio and aired statewide on Minnesota Public Radio in 2017. She is a recent contributor to “We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World,” an anthology of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Melissa has also worked with MIGIZI Communications on a long-term project to preserve MIGIZI’s historic legacy radio archive, a digitization project encompassing 15 years of radio programming by Indigenous radio makers. She attended the Third Coast Audio Festival as an Association for Independents in Radio (AIR) 2019 fellow. In 2018, she attended AIR’s Full Spectrum Audio Storytelling workshop at Union Docs in Brooklyn, New York.
Melissa’s work has received several awards and accolades, including multiple awards from the Indigenous Journalists Association, numerous Page One Awards from the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists, an award of merit from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association’s Eric Sevareid for her work on North Star Journey.
Melissa is a citizen of Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and lives in Minneapolis with her partner, John.
Recent Contributions
- 20 years later, lives affected by the school shooting in Red Lake will be memorialized
- Tribal leaders and state lawmakers come together for Sovereignty Day at the Capitol
- Judge dismisses lawsuit claiming tribal casinos in Minnesota are running illegal games
- Klobuchar, Smith call for answers about potential Indian Health Service office lease termination
- Bois Forte Band of Chippewa set to open cannabis dispensary on tribal land in northern Minnesota
- Celebration and criticism follow Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier’s prison sentence commutation
- Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier granted clemency by President Biden
- Minnesota tribal leaders call for Biden to commute Leonard Peltier’s sentence
- Minnesota regulators require studies along possible routes before pipeline construction near sacred site
- Bois Forte Chair Cathy Chavers resigns to focus on her mental health
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