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Minnesota News
MPR News Staff

Duluth City Councilor Renee Van Nett dies at age 52

A woman poses in front of a waterscape in Duluth.
Renee Van Nett.
Courtesy Image from Duluth News Tribune

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Duluth City Councilor Renee Van Nett, the first Native American woman elected to the Duluth council, died Friday after a brief battle with cancer. She was 52.

Van Nett was in her second term on the City Council, having won reelection last year. The member of the Red Lake Nation was also the first Native American to serve as City Council president in Duluth.

Remembering Van Nett on Friday, Mayor Emily Larson called her an "all-around truth teller."

“Renee Van Nett was an incredibly powerful woman who lived life with clarity and purpose. An absolute straight talker who knew her values, she also knew her voice. And the importance of using it," Larson said in a statement. "Time and again she was fearless. I will truly and deeply miss her as a friend to call on and laugh with through the brutal work of local politics. Our entire community benefited from her groundbreaking leadership as the first Indigenous woman elected to the Duluth City Council."

City Council President Arik Forsman said Van Nett "was the bravest person I’ve ever met. She overcame immense obstacles in her life."

Van Nett served the city's 4th District, including the Lincoln Park, Piedmont and Duluth Heights neighborhoods. Her family and friends had just announced on Monday that she was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness and was in the hospital.

A GoFundMe account is raising money to help Van Nett's two teenage daughters.

Forsman, who called Van Nett a close friend, said she "dedicated her career to improving the lives of working people and cared deeply for her brothers and sisters in Labor."

Van Nett was a founding member of the Duluth Citizen Review Board to advise the city's police department — part of what Forsman said was a passion for public safety issues.

"She served for many years as the Council Public Safety Chair and always fought to get our firefighters and police officers the resources they needed to keep Duluthians safe," Forsman said in a statement. "She had a backbone of steel and was instrumental in many measures that passed the council during her tenure, including her historic resolution acknowledging the traumatic history of American Indian boarding schools in our state and supporting efforts of reconciliation."

The city will release details about a memorial service in the coming days.

Babette Sandman, one of Van Nett's constituents, told the Duluth News Tribune that Van Nett was "a fierce voice for the west end and for us Anishinaabe people out here," and had grown as a community leader in recent years.

"It was beautiful to watch. It was almost like watching a flower bloom," Sandman told the News Tribune. "She was really stepping into the real true her. It just feels so unfair for her to have to be taken now, when she was at her best."