Little fires everywhere: A new arts collective goes on tour to build community in rural Minnesota and beyond
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On a September evening at the Turf Club in St. Paul, models weave through bar tables in upcycled designs.
Annie Humphrey, an artist and musician based on the Leech Lake Reservation, performs on the stage, followed by Minneapolis musician David Huckfelt. On a back table Shanai Matteson, an artist from Palisade leads printmaking demos with a stencil of a black aandeg (the Anishinaabe word for crow) and an orange-red sun.
“There’s a story about the crow. Long ago, the crow had bright, beautiful, vibrant colored feathers,” Humphrey recalls. “But crow also saw that the people were suffering because they had no fire.”
To bring fire to the people, crow flew close to the sun and scorched his feathers black.
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“He was able to grab the fire and bring it back down to the earth and bring fire to the people so that they could be warm,” Humphrey continues. “If you take a crow feather and hold it in the sun, it’s iridescent, and all these colors are still in that feather.”
The stencil is the logo for the new arts and community-building collective Fire in the Village, started by Humphrey, Matteson and Huckfelt this year. (“Fire in the Village” is also the title of a book of Ojibwe stories by Humphrey’s mother, Anne Dunn.)
The Turf Club event is a kick-off for a fall tour that will take the collective to small towns across the Midwest over the next two months. The next stop is Sept. 20 at the Long Lake Conservation Center in Palisade for the Community Harvest Camp.
‘No politics involved at all’
The trio all share a background in activism, specifically fighting the Line 3 oil pipeline. In 2022, Matteson was acquitted of a gross misdemeanor charge for aiding and abetting trespassing in relation to the pipeline.
But with Fire in the Village, the collective wants to do something untethered from any one cause.
“If we were going to start something, I knew that it should center on art and the human spirit, the human condition,” Humphrey says, “and have no politics involved at all.”
Through art, fashion, music and collaborative events with schools and local organizations, the collective is hoping to heal divides and put a dent in the loneliness epidemic in rural communities and on reservations.
“I think a lot of people are feeling isolated,” Matteson says. ”There’s a lot of divisiveness going on. Personally, I’m not interested in continuing that. I don’t want to be part of a cause where it feels like it’s putting another barrier between me and the people who live around me.”
One of the inspirations for starting the collective is their mentor John Trudell, a poet and activist for the American Indian Movement who died in 2015. One of Humphrey’s songs, “We Are Power,” features Trudell.
Trudell had “a healthy suspicion of leaders and people who called themselves leaders,” Huckfelt says.
“We like the feeling of the collective and not pushing one person as a front for something,” Huckfelt adds. “So, we’re really working together with our skillset because we believe in music, we believe in art, we believe in community, and so that’s what’s being put forward here.”
Making connections
For the St. Paul tour stop, Humphrey spoke to Macalester students, some of whom ended up walking in the fashion show at the Turf Club.
“Fire in the Village is a way to connect with individuals and to smaller communities that you’re a part of,” says Meira Smit, one of the Macalester students who came to the Turf Club. “A way to build messages and movements around the things that we deeply care about.”
Haley Cherry, a producer for Minnesota’s Native Roots Radio on AM950, also came out to walk in the fashion show after meeting Humphrey and Huckfelt this past year.
“It’s important to hear from both perspectives: issues of Indigenous identity, but also [from] David, as a white ally, I think it’s important to draw those bridges of community concerns,” says Cherry, who is a descendant of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. “A fire in the village is something that has to bring attention to everyone.”
While the collective will travel around like art bards, they also have a base in Grand Rapids, where they’re doing an artist residency, “Artists in the Attic” at the historic Old Central School building, through the MacRostie Art Center and the city. They hosted their first upcycled fashion show at MacRostie in May.
Humphrey makes the designs from thrifted clothes and found textiles and Humphrey’s daughter Geezis directs the fashion shows, as well as doing art programming for Fire in the Village. Humphrey’s other daughter, Scout, helps with printing pop-ups.
In June, Humphrey also led a community mural with youth groups on the Leech Lake Reservation, the Boys & Girls Club in Deer River and the Long Lake Conservation Center. Soon, the mural will be installed at the powwow grounds in Ball Club, a village on the reservation. There are more murals to come, Humphrey says.
Community spaces and community building
The tour is also about revival, Huckfelt says, stopping at historic community buildings in small towns, such as the 210 Gallery and Art Center in Sandstone Oct. 19 and the Historic Chief Theater in Bemidji on Nov. 2.
“A lot of these spaces are really beautiful old music and theater art spaces,” Huckfelt says.
“I think in a lot of these communities, people are reviving these spaces because they know how important it is,” adds Matteson. “We need more spaces like that because that’s part of what’s making us so lonely and isolated.”
These community spaces set the scene for community-building.
“The pride and the expression that comes through art and music — in the wake of that, there’s all kinds of dialogue, conversations. There’s new connections, meeting people, town to town,” Huckfelt says.
“We’ve been doing this work in our own ways for a long time, individually and together. It’s a natural step to call it ‘Fire in the Village’ — little fires that we can sustain and we can huddle around for good ideas and for community.”
Humphrey says nothing can unite people and bring down walls like the arts.
“It’s a very gentle way to say really hard stuff,” Humphrey says. “I have played in front of people who don’t agree with what I speak, but when I sing it?”
Humphrey says people will come up to her after shows to chat about issues, even when they don’t agree.
“No one is throwing bad names at each other or anything like that,” Humphrey says. ”It’s just really quite civil when it’s done in a gentle way.”
In October, the Fire in the Village tour will travel to Ashland, Wis., Sandstone and many other towns. It will return to the Twin Cities for the Decolonize Thanksgiving event Nov. 29 at the The Hook and Ladder Theater & Lounge.
