For this Minnesota living history teacher, the past is never dead
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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman's words "contribute a verse" each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
To the beat of drum-heavy Nordic music, Arn Kind steps in front of an audience of about 20 people in the basement of the Elysian public library. He’s dressed in furs, holding a round wooden shield and brandishing an ax.
He’s ready to deliver a lesson on the Viking Age that will be hard to forget.
In the span of nearly 90 minutes, he’ll teach some ancient battle cries, help two volunteers don chainmail armor, helmets and weapons and paint a living picture of the Vikings as expert traders, navigators and fighters.
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Nearly every week, you can find Kind making history entertaining and educational in school classrooms and small town libraries across Minnesota. From the Vikings to the voyageurs to Vietnam, he delivers lessons like few others.
He said he developed a passion for history early in life growing up in Mankato, where his dad taught history. The family spent summer vacations traveling to battlefields and historical sites.
“My mother once turned to my father, we were driving, and she turned to my father and she said, ‘Clint, if I see one more cannon during this vacation, I’m going to throw up. Can we go someplace else?’” recalled Kind. “I just love history, because it’s human drama.”
Following his father’s path, Kind taught school for 36 years in Mankato before deciding in 2013 to become a full-time traveling history performer.
His immersive approach to Minnesota history began with a new classroom assignment that shifted him to sixth grade, when Minnesota kids typically learn about the state’s history.
“I switched from fourth grade to sixth grade, and now all of a sudden, I have to teach Minnesota studies, which I didn’t know a whole lot about,” Kind recalled. “So I spent the entire summer going to all these Minnesota historical sites leading up to my next fall of teaching.”
On one of those trips he met a member of the First Minnesota Regiment Civil War reenactment group. Kind joined the First Minnesota, and he used the Civil War period clothing and gear as a teaching tool for his sixth grade class in Mankato.
“And then pretty soon, other classrooms wanted me to do the same thing. Then pretty soon, other schools wanted me to do the same thing. And then other communities,” said Kind.
He does about 70 performances a year. Some are in public venues like small town libraries or fire halls. Many are in school classrooms.
“I get real busy in the spring of the year when desperate teachers are saying, ‘Mr. Kind, I’m supposed to cover the American Revolution. We didn’t get to it this year. Can you come and teach us?’”
His hands-on interactive approach is designed to make history interesting to students who often assume the subject is boring.
“’What do I care about what a bunch of old farts did a long time ago? It’s got nothing to do with me’” is a common complaint, said Kind. “I say nonsense. You’re sitting in front of me right now because of decisions that your predecessors made. It’s true drama. It’s the drama of real people.”
His presentations often involve a trailer load of gear. His wife Meg often helps with setup and take down. They travel to shows across the state together.
“I’m the museum that comes to you. I bring all sorts of artifacts, posters, maps, whatever things that people can pick up and handle if they want to,” he said. “And I always envy the presenters that show up with their little briefcase, and they open up their laptop and they’re ready to go.”
He loves turning up facts and learning new and interesting bits about Minnesota history. “Once you stop learning you’re dead,” he proclaims.
At 71, Kind said it’s getting more difficult to lug all the gear to his shows, but he’s still creating new programs. One in the works is about the Prohibition era in Minnesota.
“We had the best booze coming out of Minnesota,” said Kind. “‘Minnesota 13’ was made in a lot of stills in Stearns County, up around the St. Cloud area. It was so good, Al Capone himself shipped ‘Minnesota 13’ down to Chicago and his speakeasies down there.”
“A lot of people (teachers) hold me as a carrot toward the end of the year, you know, ‘We got Mr. Kind coming at the end of the year, but you gotta have this, this, this and this done and be ready for the presentation.’ I have a lot of students that go away thinking they thought history was boring, but I made it really exciting for them.”
Kind wants to be entertaining enough to stimulate an interest in history among audiences of any age. But he also wants to challenge them to keep learning and thinking.
“When I talk about the Holocaust and we end the presentation, I ask a question; is it possible to have another Holocaust? Or is this just an old picture we hang on the wall that we just dust off once in a while,” said Kind.
He bristles at attempts to gloss over uncomfortable parts of history. For example, he insists on displaying a Confederate flag when he talks about the Civil War.
“I’m proud to be an American,” said Kind. “But you know what? There’s parts of our history that we’re not proud of. There’s parts of our history that we are ashamed of, and there’s a movement in this country right now to only teach our children the parts of history that we’re proud of.”
“We have to let our young people know the mistakes we’ve made in the past. We need to learn from our mistakes, or we are definitely going to repeat them again.”