jimschnortz.photography

Tara Houska (zhaabowekwe), social media, 8 July 2021. Text reads:

This is the Mississippi River headwaters right now. Minnesota in a severe drought. Enbridge is taking 5 BILLION gallons of water from our rivers & lakes to drill Line 3 pipeline thru. […]

fucking Enbridge is airing commercials on mpls radio claiming that everything they’re doing is accepted by native people and they’ve been listening to native people SO HARD trust us you guys and it’s SO FUCKING DISGUSTING

Anyone here who lives in the US needs to send messages to the MN legislature right now. I’ll get you started, here’s how you can contact the governor AND Lt. gov: https://mn.gov/governor/contact/

There’s a million reasons to defend the Mississippi: Her cultural significance, the fact she supports mifwestern wildlife, the fact we don’t want to lose a whole ass river… But if you can’t muster up enough to care about it for any of the regular reasons, consider the fact you will almost certainly starve. Please take the 5 minutes to send an email, I can’t do this on my own.

Since June 2020 hundreds of homeless people have been camping in Minneapolis parks. The parks issued camping permits to help ease the demand on shelters because of the Covid crisis. In September, Police made unannounced sweeps of those camps, confiscating camping equipment and attempting to move people out of the parks, putting their health at risk by forcing them into over crowded shelters.

Above: Police mace protestors and homeless advocates attempting to prevent sweep of Powderhorn Park which had the largest homeless encampment. Photo “courtesy” of the Star Tribune.

Not all parks were swept and some still have people living in tents. Today we had our first real snow of the year, about 6 weeks early. Four inches so far and it’s still falling. The snow is wet and heavy and will collapse any tent not designed for year-round camping.

I have a post that has 40k notes about community organizations that were helping people survive in the areas effected by the May uprisings. (One of the casualties of that uprising was an apartment complex being built for low income residents.) I’m asking folks who reblogged that post to reblog this list of organizations in Minneapolis who help the homeless camped in parks. While I believe that this a problem that our government could solve if it had the will to do so, I also see this as a humanitarian emergency.

Please vote on November 3. If you live Minneapolis, please participate in the local elections to replace a city council who have not managed to address police brutality or homelessness.

The list of local organizations helping homeless in Minneapolis parks is here:

Beltrami Park Encampment relief

Logan Park Encampment help

Chowgirls Greenhouse Project

Project Back to Home (Lake Harriet encampment)

Minneapolis by Patrick Forslund