'Ranger In My Heart' documentary debuts Thursday

91.7 KAXE presents the debut of a new, hour-long audio documentary that tries to answer the question, “What does it mean to be an Iron Ranger?”  Award-winning producer Milt Lee visits with young folks and old-timers, retired miners and rock musicians, born-and-bred Rangers and “packsackers” to seek the essence of this special and significant region.

Ranger in My Heart debuts Thurs., Feb. 24, at 8 a.m. with additional broadcasts Fri., Feb. 25 at 6 p.m., Sat., Feb. 26 at noon, and Sun., Feb. 27 at 8 p.m.  KAXE is heard across the Range at 91.7 FM, in Bemidji at 105.3 FM, and in Brainerd at 89.9 FM.  The program will also be streamed live and archived at kaxe.org on the Culturology page.

Milt Lee

Milt Lee is a radio and film producer who grew up in southeastern South Dakota. His wife, Jamie, grew up on the Iron Range. Like most husbands, Milt had always wondered what made Jamie tick. At the same time, KAXE’s parent organization Northern Community Radio was interested in a documentary project about the Iron Range. The convergence of these two interests is the inspiration for Ranger in My Heart.

Milt takes an outsider’s look at the history, people, natural environment, attitudes, and culture of the Iron Range.  The documentary weaves together interviews, music and sounds gathered around the Range.  His interviews include local history sources like Dan Bergan and Aaron Brown as well as prominent area musicians like Matt Ray, Rich Mattson, and Aurora Baer.  A musician himself, Milt finds that he can interpret something about the soul of a people through the music they’re making.

Milt Lee has been producing documentaries for public radio since 1992.  With his writer and wife, Jamie Lee, they have done over 70 long form documentaries. Winners of 6 Golden Reels, the Lees continue to explore the inner workings of grassroots people leading regular lives and discovering the true wealth of America.

Culturology Update: February 7, 2011

by Travis Ryder
This past Thursday morning, KAXE listeners were treated to David McDonald's long-form audio portrait of the first home Minnesota Vikings game played outdoors in exactly 29 years.  Particularly impressive in his essay, I thought, was how many Northern Minnesotans McDonald was able to document, and the overall capture of the atmospherics of such a massive and historic gathering.  Hear it in the AMPERS Archives.

In Minnesota history:

January 31, 1883: The Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, the founding organization of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), is incorporated, with William W. Folwell of the University of Minnesota as its first president.

February 1, 1840: Thomas B. Walker is born in Xenia, Ohio. After making his fortune in lumber, he would plan and develop the Walker Art Gallery, which opened in 1894. He would also play an instrumental role in the creation of the Minneapolis Public Library. He died in 1928.

February 1, 1886: St. Paul's first Winter Carnival opens, hosting competitions in curling, skating, and ice polo and boasting the first ice palace in the United States. Built in Central Park, the palace is 140 feet long, 120 feet wide, and 100 feet high.

February 2, 1996: Minnesota's coldest temperature is recorded at Tower, a minimum extreme of -60 Fahrenheit that bests by one degree the 1899 record low of -59 at Leech Lake.

February 3, 1979: The Minnesota Twins trade future hall-of-famer Rod Carew to the California Angels.

February 4, 1803: The Reverend William T. Boutwell is born in Lyndeborough, New Hampshire. In 1832 he would accompany Henry Schoolcraft on the trip that confirmed Lake Itasca as the source of the Mississippi River, and he would supply the Latin words from which Schoolcraft named the lake (veritas, true, and caput, head). He would also serve as missionary to the Ojibwe in various Minnesota locations until 1847, when he moved to Stillwater, where he died on October 11, 1890.

February 5, 1924: Forty-one iron-ore miners drown or are fatally buried in mud, and seven more escape by climbing a ladder at the Milford Mine north of Crosby. A nearby lake suddenly empties into the underground operation. A county inspector, who had visited the mine the week before the accident, would later state that every precaution had been taken and that the flooding was unavoidable.
February 6, 1967: Duluth's Accordionaires, a group of twenty-four accordion players, give a triumphal concert in their hometown. Organized in 1950, the group had performed around the world, including stops in Japan and the Soviet Union.
February 6, 1996: Governor Arne Carlson closes all state schools due to extreme cold temperatures and wind chills.
February 7, 1851: The territorial legislature votes to make St. Paul the capital and to put the prison in Stillwater.
February 7, 1867: Laura Ingalls (Wilder) is born near Pepin, Wisconsin. Her family would settle in Walnut Grove, Redwood County, from 1874 to 1880 (living briefly in Iowa for the year 1876–77). She is remembered for writing the Little House on the Prairie books.
February 7, 1922: Ga-Be-Nah-Gwen-Wonce, an Ojibwe man also known as "Wrinkled Meat" and reputed to be 137 years of age, dies at Cass Lake.
Find these items and many more in The Minnesota Book of Days, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Entries from the Culture Calendar:
Catherine Holm reads from her new book 'My Heart is a Mountain: Tales of Magic and the Land', Monday night at 6:30, at Lyric Center for the Arts in Virginia.
Bemidji's broad and deep visual art scene is on display with new exhibits that debuted in last week's Firs Friday art walk.  The Bemidji Community Art Center has the comprehensive list.
Oils, acrylics, watercolors, and encaustics from BSU faculty member Natalia Himmirska, and mixed-media creations by Marlon Davidson and Don Knudson, are at MacRostie Art Center through February.  Hibbing Community College instructor Daryn Lowman presents a lecture and demonstration focused on these current exhibits at the MAC starting at 6 p.m. this Wednesday night, February 9.
Also February 9, musician Sela Oveson, who has been profiled on Centerstage Minnesota, presents a CD release party for the album 'Rogue Lightning'.  That runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at Brewed Awakenings Coffeehouse in downtown Grand Rapids.  Competing for the ears of downtown district live music lovers will be Sam Miltich and his jazz combo at the VFW, also from 7 to 9.  Uptown, the electrified string quartet Stringfever blows minds at the Reif Center starting at 7:30.
And also on the event-heavy Wednesday, February 9, the Edge Center for the Arts in Bigfork screens the 1943 wartime rom-com 'The More The Merrier' at 6:30 p.m. 

An Historic Day: The Last Armed Conflict Between Native Americans and the U.S. Government (until Wounded Knee in 1973)

From "The Minnesota Book of Days":

On October 5th, 1898, The Battle of Sugar Point occurred on Leech Lake. Soldiers from the Third Infantry had accompanied U.S. Marshal R. T. O'Connor to arrest Bugonaygeshig, of the Bear Island Pillager Indians. Bugonaygeshig had protested practices of lumber companies on the reservation, and he was in turn accused of illegal liquor sales. When O'Connor came to arrest him, Bugonaygeshig was rescued by a group of Ojibwe. O'Connor then requested assistance from General John M. Bacon at Fort Snelling, who traveled with eighty soldiers on a steamer to Sugar Point on Leech Lake, where Bugonaygeshig and his friends were living. Six soldiers are killed in the ensuing battle, while Bugonaygeshig escaped and was never arrested.

Here's more background on the causes of the battle from Wikipedia sources:

The main issues between the Pillagers and local officials whose mistreatment included the frequent arrests of tribal members on trivial charges and transporting them far from the Leech Lake Reservation for trial. This was often the case of members who had witnessed criminal acts.
During the 1880s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers began building dams in the Mississippi Headwaters. One of the dams was built on Leech Lake flooding parts of the Pillager reservation and causing the displacement of villages and ruining the soil. However, it was nearby logging companies which caused considerable resentment. Although the logging companies agreed to annuity payments in exchange for harvesting dead and fallen timber on the reservation, the value was often underestimated and payments were frequently late. Some loggers set fire to the foundation of living trees in order to pass off as dead timber.

Bugonaygeshig started protesting against business practices of the lumber companies on the reservation in early 1898. However, when he and Sha-Boon-Day-Shkong traveled to Onigum on September 15, they were seized by U.S. Deputy Marshal Robert Morrison and U.S. Indian Agent Arthur M. Tinker as witnesses to a bootlegging operation and were going to be transported to Duluth (Bugonaygeshig had previously testified at another bootlegging trial in the port city on Lake Superior five months earlier). As the two were being led away, several Pillagers attacked Morrison and Tinker allowing Bugonaygeshig and Sha-Boon-Day-Shkong to escape custody.

Following the battle on October 5th...
The Pillagers finally dispersed early the next day and the soldiers headed back to St. Paul. Although there was initial panic among the neighboring settlements of attacks against Deer River, Grand Rapids, Bemidji and Aitkin, public fears of another Indian uprising subsided after newspapers began reporting the circumstances of the attack. The day after the battle, the Cass County Pioneer published a letter by the Pillagers which said the following,

“

We, the undersigned chiefs and headmen of the Pillager band of Chippewa [Ojibwe] Indians of Minnesota ... respectfully represent that our people are carrying a heavy burden, and in order that they may not be crushed by it, we humbly petition you to send a commission, consisting of men who are honest and cannot be controlled by lumbermen, to investigate the existing troubles here ... We now have only the pine lands of our reservation for our future subsistence and support, but the manner in which we are being defrauded out of these has alarmed us. The lands are now, as heretofore, being underestimated by the appraisers, the pine thereon is being destroyed by fires in order to create the class of timber known as dead or down timber, so as to enable [others] to cut and sell the same for their own benefit.[2]

”