Surly Brewing Co.’s beer hall and beer garden will tentatively reopen June 1 after a November closure that came amid lockdown challenges and a failed unionization attempt from its workers.

For ex-Surly workers who lost their jobs in November, the news is less than welcome. Multiple restaurant employees said that management had not contacted them for their jobs back, but they would not go back even if asked.

“For me, there’s just better beer in town with employers that treat their employees better. So that’s where I would go,” said Megan Caswell, a bartender who worked at Surly for five years and helped lead unionization efforts.

Surly’s Instagram announcement said it would reopen “thanks to the remarkable progress being made on the vaccination front in MN.”

The Prospect Park mainstay closed in November, citing an 82% decline in on-site food and beer sales during the pandemic, reported the Star Tribune. Management announced the impending closure two days after workers declared their intent to unionize in August, in what many workers and customers called a union-busting tactic.

The vote to unionize then took place in October, a month after management announced the impending closure. It failed by one vote.

“After everybody lost their jobs, it was really hard for them to have any interest in the [union] election anymore,” Caswell said.

Though Surly’s was going to close no matter what, workers could have had more influence in negotiating their prioritization for rehiring if they had a union.

Surly’s Senior Marketing Director Holly Manthei said the company is going to start by hiring key leadership positions, like an executive chef and general manager. In an email to the Minnesota Daily, she said that “all qualified candidates and former employees are encouraged to apply to any open positions.”

Manthei declined to answer questions about whether the company would offer jobs first to former employees. She also declined to answer questions about the unionization effort or its impact on the Surly image and business model.

The timeline for reopening may be adjusted due to pandemic restrictions, Manthei said.

Surly beer production has continued throughout the last few months, even as the beer hall and restaurant were closed.

Katherine Huska, a former food runner at Surly, said workers started the union efforts because “we really just cared about each other’s safety and wanted each other to have a better job and to be heard.”

Employees’ discontent began once Surly reopened with limited capacity last June, Caswell said. She said management changed the business model, service model and employee wages.

“I technically got a wage increase because my hourly pay went up, … but they effectively took our tips away,” Caswell said. Caswell said her daily wages plummeted without tips.

The new service model stopped table service and instead encouraged customers to line up at the bar to order, said ex-server Jacob Ruff, adding that it seemed wrong to have all of the customers in one place during a pandemic.

Dozens of customers commented on Surly’s social media posts asking management to recognize the union before returning.

Longtime customer Scotty Imberg said he loved spending time at Surly’s in past years because of the good food, beer and friendly staff. He said in an Instagram message to the Minnesota Daily that he “would like to see the owners take accountability for their actions against their loyal workers, and offer jobs back to any employee who wants their old job back” before he returns.

The city of Minneapolis signed on to the Just Deeds initiative March 3, creating a free pathway for homeowners to discharge racial covenants that still exist in the deeds to their homes.

Supporters say Just Deeds is an early step in broader discussions about the impacts of racial covenants, which are contracts created in the early 1900s that blocked people of color from owning a property. Seven cities in Hennepin County have decided to take part in the Just Deeds project, and 101 covenants have been discharged so far.

Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota-affiliated group of historians, geographers and community members, partnered with Just Deeds to share its map of racial covenants in Hennepin County. More than 8,000 racial covenants were recorded in Minneapolis.

For homeowners, the process is free and fairly straightforward; they can see on the map if there is a racial covenant on their property and connect with attorneys through the Just Deeds website who help discharge the covenant for free.

Golden Valley city attorney Maria Cisneros, who spearheaded the initiative in 2020, said University students have also volunteered with the project to raise awareness about racism in housing and the lasting effects of these racist policies.

Racial covenants were made illegal with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, but Cisneros said “that was never enough to make the impacts of this go away.”

In 2010, Minneapolis’ population was 69% white. But neighborhoods where racial covenants were common are still 73-90% white, according to data from the city’s Just Deeds website.

In 2019, Minneapolis’ Black homeownership rate was the lowest of any metro area across the country at 25%, and racially segregated neighborhoods tend to have fewer parks, fewer amenities and more environmental hazards.

Cisneros said discharging the covenants is the first step for homeowners and city officials to open a larger discussion on how racial covenants impacted where resources and amenities — like grocery stores, schools and transit — were developed.

“It kind of goes back to the whole nature of white supremacy and our system where it tries to be colorblind or look innocuous, but it is really driving a lot of resource distribution,” Cisneros said. “So we’re trying to think about how all that is connected and what changes we need to make.”

Cisneros started the Just Deeds project after she bought her home with her husband, who is Afro-Latino, and realized that there was a racial covenant on the property.

“If we had been buying this house at the time that my grandparents built a house a mile away … our kids are mixed race; they wouldn’t have been allowed to live here,” Cisneros said.

Looking at the map of Hennepin County, there are large clusters of racial covenants in south Minneapolis and along the borders of the surrounding suburbs.

Dr. Greg Donofrio, a professor of historic preservation and public history at the University, said the racial covenants were a tool of white supremacy.

“There was … a fear, a desire to keep people of color out of the suburbs. Suburbs were designed to be racially exclusive places,” he said.

Kiarra Zackery, equity and inclusion manager for the city of Golden Valley, said she grew up in south Minneapolis where her “dad is the only Black man on his block and has been for 27 years.”

She said her work on this project has been meaningful after seeing the striking differences between her workplace in Golden Valley and her new home in north Minneapolis, which she bought during the beginning of the George Floyd protests.

In Golden Valley, neighbors were able to “walk around in the neighborhood and everything seemed normal” during the protests, Zackery said.

“On the other hand, I had my partner literally staying up all night to protect the sole grocery store in north Minneapolis so it wouldn’t be burned down because there would be nowhere for folks to get food over here,” she said.

Television crews crowded around radio host Abdirizak Bihi Friday as a nurse injected him with a COVID-19 vaccine. Bihi, a community leader in Cedar-Riverside, said it was important for him to show his neighbors that the inoculation is safe.

Bihi was a key figure in a clinic hosted by the Brian Coyle Center to help promote the vaccine to the East African community. Several community leaders, including an assistant imam, received vaccinations and talked about it on local TV programs to encourage others to do the same.

“If [East African neighbors] are anxious about something, and they actually see the leaders and if the leaders or the imams do it, then it’s okay to do it. It’s safe,” Bihi said.

Nurses from Cedar-Riverside’s People’s Center clinic vaccinated 40 neighbors from 1-4 p.m., and they will come back every Friday to distribute vaccinations at the Coyle Center “as long as we see the need,” said Paula Guinn, chief advancement officer with the People’s Center.

Residents can call the Coyle Center or come in person to set up an appointment to receive the vaccine. Vaccines are good for six hours after the bottle is opened, so Guinn said she needs to bring the exact amount that they will use to make sure none go to waste.

Guinn said that in a typical day they distribute about a hundred doses.

After a lot of success with testing at the Coyle Center in the summer and fall, they felt the community hub would also draw in many neighbors for vaccinations, she said.

“Testing over here went well,” Brian Coyle Center director Amano Dube said. “And let’s now do the vaccine … and make it easy for the community to walk over to the place they go all the time.”

Dube added that some members of the East African community are hesitant to receive a vaccine because of negative misinformation circulated through social media and word-of-mouth. He said as they hear good things from neighbors and relatives that receive it, they become more willing to get a dose themselves.

Some of the hesitancy also comes from “the history of treating BIPOC folks poorly in the field of medicine,” said Dave Alderson, co-executive director of the Cedar-Riverside Community Council (CRCC). He added that access is also an issue, but setting up a clinic in the Coyle Center helped make the vaccine available in a familiar location.

The CRCC went door-to-door, made flyers and called residents to advertise the event. Alderson said he hired two people to increase promotion for the weekly clinics this spring.

“The focus for us right now is on working in collaboration with People’s Center and Coyle to fill up the available slots that the People’s Center Clinic can accommodate,” Alderson said.

Guinn said People’s Center representatives will visit nearby mosques and partner with the imams to further encourage vaccinations.

Throughout the state, vaccinations for Black Minnesotans and other racial minorities trail behind those of the white population, according to the state’s March 6 vaccine data.

Black or African American residents make up 6% of the population but account for 3.5% of vaccinations. In comparison, about 82% of Minnesotans are white, but they received nearly 91% of the vaccinations.

Hennepin County officials have relied on new strategies such as working with about 25 “trusted messengers” — residents who are well respected within their community — to reach BIPOC and immigrant populations.

“You want an engagement team that is reflective of the community that we’re trying to reach,” said Kelsey Dawson Walton, division manager of the county’s engagement services.

Dawson Walton said the county has worked with trusted messengers and various media outlets to distribute health information and more than 360,000 face masks in the county within the past year.

Bihi and Imam Sharif Mohamed, from the nearby Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque, are trusted messengers in Cedar-Riverside. They help estimate the neighborhood’s need for things like masks and hand sanitizer, said Zam Zam Ali, Hennepin County engagement lead for the East African community.

“We’re very involved over there. Sometimes people will be like, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of focus on that area,’” Ali said. “But it’s because there’s a lot of people that live over there and … there’s a lot of leaders that are reaching out to us and asking for the resources.”

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) released a study on rent stabilization while the Minneapolis Charter Commission considers two amendments that would pave the way for a limit on rent increases.

The city commissioned the study, which was released last month, for context on developing the charter amendments. It revealed that lower-income renters have recently experienced the largest rent increases, and the University area experiences greater upticks than anywhere else in the city.

“Lower-income renters really have trouble in the market,” said Ed Goetz, CURA director. “Rents increased at higher percentages than [for] other groups, and they had less income growth.”

The average rent increase per year in Minneapolis from 2013-2018, following the 2008-2012 housing market crash, was 2.7% — with the highest year-to-year increase being 9.4%. In University-area neighborhoods, the average annual rent climbed 3.3% from 2013-2018, the greatest uptick in Minneapolis.

Goetz said the study does not explain this, but he has a guess: “The highest rent increases occurred in older buildings, built before 2000, and so this area likely has a lot of these buildings,” he said in an email.

The Charter Commission has 150 days to review the study and provide recommendations or a ruling on two charter amendments that would then go on the ballot in November 2021. The first would allow the City Council to implement rent control by passing it or putting it on the ballot as a city question.

The second allows the citizens to write a rent stabilization policy and get a question on the November 2022 ballot.

Qannani Omar, housing organizer with Harrison Neighborhood Association, works with Minneapolis United for Rent Control (MURC) to educate Minneapolis-based advocacy groups and community organizations about rent stabilization. She believes the Council offered these two pathways to give Minneapolis residents a choice.

“If they design a policy that may not align with the values that we’re hoping for, our coalition partners are ready to create our own ordinance and put it on the ballot,” said Omar.

The CURA study showed that many cities set the rent cap at the consumer price index (CPI), or a variation of that percentage, such as CPI plus 3%. Goetz said this could be a benchmark for Minneapolis’ rent cap.

“CPI is kind of an independent measure of costs in the local economy set by an independent party, not landlords or tenants,” Goetz said. It considers average costs of living, such as transportation, food and medical care.

If the rent cap were set at the CPI, it would change year to year, but in Minneapolis, it would probably land between 3%-5%, Goetz said.

The study also revealed some of the cracks in the existing policies around the country. The rent cap sometimes acted as an incentive for landlords to neglect building upkeep or convert apartments to condominiums in order to avoid the limit, Goetz said. He said local governments responded by creating other programs to counter these negative effects.

Minneapolis tenant and landlord groups are still concerned about some aspects of the ordinance.

MURC organizers want to ensure this potential rent cap does not exempt any rental housing, Omar said. The rent stabilization ordinances in other cities sometimes exclude single-family homes or new construction to encourage developers to build in the area, Goetz said.

“If we start carving out special exemptions for newer buildings or older buildings or try to take out single-family homes, it really causes an imbalance of which rental units will be available and will still be affordable,” Omar said.

For property owners, this possible ordinance has not been successful in other cities because it does not address the lack of housing for renters of different incomes, said Cecil Smith, CEO of the Minnesota Multi Housing Association (MHA). He added that lawmakers should focus their efforts on creating more housing instead.

Blois Olson, a spokesperson for MHA, said property tax increases, which are set by the city, are the biggest cost drivers on housing in Minneapolis.

“Then there’s nowhere else to pass those [costs] along to other than the renters,” Olson said.

Interstate 94 sliced through Cedar-Riverside in the 1960s, cutting it off from downtown Minneapolis.

Currently, the Minnesota Department of Transportation is in the public engagement process for its Rethinking I-94 initiative, which looks at a stretch of the freeway in Minneapolis and St. Paul and intends to reconnect communities torn apart by the road’s construction, including this West Bank neighborhood.

In December, Minneapolis published a resolution stating that the city opposes reconstructing the freeway in its current form and that Rethinking I-94 must avoid or mitigate “any negative impacts to livability, safety or environmental burden to adjacent and connecting neighborhoods.” The resolution fits within the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, prioritize alternate transit and improve racial equity.

In Cedar-Riverside, residents said they wanted Minneapolis transportation authorities to increase walkability and not increase traffic on the freeways and within the busy neighborhood streets.

Longtime neighbor and project manager for the city of St. Paul Kowsar Mohamed said the traffic congestion is dangerous for the children and elderly population that live and walk nearby. She said it’s important for city authorities to keep these dangers in mind when planning construction detours.

“It is highly recommended that we raise awareness at any given point if there is going to be construction,” Mohamed said. “That the detours aren’t pushed over here because there is already a high amount of cars that come through our neighborhood intersections on Fourth Street, on Cedar [and] Riverside.”

The resolution emphasizes increasing alternative transportation, like rapid transit and bicycle connections over the freeway.

Mohamed said she wants city authorities to engage more with community members and consider implications for Cedar-Riverside while developing the Rethinking I-94 initiative.

“This is a highly knowledgeable and aware community of their surroundings,” Mohamed said. “They know what their needs are, obviously walkability … having increased opportunities for economic development and prosperity and social capital is always at the forefront of any emerging community.”

A vision for Cedar-Riverside

The freeway system decimated neighborhoods across the country. In St. Paul, the construction of I-94 tore apart the historically Black Rondo neighborhood, home to a flourishing and vibrant Black middle-class. In all, at least 700 homes and 300 businesses were demolished.
But in Cedar-Riverside, community leader Abdirizak Bihi said the freeway provided transportation and job opportunities for residents.

“As the current condition of the community, this immigrant community that depends on highways to get jobs that are not in the city or to travel on public transportation, it’s really useful,” Bihi said.

Bihi added that many of his neighbors had jobs in suburbs or transit-related jobs like driving for Uber or Lyft, so the easy commute is essential.

However, Mohamed said she wants the city to install more pedestrian bridges and make sidewalks safer.

Currently, there is one pedestrian bridge that connects to the Seward neighborhood, and when it is under construction, she said it’s more difficult for residents to leave the neighborhood.

But Cedar-Riverside and Seward once were deeply connected before they evolved into separate communities after freeway construction, said David Markle, who has lived in the neighborhood since the early ‘60s.

On the West Bank, I-94 sliced through homes, a church, locally-owned businesses and Augsburg University, Markle said. An influx of renters also moved to the area.

A community “created in the shadow of the freeways”

When officials determined where the freeway would run, they considered the highway a tool to clear “blight” or “slums” in the city, which was subject to interpretation, said Greg Donofrio, director of A Public History of 35W and University of Minnesota professor.

“Blight was also often racially coded,” Donofrio said. “Blighted neighborhoods were neighborhoods where immigrants lived, where poor people lived or where people of color lived.”

In the ‘60s, when the interstate was constructed, Cedar-Riverside hosted high populations of Scandanavian and Irish immigrants, according to a Twin Cities Daily Planet article. It was also a hub for the counterculture — hippies, and beatniks.

Two developers, Martin and Gloria Segal, bought up many smaller pieces of land with the end goal of a “New Town in Town” concept that would create a community within a community. They wanted to redevelop most of the neighborhood into high-rise apartment buildings with a wide variety of income types.

“The Scandanavian and Eastern European populations were growing older, and Cedar Avenue was becoming a part of the underbelly of the city’s nightlife,” said Tim Mungavan, director of the West Bank Community Development Corporation. “And so the idea was to just make a clean slate and get rid of everything.”

Ralph Rapson, a notable architect associated with the University, helped the Segals design Riverside Plaza apartment complex as the first phase of this plan. For the developers, making a clean slate included clearing the existing immigrant population in the neighborhood, Mungavan said.

“[The developers] bought a property and basically would rent that property to hippie households as kind of a blockbusting technique,” Mungavan said. “The older Scandinavians who were not that interested in moving, when they ended up with a neighbor that had this totally different and objectionable lifestyle, that sort of softened them up and helped [the developers] buy their property.”

However, the “hippie population” organized against the development in the early ‘70s, and the “utopian” intent for the neighborhood crumbled as the developers halted progress, Mungavan said.

By the ‘70s, a new wave of Vietnamese immigrants moved into Riverside Plaza, followed by East African immigrants in the ‘90s to shape the ethnically diverse neighborhood that it is today.

“So that existing community has been sort of created in the shadow of those freeways,” Mungavan said. “And it’s pretty much adapted to it.”

Minneapolis City Council members and community leaders are looking to advance a rent stabilization proposal that would cap the annual rent increase so landlords cannot dramatically increase costs.

Council members have not determined the percentage increase limit, but the typical amount for other cities with the ordinance ranges from 3% to 10%. The proposal could end up on the ballot this November.

The ordinance will go through a public hearing around the end of the month, and the University’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) will present research on rent stabilization ordinances in other cities to help inform council members.

Minnesota has a law that states cities require voter approval to enforce rent control. So, officials are looking to pass the ordinance either through a charter amendment or a city council process that is then voted on by the public, said Ward 2 City Council member Cam Gordon, who is leading the proposal.

More than half of all renters in University-area neighborhoods are considered “cost-burdened,” according to 2015-2019 data from Minnesota Compass. A cost-burdened household pays more than a third of their income toward rent and may have difficulty affording necessities like food or medical care.

Ryan Allen, director of the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, said he has seen rents in large metropolitan areas increasing much more quickly than household incomes in recent decades. He said that rent stabilization could be a tool to help bridge this gap.

“The research on the effects of rent stabilization or rent control policies indicates very, very clearly that for housing units that are affected by the stabilization. … the rents go up at a slower rate than they ordinarily would have,” Allen said.

In some cities with rent control ordinances, Allen said newly constructed residences are exempt from this rule so developers are not discouraged from building.

For renters, this ordinance is an opportunity to plan ahead and avoid any expensive surprises waiting for them at the end of the month.

Rodriguez, a renter with Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia — one of the organizations promoting the ordinance — said recent rent increases have put a strain on her family. Rodriguez declined to give her first name for fear of retribution from her landlord.

She said each time her landlord raised her rent, tenants were given about 15 days notice before they had to pay. Her husband is the only one in the household who works, making it difficult to accommodate the unexpected extra rent within their monthly budget.

“How are we supposed to be able to pay these high rents, plus the rent increases, when we’re not making any more money?” she told the Minnesota Daily in Spanish, relayed through a translator with Inquilinxs Unidxs Por Justicia. “It’s not paying us enough to be able to pay these rent increases in the first place.”

Rodriguez said her rent started at $775 a month, and the landlord increased it to $850, then $950, all within about a year — about a 23% increase in a short period of time. She said this was especially difficult to pay in the middle of the pandemic.

“It’s really heartbreaking that we’re in this position of having to choose between paying rent and being able to feed our families,” Rodriguez said. “And oftentimes both parents are forced into working sometimes even multiple jobs, and then childcare is not very accessible either.”

Conversely, some believe the ordinance would have negative consequences in the long run for landlords and tenants, said Mike Jacka, president of Minnesota Real Estate Investors Association.

He said property conditions would deteriorate because there would be less incentive for the landlord to fix the property.

“If there’s no financial incentive for the landlord to increase the value of the property, aka by getting a higher rent from a tenant who’s willing to pay more to get a nicer property, then what’s the incentive?” Jacka said.

After several years and a lawsuit about the 200 Central Ave. SE development, the Minneapolis Planning Commission approved the latest version last month with twice as many units and less parking.

Despite mixed responses from residents, the commission approved the project, leaving only parking variances up for debate. The developer plans to move ahead on construction in late 2021.

Minneapolis-based developer Alatus announced the cancellation of its Marcy-Holmes condos project in 2019, instead looking into rental units. Alatus still owns the land and will contribute as co-developer with CRG for the project, formerly called the Alia condos.

The project will be a 28-story building with 360 market-rate apartment units and 3,800 square feet of commercial space. Four years ago, Alatus originally planned for more than 200 condos that would stretch 42 stories tall, a height that some residents did not want in the historic St. Anthony Main area.

“The currently approved plan is short while still offering the same street level aesthetic to compliment the historic Pillsbury Library but a type-one tower that will be unlike any other currently in the Twin Cities market,” Chris Osmundson, Alatus director of development, said in an email.

The planning commission approved the developer’s request to downsize car parking from 238 to 222 spaces at the Jan. 25 meeting.

“We’re looking at a number of sustainable design strategies,” Gretchen Camp, an architect with ESG Architecture & Design, said at the meeting. “One of those strategies is actually to utilize the adjacent parking ramp, and that’s why we’re asking for the vehicle parking reduction.”

The Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association (MHNA) wrote a letter of support for the Alatus condos years ago. MHNA director Chris Lautenschlager said the project offered community benefits like improving the streetscape, but some nearby residents were against it regardless.

Lautenschlager said the neighborhood would have liked it if the current project offered those same amenities.

Car and bike parking spots and electric vehicle charging stations were the only items up for debate with the city. The developers agreed to keep 463 bike parking spots and amended the application to include 10 electric vehicle charging stations, satisfying MHNA’s goals for a green project, Lautenschlager said.

However, not all area residents were satisfied. A few voiced concerns about the easy path forward for the newest iteration of the project, despite the past lawsuit. Neighbors for East Bank Livability had filed a lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis for approving the tower’s height in 2016, which successfully slowed Alatus from moving forward on the project.

The appeal was later denied by the Minnesota Court of Appeals.

“We worked hard to point out the inconsistencies of the project that was on the table in 2016 about how out-of-sync with the historic district that the 42-story tower was, this is no different,” Jeff Wright, treasurer for the Neighbors for East Bank Livability group, said at the planning commission meeting. “How long is this project going to continue to be viable?”

J.J. Smith, developer with CRG, said all that is left is design work, filing for permits and closing on financing before they plan to start construction in the second half of 2021.

The West Bank bar and restaurant Republic closed with plans to relocate from its Cedar-Riverside location.

Republic announced its “bar and dining room will be closed until further notice” in a Nov. 8 Facebook post. The building owners put the building up for sale and Republic will move to a different location, according to the bar’s general manager Pejmon Nadimi.

The new location and timeline for opening is “to be determined,” Nadimi said.

Matty O’Reilly, the owner of Republic, could not be reached for comment. O’Reilly owned three other restaurants and a hospitality consulting business in the Twin Cities area before September, according to a Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal article.

O’Reilly closed the St. Paul restaurant Bar Brigade and consulting business Banner Year Advisors in September 2020, according to the article. As for O’Reilly’s other two restaurants, The Foxtrot Burger Spot in St. Paul is listed online as permanently closed and Nadimi and another partner took over management of Sandy’s Tavern in Richfield at the end of last year.

While other neighborhoods near the University of Minnesota have lost some landmark institutions, West Bank restaurants have mostly weathered the storm of the pandemic.

The restaurant landscape largely remains the same in Cedar-Riverside despite the challenges of COVID-19 lockdowns. The West Bank Business Association (WBBA) rolled out initiatives throughout the pandemic to help ease new businesses into the area and support established locations.

Acadia cafe posted to Facebook in September that it was seeking new ownership. The restaurant has been closed since June during remodeling.

“After 18 years, two locations, countless music/karaoke/theater shows and a pandemic, the owners are ready to move on,” the post read. “The business is currently closed for renovations and covid, and we’re looking for someone to bring it into its next phase.”

Malabari Kitchen, an Indian restaurant on Cedar Avenue South, closed in March with no plans to reopen.

No restaurants have opened in the neighborhood within the last year, said KJ Starr, business services director of WBBA. But JoJo Ndege hoped to.

He originally planned to open Kilimanjaro Grill last June but said the pandemic difficulties forced him to delay the opening date to fall of this year. The restaurant will be located in the old Viking Bar location, though the work on the building is not yet completed.

Ndege has hosted a radio show called African Rhythms for more than ten years and has been involved with many African music events in the area, so he said it felt “natural” to open his restaurant in Cedar-Riverside.

“I felt that if I brought in the cuisine part of it, it will just enrich the neighborhood even more,” Ndege said. “We’ll invite different chefs to do different foods from different ethnicities, but all of that is not going to work anytime soon, so when we open we’re going to start with the catering.”

Kilimanjaro Grill will offer take-out options, catering services and possibly a sidewalk cafe. Ndege said he had to completely discard his first business plan once the pandemic hit.

“So, the first thing is how we’re going to be able to change within short notice with whatever happens,” Ndege said. “The second thing is there’s no certainty as to how we’re going to end up.”

Many restaurants have added or expanded online ordering options. Michelle Kwan, owner of Keefer Court, said the pandemic has not significantly impacted their sales, because their bakery already had an extensive takeout menu.

“In addition to being a bakery and everything, it’s definitely been different, because we never did delivery before and starting last year, we started doing delivery with those third-party businesses,” Kwan said, noting that she had to set delivery prices higher to cover the extra costs of third-party apps.

Many West Bank businesses are a part of the WBBA and could take part in the initiatives that they are setting in place this year, such as websites for businesses on WBBA’s directory. Starr said the association is putting together photos and small stories for each of their 200 member businesses that will be linked to an interactive map on the WBBA website.

“So, you can click on the map on our website, and I can pull up like what is your grocery and you can see [the owner] and his mother and all the cool foods they have at their grocery store,” Starr said.

Starr said that the association is also planning to assemble a framework and staffing for a restorative justice program in the neighborhood. WBBA helps restaurant owners to apply for grants and loans as needed, as well.

At The Red Sea, a mainstay that has been in the neighborhood for decades, the bar and live music venue have been closed since March, and dining capacity is still limited to 50%.

Russom Solomon, longtime owner of the Ethiopian restaurant, said he is just waiting for the state’s restrictions to ease.

“It’s a constantly changing neighborhood,” Solomon said. “But we have adapted with the change.”

For more than a century, Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and driven into boarding schools where their hair was cut, and they were stripped of their culture.

Now, Indigenous community members and University of Minnesota researchers are looking at the trauma caused by this practice.

The Child Removal in Native Communities Survey centers the experiences of American Indian and Alaskan Native people who were forced into boarding schools and the foster care system, focusing on the generational impact of these practices. Led by Native researchers, it is meant to study the trauma inflicted on Indigenous communities and subsequent healing.

In April 2019, two Indigenous community-based researchers opened the survey with a ceremony, establishing that their academic research would be “guided by spirit, not just by the intellect,” said Sandy White Hawk, a Sicangu Lakota tribal citizen and founder of the First Nations Repatriation Institute.

Christine Diindiisi McCleave, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation and CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, co-led the study and said academic research of Native communities historically has been extractive and privileges the voices of researchers who are not Indigenous.

This research is different.

Diindiisi McCleave said that her and White Hawk’s leadership in the project has been critical because they had direct experience with boarding school survivors and Native American adoptees.

“We Indigenous peoples, we don’t want to be studied from the outside,” Diindiisi McCleave said. “We have a lot to say about our own histories, about our own experience and about our experience with American history.”

A survey and a ceremony

The approximately 30-minute survey looks at three different experiences: if the respondent went to boarding school, if their family went to boarding school, or if they were adopted or put into foster care. Participants could fill out one or all segments, depending on which fit their experiences.

Because of COVID-19, the researchers have stopped recruiting participants for the survey, though it is still open online. Diindiisi McCleave said the survey addresses difficult experiences, so the team did not want to push the survey on people who were already under pandemic-related stress.

Carolyn Liebler, a University of Minnesota sociologist who is helping to lead the research alongside White Hawk and Diindiisi McCleave, said their approach is “totally different” from other research.

“We have ceremonies and prayers as part of the research process … talking about things holistically, recognizing that just because time passes doesn’t mean things change,” Liebler said.

Until the pandemic is over, the team will not close the survey or move on to analysis. The researchers are aiming for 1,000 participants and currently have about 600, Liebler said.

She added that they plan to attend in-person events once the pandemic is over to meet with the tribes in large groups and provide paper copies of the survey while offering support for participants who are sharing traumatic experiences.

“And then we will have a ceremony when the survey closes to thank the community for allowing this to exist,” Liebler said.

Generations of trauma, and the path to healing

The research unearths a painful era of federally mandated Indian boarding schools that were enforced from 1860 to around 1980.

At this time, government officials forced many Indigenous children to leave their families to attend boarding schools and assimilate to white, Christian culture. Eventually, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 gave jurisdiction of children to tribal governments, enabling tribes and families to be involved in child welfare cases.

White Hawk previously conducted research on Native American adoptees and served as an honorary witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, which addressed a similar era of boarding schools and aimed to facilitate reconciliation between former students and their communities.

“I listened to three days of testimony from former boarding school attendees,” White Hawk said. “And nearly every single individual said, ‘I did not know how to express love to my child [because of the boarding schools].’”

White Hawk said boarding schools led to the “breakdown of the family,” which continued into the adoption era where many Native children were adopted into white families. This resulted in further assimilation and loss of Indigenous culture — which included assigning children “white” names, forbidding them from speaking their Native language, cutting their traditionally long hair and converting them to Christianity.

Today, these effects are still apparent as American Indian children are 18 times more likely to experience out-of-home care than white children, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

“The result is: You were disconnected, you were removed. You lost that connection to your family, your language and culture, your community, your homelands,” Diindiisi McCleave said. “If the harms and impacts are the same or similar, then the healing path is also similar, where the healing comes from reconnecting with language and culture, returning home.”

The researchers said they hope gathering data will help provide a legal basis for experiences they have known for decades.

“That’s part of why we need empirical data, right? It’s part of the westernized system,” Diindiisi McCleave said. “It’s something that people will believe and rely upon.”