The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha

“We're interested in exploring connections across activist communities in space,” says Myrl Beam (PhD '14, American studies), associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Macalester College, about the networks integral to the Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha. This project received a Liberal Arts Engagement Hub (the Hub) residency for the 2024–25 academic year. 

Bridging archival research with community voices and oral history practices with local activism, the “community cohort model” of the Long Fire brings a plethora of approaches, perspectives, and voices to understanding the histories and stories of the area around the Minneapolis Police Department’s third precinct. 

Beam, who works on the project with a team of University scholars, gave us a glimpse into the project and this uniquely collaborative approach.

Bringing Community Together

Beam recalls the project’s catalyst: “I was in a queer community listening session about the future of the third precinct, maybe two and a half years ago, maybe three years ago…and I was thinking about how many people in that room I had done organizing with in other spaces [in the area].” He thought, “The physical proximity of all these things...anti-Trans violence, anti-Black policing, queer abolitionist politics, and the daily policing of houseless folks who are predominantly native in that corridor. It felt like an indication of how bound up all those things are.”

From there, he started building a team around the project, drawing five scholars of “many hats” together, composing a team not only of scholars but also of activists, community members, educators, and students. "Collaboration such as this, collaboration that brings myriad perspectives and voices into one place, is at the core of this project."

Put simply, “the project is a collaborative community public history project that is investigating the histories of activism in the neighborhoods around the third precinct in South Minneapolis,” Beam said. The Long Fire asks, “What are other activist campaigns from 20 or 40 or 60 or 100 years ago that informed this activism, that set the stage for it, and how is all of that shaped by settler colonialism and anti-Black racism?”

In this project, answers to questions like these don’t rest in archives alone. “This is a story that really needs to be told polyvocally,” Beam says. “There's a value there at the core [of the Long Fire] about the necessity of collaborative work to think about these histories as histories that no one academic alone could, or should, be trying to tell.”

Connecting Oral Histories

The team started by building “a collaborative project,” Beam says, setting up frameworks and plans to support their aims. “Then we jumped into doing some archival research.” Beam worked with Billund-Phibbs, Natala, and Macalester student, Francesca Barroso, on “a summer of archival research at the Hennepin County Central Library in their special collections.” 

Then, in the fall, with the support of Hub funding, Yates and Bettine took the lead on building the community oral history cohort. Eight community members in the cohort completed an eight-week training on oral history before then reaching out to find “narrators,” community members with stories and histories of the area to share. “Because of the Hub, we were able to pay them for participating in the class. And then also we were able to pay them for each oral history that they did, as well as pay the narrators,” Beam says. 

This model, a web of connections between community members linked by the geographical area and its history, highlights the interwovenness of events and spaces. “We see [different issues and events] above ground as separate things, but underground, they are connected by people and by values,” Beam explains. A project with this model, Beam describes, “[has] more reach [because] all of us have different perspectives or connections to the neighborhood and the uprising, and histories of activism, and our different connections were then able to [spread] out.” 

The Long Fire hosted their cohort in the Hub's annex space in the Nolte Center on the University of Minnesota campus. They also found a sense of community with other Hub residencies: “There were a lot of commonalities among them…we just got to learn from a bunch of different projects, which was really great.”Creating a Chorus

Today, the Long Fire team is in the process of transcribing the oral histories they have recorded. “The end goal,” Beam shares, “is to create a digital exhibit that might involve mapping, or map-based visualization, and potentially timelines…I think there will also be a community teach-back at the Coliseum building this coming year…And then I think that there might be some writing projects from it. I'm really interested in the potential of an anthology or a book collection, maybe even an academic book that looks at the history of racialized sexual policing in South Minneapolis and its connection to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism.” 

As the Long Fire continues its work towards sharing and organizing these oral histories, keep an eye out for exhibits, gatherings, and other publications.

This story was written and edited by an undergraduate student in CLA.