MPR News: North Star Journey

Launched in 2022, North Star Journey is a reporting project from MPR News that celebrates the history and culture that make up diverse communities across Minnesota. With a focus on undertold narratives, the initiative uncovers problems but focuses on solutions and the people who are driving them.

In surveys following our 74 Seconds podcast ' which we produced in 2017 around the trial of the police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop ' MPR listeners told us that they needed something that could help them understand. They wanted a trusted guide to walk with them, step by step, through a challenging, complicated moment and help them make sense of things. They wanted context and history. They wanted the tools to better navigate their world. The killing of George Floyd made this even more imperative.

MPR News is well-positioned to provide this context to Minnesotans. We have a long history of exploring injustice in our daily and ongoing news coverage, we have our archives of historical reporting and cultural events going back more than 50 years, and we have a public service mission.

North Star Journey helps make better sense of some of the divisions and inequity we see in Minnesota today for MPR's current listeners. We also hope that this reporting might build trust with audiences who are new to MPR as people see themselves in this reporting. Ultimately, we want to learn the lessons of history and also connect audiences to people and communities who are making a difference across the state as we look to create a more equitable Minnesota for the future.

Over the coming biennium, our cadence of North Star Journey reporting will include a focus on The American Indian Movement (AIM) is best known for its 71-day occupation of a trading post in Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973. It will explore why AIM begin in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis and what were the social and economic conditions that prompted its founders to form a civil rights organization focused on Native American sovereignty. MPR News will interview living AIM members, community members and historians about the group's origins to create content for all platforms, including a limited series podcast. In addition to the rich MPR archive, we will partner with several other archival sources, including the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota Historical Society, The University Archives at the University of Minnesota Library, and Seeing Red Audio Archive at Institute of American Indian Art.

This project is an evolution of North Star Journey and will be part of a larger Native News project at MPR News as well. We know the Upper Midwest (and national) Native community has one of the strongest social networks and these stories are often our most engaged.

MPR News is working to get to the root of the issues and to present a spectrum of narratives. We'll bring these stories to you on-air and online, via podcast and video, in long form and short form.