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It was a frightened and weary nation that headed into Memorial Day weekend 2020, having been drained by a divisive impeachment trial, shocked by Kobe Bryant’s death and traumatized by a worldwide pandemic unlike any calamity in living memory. Americans had grown tired of waiting in line for groceries, hoarding toilet paper, arguing over which workers are or are not “essential,” managing schoolchildren without schools, missing baseball, basketball, restaurants, amusement parks, movies and malls, being shut in and locked down (or, at great risk to themselves, serving those who were shut in and locked down). They were advised to spend the summer’s annual three-day launch party at home, but many were having none of it and saw the long weekend as a chance to finally put the crazy first part of the year in the rearview mirror.
Special YES PNS Report George Floyd Anniversary and Reimagining Public Safety / Public News Service publicnewsservice.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from publicnewsservice.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Heidi Ehalt, Dana Thompson
It takes a certain level of bravery to open a restaurant during a pandemic. Then there’s the outright audacity required to open one of America’s first Indigenous-focused, fully decolonized restaurants during a pandemic in Minneapolis a city that, with George Floyd’s murder a year ago, became a Midwestern microcosm of America’s racism problem. A city where this spring, while residents simultaneously tried to stop the collective bleeding and brace themselves for the fallout of the Derek Chauvin trial, Daunte Wright was slain just miles away in a devastating episode of déjà vu. The same city where in 2018, the so-called Wall of Forgotten Natives became Minnesota’s largest pre-pandemic homeless settlement. And where in 2017, a prestigious arts center sparked great controversy with its “Scaffold” sculpture, a work by a non-Indigenous artist that replicated the gallows where 38 Dakota men were hanged in nearby Mankato in 1862, in what remains th
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HE PLACE that is now known as George Floyd Square is these days blocked to cars, creating an effective memorial. Walk in from the Powderhorn Park end and you see posters giving advice about proper behaviour, rather like those signs outside a church advising that shorts and flash-photography are forbidden. A few doors down from the Cup Foods grocery store, the last place that Mr Floyd entered before he was murdered, an arts centre has been converted into a museum for all the protest signs that were waved on the street outside. Within the arts centre there is discussion of the importance of protest gardening. In a park nearby stand around 150 white plastic headstones, each of them marked with the name of an African-American killed by the police, their dates, a fist that was the emblem of the Black Panther party and the words “Rest in Power”. The combination of hippydom with symbols that are drawn from black radicalism gives the place something of the feel of the 1960s.
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