In today’s Strib, Nick Coleman has a column titled: Nothingburger celebration will go down easy with State Fair spice.
It’s all about Warren Nelson, artistic director of the Big Top Chautauqua, and how his musical theater production of ‘Old Minnesota: Song of the North Star’ includes our sad legacy of treatment of Native American Minnesotans. The musical will be performed thrice daily at the MN State Fair this year.
Called “Old Minnesota: Song of the North Star,” Nelson’s show offers a rich selection of Minnesota stories, from the beginnings of the state through the world wars up to modern times, with an orchestra, stunning audiovisuals and attention paid to the history of the fair, too. Mostly rollicking, the show also deals frankly with painful episodes in state history, including the wresting of the land from Native Americans and the war of 1862 that ended with the banishment of the Dakota Sioux and 38 hangings at Mankato on the Minnesota River.
Since 1986, Nelson has been the artistic director of the Big Top Chautauqua near Bayfield, Wis. In “Old Minnesota,” he explores the Indian tragedy with a poignant song called “Little Crow’s Flute” that reflects on the state seal — which was reversed to show an Indian riding into the sunset, rather than the dawn, as was originally intended:
“Statehood will soon seal their fate,” the son g goes: “Beside the home river, they hung 38.”
Nelson decided to confront that legacy of loss when he watched an Indian ceremony marking the anniversary of the forced removal of the Dakota from their homeland. In just a few minutes in a State Fair musical, Nelson might make Minnesotans give more thought to the Indian story of the state than we usually get in a year, even during a sesqui-whatever.