Art Norton joined us on the Tuesday Morning Show to tell us about the groundbreaking ceremony for the Itasca Clean Energy Solar Plus Battery Storage Facility.  It is the first in the region and considered a trailblazer. 

Tamara Lowney, Executive Director of Itasca Economic Development Corporation was back with us this week and introduced us to Kirstie - an entrepreneur from Colorado who consults with IEDC once a month.  She talked about the mindset of entrepreneurs and what draws business people and innovators to a region.

Each week John and Heidi pull up a chair to one of our member’s kitchen tables and get to know them a little bit better. This week’s caller, Mike from Nevis served up some yogurt with pumpkin seed granola.

Hear the whole conversation by clicking below.

Thanks to our sponsor Homestead Mills for their support of this program! Let us know if you want to be our guest on What's For Breakfast.  All it takes is your membership and an email!

So the story moves around between the different perspectives of these women, and it doesn't follow a straight chronological timeline. It's more arranged thematically. So but to go furthest back in time would be Marie Blackbird, who who was 14 years old at eighteen sixty two. And she and her mother are the ones who actually sow the seeds into the hands of their skirts. So they bring that story alive. So they represent that traditional relationship with seeds and the land and gardening. - Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson’s newest book The Seed Keeper weaves the stories of four native women living between 1862 and 2002.  It’s a story of awakening, re-connection to the land and and a sort of re-birth in terms of both personal identities and cultural histories.  Wilson joined the morning show to discuss the book, its inspiration and how she hopes the novel influences readers.

Today on Boozhoo Nana Boozhoo we learn the Ojibwe words “waabooz” for rabbit and “waagosh” for fox.  Nana Boozhoo tells us the traditional story of Waabooz and Waagosh.

More Boozhoo Nana Boozhoo on FaceBook.

Marshall Helmberger, Editor and publisher of the Timberjay newspaper, joins Heidi Holtan with news from northeastern Minnesota. This week Marshall tells us about an incident in Tower that happened last Friday. A trainee driver for a Duluth area ready-mix company accidentally dumped a line of cement down the entire length of Main Street.  This caused quite a mess and created a huge clean-up problem for the city. 

Today we talked with Lisa Joy Hesse.  As the COVID-19 pandemic began and wore on there was a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of emotional toll.  Now, with 55% of Minnesotans getting vaccinated, numbers are down and mask mandates have gone away and life is getting back to normal.  But it might not feel normal.  Lisa Joy Hesse is a mixed media and fiber artist, a dynamic presenter and certified infection preventionist.  She lives in the woods of northern Minnesota and she has come out with a workbook called

Annette Gordon-Reed is an American law professor and Pulitzer Prize winning historian. She is currently the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, where she is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences.

This Saturday, June 19th, the city of Chisholm is celebrating Juneteenth at Kiwanis Park from 11-2.  Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in the US. and is also known as African-American Freedom Day.  The event is family friendly with free food and a kid’s bouncy house.