(woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts; and by the members of Prairie Public.

Welcome to "Prairie Mosaic," a patchwork of stories about the art, culture, and history in our region.

Hi, I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien.

On this edition of "Prairie Mosaic," we'll watch the 3rd segment of "Black Histories of the Northern Plains," learn about new technology for the classroom, and listen to a band from Battle Lake, Minnesota.

♪ Breathless when you're part of the... ♪ Bruce Engebretson, of Osage, Minnesota, is a handweaver who spent over 30 years learning his craft.

Bruce was willing to show us the skills he's learned on spinning wheels and looms that are over 100 years old.

[regular clicking sounds of a loom] [regular clicking sounds of a loom] My name is Bruce Engebretson, and I think the best way to say what I call myself is what I don't call myself but what everyone else wants to call me, and that's master weaver.

I am not a master weaver.

I'm Bruce Engebretson, handweaver.

The Fiber Guilds in America have done some marvelous stuff, but that's not the tradition I came from.

I come out of the ethnic tradition of Northern Europe-- Sweden, Norway, Finland-- working people.

And women who were artistic, but they never considered themselves to be "fiber artists."

Those are the people who influenced me most.

I use floor looms that are preindustrial, and they're made for making fabric, for material.

Saving old looms is not easy.

A lot of people want something new, they want something smaller.

It's an undertaking to try and find use for these.

And I love looking at them.

There's a lot to learn even from little things, bits and pieces of old looms.

I encourage people if you're out there realize these looms are really well-made machines.

I have a loom here that we know a lot about.

That loom was built by Bendic Brasef for Othea Strand in Ulen, Minnesota in the 1890s.

We have a lot of stuff that she wove on that loom.

This piece is taken from the pattern that was woven on this loom by Othea Strand.

She wove all that carpeting.

That's what I like to do is to copy old stuff.

[piano, bass, & keyboard play rhythmic soft rock] One of the things I appreciate most about these old looms is how well they work.

These people had results in mind, they were results oriented.

They wanted something that worked well.

These preindustrial looms work in this way.

There's 2 sets of threads.

One set is going one direction, they're horizontal, that would be the long way, then you wind them around and around a beam.

So you'll have these many yards on the loom-- that's the warp.

All those threads, let's say 400 threads, all have to be kept in order and not tangled.

Each thread goes through an eye and in a certain order.

Those eyes are on pulleys and pedals.

So each set of threads will go under, over, under, over-- that's weaving.

Half of the threads will be on one set of pedals and pulleys and the other half on the other.

So you don't have to go under, over, under, over.

You put your foot down, and they go like that.

Then you hear the warp and the weft.

Then the weft comes in, it goes on a shuttle, and the shuttle carries the other sides across.

And that's the basics, that'll get you a start if you understand that.

I dislike the word "just" when it's used in a way that would be dismissive, like "I just do this."

Really nobody "just" does anything.

Think about cooking or baking or shopping.

"I just do this."

Not really.

And the same with this work.

You have to have good materials, they have to be washed well, they have to be prepared well, and then it has to be spun well, and it has to be woven well.

Every step of the way is really important in this and everything.

The craftsman versus the artist is interesting to me.

There's different categories I work in.

The one category is tapestry, and in that I use, it's an idea, a feeling expressing something artistically.

Then I have the craftsman side of me which, I like to make things that are functional.

And it depends on what kind of materials are at hand.

If I run into a place where I can find some wool to weave with I'll use that.

If I've spun something, and I have something left over, or I decide I want to make a blanket, I'll work on that.

Working with fiber and with wool has been a great thing for me, the history and the beauty of it has been really really a blessing to me, something I can share with people.

People learn, they enjoy, they can say they have done something, they can see how things were at a different time.

I think one of the things I cherish the very most is the teachers I've had, the transmission.

That to me is something I wouldn't be without.

There's the ethnic tradition which I have, and I'm so happy for that.

And there's the family tradition which I think people need to cherish, and I think that people don't realize quite how important that is.

I don't care if it's making jelly or hunting or weaving-- cherish that!

Really, think about the family tradition.

Transmission to me is really something to cherish.

The new Becker County Museum in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota is a longtime dream come true for the community.

Among the new features is an area dedicated to science and STEM programming for visitors of all ages.

[rhythmic electronic music plays] (Becky Mitchell) STEM and science and math are so important in today's world.

You see more and more industries in our own region involving things like robots and coding every single day.

And so the goal is to be able to teach them that problem solving, working together but also the ability to work independently.

(Kevin Mitchell) We go off deeper into the sort of makerspace, really super science stuff like 3-D printing, lasers, we have a Wazer and things like that.

So where you can actually make and learn things that are part of industry.

There's a couple different ways you can approach 3-D printing.

If you really want to do the work, you want to do something custom, you create it in the computer on the screen until you think you've got it.

You build that slowly but surely with shape.

Here's a cylinder.

We pull the cylinder in, and we can use the tools to set the height and the size and the rotation and all of that.

You add shapes together one by one to create what you want for your final outcome.

You take that file and whatever way you can you get it to your 3-D printer, that can be a thumb drive, that can be on a network, it can be a lot of things, then you start the 3-D printer doing that.

It takes a plastic filament, many different materials available, draws it into the head, melts it and squirts it out in a little pattern on the table that eventually builds from the bottom up in layers your 3-D design.

And there's a lot things about that-- the density, whether the inside is filled, solid, or hollow, that kind of thing, what the structure is, what the material is, all the temperatures, and it makes your creation on the table.

[rhythmic electronic music plays] Laser engraver cutters do 2 different things, they use a laser, in this case it's a CO2 laser.

CO2 lasers are applicable to things that you can set on fire.

Basically your standard of guessing is if can I laser this, what will it set on fire?

If I put it in the campfire, yes.

So we've got kind of the same thing.

You have a computer program where you generate your graphic.

You have to decide between 2 things, engrave or cut.

Again you get your graphic to your laser however that is, put the material in the bed, you set the focus because how far you are from the laser is critically important.

Then you start your burn, and hopefully you learn a few tricks along the way.

We've got our work material lined up on the bed of the big laser again ready to do this.

First we go into the screen, and we go to the function, and we choose autofocus down here and hit enter.

Autofocus is going to raise the bed, or the Z axis, until it touches the sensor, then it's going to back down away from it the exact correct distance.

You can verify that with the focus light there.

This little red dot is right under the laser head, so we can tell it's the right distance away.

It uses a little parallax to do that.

The laser head is straight up and down, the focus light comes from over here at an angle, so when it's the correct distance, they cross.

Then we'll close the lid because you can't run this one with the lid open because it will sever limbs.

Our piece is done.

We're going to open it up and we're gonna see if I have a job or not.

So there's the boss's folder with a nice lightly engraved Reimagine logo.

We actually have 2 different lasers here.

We have the large format more industrial laser that's a little harder on the front end.

In the software you have to have a real good knowledge of what you're doing and know a lot of the factors about it.

We also have a smaller laser that's branded as the Glowforge that's getting popular in the makerspace world.

That one is super easy to use.

Of course, the capabilities are lower and smaller, it's less power, it's a smaller bed size, all of those things.

But the interface for it is super simple.

It's a webpage basically, you go there, you drag an image into it, or you drag an outline into it.

You can get a lot of that stuff off of Etsy and other places like that.

And poof!

In just minutes you can unbox this thing and be lasering on a small scale nice neat little things.

The Wazer is interesting in that again is one of those things where Becky came in and said hey, I've got an idea, and I'm like what is a Wazer?

Then I thought, and we did an online demo with it, and I'm like, we have to have a Wazer, it's really cool.

Wazer is a brand name or a branded name for waterjet cutting.

Waterjet cutting again is important because it's used in industry for a lot of things.

Industries have been cutting on large expensive waterjet cutters for maybe a decade or 2.

The Wazer brings that to a scale that a lot of us can have, or at least someplace like the museum can have it around so you can come in and touch it.

It literally says in the intro to it, "Cuts anything," which I find like Ooo!

"Cuts anything."

It uses high pressure water much like a pressure washer, then it adds in a little bit of real fine sand that has sharp edges of an abrasive material.

It mixes those 2 together and shoots it at your material at an extreme rate of speed, then that will trace out and cut out a pattern in whatever you put in there.

So you can make an image or a shape, a pattern on your computer, send it to this thing, and it'll cut it out with great precision.

I'm going to pick the logo Reimagine.

There's a few steps to prepare the machine to cut it.

Yup, here's what I want to do.

Lift the nozzle clear of any obstructions.

So you manually lift the nozzle up so that there's room under it.

Okay, I've done that.

It's going to home itself now.

It's going to find the starting corner and calibrate itself and make sure it's good to go.

Then I'm going to choose cut material.

It's going to tell me to close the lid.

Then we press this to start it.

Now this one is noisy and messy.

Here we go!

[loud whirring & clattering of the sand hitting the surface] The mistakes I made here you can see.

It's a little overcut in areas, it isn't really ready to break completely out, but it came pretty close for a first try.

But that's part of STEM's theme and the fun of learning as you work through those things one iteration at a time until you get it.

(Becky Mitchell) We spoke with teachers, when you come to this facility, what sorts of lessons would you like your kids to take away from it?

What sorts of opportunities are you wanting us to provide?

It also reinforces, many of our area schools have lasers.

Many of our area schools now have 3-D printers.

What something like this at our local museum offers is the ability for a teacher to give an assignment now.

You go and print this project, you go and create this piece.

It challenges students to learn a little bit on their own without maybe a teacher looking right over their shoulder.

Episode 3 of "Black Histories of the Northern Plains" profiles a slave named Joseph Godfrey who escaped from Fort Snelling, lived with the Dakota Indians, and even fought in the U.S.-Dakota war.

[fiddle & guitar play in slow tempo] (Matt Olien) In August of 1862, Sheriff Charles Roos of Brown County, Minnesota, wrote a hurried dispatch to Governor Alexander Ramsey detailing the gruesome murder of several German immigrants at the hands of a group of Dakota warriors.

The last sentence of his letter identified an unexpected suspect among the culprits: "Wabashaw's band, a Negro leading them."

The events that followed, which we now recognize as the U.S.-Dakota War, were perhaps the most consequential days in Minnesota's history.

A unique set of circumstances placed a young black man at their center.

In his 1935 study, "Black Reconstruction in America," W.E.B.

Du Bois asked a poignant question about the ethical obligations of history: "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.

One of the traumatic wrongs in U.S. history was our prolonged insistence upon chattel slavery; another was the violent land dispossession on indigenous peoples.

In the story of Joseph Godfrey, a black man living among the Dakota as a fugitive, we see a unique perspective that blurs our popular understanding of the free North.

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public.

Our narrator is Matt Olien.

And this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

[fiddle & guitar play in slow tempo] (Matt Olien) Though the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 both effectively outlawed slavery in the United States' territorial lands of the Great Lakes and northern plains, enslaved African Americans were a regular feature of life in the northwest.

Several thousand slaves had lived in French and British Canada before the European empires abolished slavery there in 1793 and 1834.

Many of them were Indigenous Pawnee, but this group included enslaved Africans, as well.

When France ceded Illinois Country to England as a consequence of the French and Indian War, for example, 900 enslaved Africans lived in the region, according to Professor Christopher Lehman.

Some of these enslaved men and women worked as the personal servants of fur traders and explorers, but many were enslaved by the very people tasked with enforcing law and order in the northwest frontier-- officers in the U.S. Army who had moved steadily westward form the original 13 colonies since the United States declared independence.

In the northern plains, the epicenter of slavery was at Fort Snelling, a military outpost built at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers in the 1820s, and the small Métis communities that formed nearby at Camp Coldwater and Mendota.

The unique driver of slavery around Fort Snelling was an extralegal Army program that reimbursed officers for the expense of their personal servants.

In this way, the U.S. Army incentivized and even subsidized the cheapest personal servants available to officers on the free frontier-- enslaved African children.

In 1831, a slave named Courtney was sold to Alexis Bailley, an American Fur Company Trader, for $450.

She would work as a domestic servant in the Mendota home Bailley shared with his wife Lucy, the Métis daughter of Jean-Baptiste Faribault.

Courtney raised her son Joseph, fathered by a French-Canadian trader named Joseph Godfrey, in the Bailley household and together the two seemed to have endured regular violence.

The next few years brought some profound changes for Courtney and Joseph.

They moved with the Bailley's throughout the Missippi River Valley, first to Prairie du Chien, and then to Wabasha.

In 1835, they were separated when Bailley sold Courtney and her younger son William to a Missouri lawyer who helped them successfully sue for their freedom in a precursor to the lawsuit later filed by Dred Scott, another African American enslaved in the Fort Snelling community.

As a teenager in the late 1840s, Joseph Godfrey escaped to live with the Red Wing band of the Dakota, and moved with them to the Lower Sioux Agency on the Minnesota River in 1853.

He lived among them, married a Dakota woman named Takanheca, and fathered a child as a fugitive, unsure of his fate in U.S. courts.

Nine years later, Godfrey took part in the U.S.-Dakota War, though his role in the conflict has been unclear.

During the military trial that followed the Dakota surrender in the fall of 1862, Godfrey claimed that Dakota warriors had threatened him with death to take part, and in a letter sent from prison to the missionary Stephen Riggs in 1865, he reiterated his innocence writing... Godfrey was one of the 303 Dakota men tried in the aftermath of the war and sentenced to death.

He narrowly avoided joining the 38 Dakota warriors publicly hanged in Mankato on December 26, 1862.

Godfrey spent 3 years in prison before he was pardoned and freed.

He spent the rest of his life on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska, until his death in 1909.

The Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota Wars revealed the complexities of race in the northern plains and profoundly reshaped life here afterwards.

The results of the conflicts redefined who was welcome to live in Minnesota communities and with what levels of personal freedom.

Amidst a population boom driven primarily by European immigrants, the fate of free and enslaved Blacks and Indigenous Americans, which had previously been intertwined in the lives of the Bongas and Joseph Godfrey, began to diverge.

For the Indigenous peoples of the northern plains, the end of the 19th century brought continued population decline and adjustments to a new way of life on reservations.

Black folks on the other hand, began to migrate to the Northern Plains of their own volition.

The end of the 19th century offered new possibilities, both real and imagined.

I'm Troy Jackson II for Prairie Public.

Thanks for watching.

Blue Red Roses from Battle Lake, Minnesota, have created an organic groove in their music and their chemistry on stage is genuine and inviting.

[intro chord] ♪ Slow me down ♪ ♪ Is there such a thing as the west ♪ ♪ If there is ♪ ♪ Would you show me the way ♪ ♪ Campfire flames dance ♪ ♪ And disappear into the night ♪ ♪ Drifting off ♪ ♪ Gonna let the stars ♪ ♪ Put us to bed ♪ ♪ You find yourself out here ♪ ♪ Waiting for the dust ♪ ♪ To blind your eyes ♪ ♪ Take 'em by surprise give in don't you fade ♪ ♪ Lose your faith in time ♪ ♪ Follow flowing rivers and her mountainsides ♪ ♪ Surrender to a beautiful life ♪ ♪ Oo-oo oo oo-oo-oo-oo oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oo oo oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ The howl of the wind ♪ ♪ Is our guide through the night ♪ ♪ Pink orange and blue ♪ ♪ Bleed through the black night ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You find yourself out here ♪ ♪ Breathless when you're part ♪ ♪ Of the sunrise ♪ ♪ Soak up all the warmth ♪ ♪ Give in don't you fade ♪ ♪ Lose your faith in time ♪ ♪ Follow flowing rivers and her mountainsides ♪ ♪ Surrender to a beautiful life ♪ ♪ And we'll keep ♪ ♪ The moonlight in our eyes ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ And we'll keep ♪ ♪ The moonlight in our eyes ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ And we'll keep ♪ ♪ The moonlight in our eyes ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ And we'll keep ♪ ♪ The moonlight in our eyes ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo oo-oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Oo-oo ♪ ♪ Oo-oo-oo oo-oo ♪ ♪ ♪ If you know of an artist, topic or organization in our region that you think might make for an interesting segment, contact us at... (Barb) You can watch this and other episodes of "Prairie Mosaic" on Prairie Public's YouTube channel, and please, follow Prairie Public on social media as well.

I'm Barb Gravel.

And I'm Matt Olien.

Thanks for watching another edition of "Prairie Mosaic."

[guitar, bass, & drums play in bright country rhythm] (woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts; and by the members of Prairie Public.