Renovated Minneapolis American Indian Center turns to tradition to build a sober community

Melanie Hawkins’ life revolves around the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Every day she scours the building as its lead custodian, and in her spare time she takes classes in beading, sewing and making moccasins.

These were traditions that Hawkins once watched her grandmother practice. Decades later, when she moved from her South Dakota reservation to the heart of Minneapolis’ urban Indian community, she found them again at the American Indian Center. Hawkins credits reclaiming her culture with helping her live sober the past six years. Now, she says, her grandmother comes smiling to her in her dreams.

“I really have turned to my culture and our ways,” Hawkins said as she practiced a straight stitch on a traditional Native ribbon shirt this winter at the center’s sewing circle. “It really helped me come this far in my life.” The shirt is destined to be given away at one of the building’s quarterly powwows, and she’s looking forward to seeing a young man dance in it.

The 1970s-era American Indian Center completed a once-in-a-generation, $32.5 million modernization and expansion last year under architect Sam Olbekson. It includes the Gatherings Café, which serves healthy Indigenous food (including Three Sisters Kale Salad and bison tacos) and a sprawling gym that hosts the New Year’s Eve Sobriety Powwow.

In the minutes trickling down to 2025, dancers were invited to the floor based how long they’d been sober. They formed a circle, starting with elders with 45 unbroken years, all the way down to those who’d been free of drugs and alcohol for just one day.

Sobriety is a subtle but integral pillar of the American Indian Center, where parking lot signs prohibit smoking anywhere on the grounds and an indoor mural implores, “Keep Tobacco Sacred.”

As community members started trickling back in the year since the center’s reopening, it’s become a sober refuge on Franklin Avenue, said Kim Payne, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa who lives in Woodbury.

She visits Minneapolis often because making ribbon skirts and shawls at the American Indian Center helps her connect with her culture. But throughout the surrounding neighborhood, Payne sees young people caught in the undertow of the streets – the pretty girl with tin foil and lighter sitting at the bus stop, the young man doubled over, immobile, behind the pharmacy where she picks up her prescriptions.

“Having the American Indian Center here as a safe place for the children to come to and dance with the powwows,” Payne said. “It’s just like going to church. You feel that drama, and it’s just awesome.”

So how does the center talk about tobacco’s ceremonial use, when vaping is seemingly ubiquitous among the neighborhood’s younger generations?

Program director Cheryl Secola acknowledges it’s a battle. Not many teenagers are committed to sobriety as a way of life.

But the center has a culture and language keepers program with a big following on social media, and when teens enroll, they learn the names of native plants. Last summer Secola took students on a day trip to the river, where they learned how to offer tobacco to the water spirits and pray for what they wanted.

Native people didn’t have alcohol, drugs and commercial tobacco before European settlement, said Secola. But today, American Indians face many health disparities, including high rates of diabetes and cancer.

”Now there’s this epidemic of fentanyl. You see unsheltered relatives everywhere," she said. “Our young people, they don’t have a choice to be around it. So we want to provide a space where people feel safe and there isn’t that.”

Thursday evenings, David “Memegwesi” Sutherland teaches beginner Objibwe at the center. From a linguistic standpoint, the endangered language’s complex conjugation system makes fluency difficult to attain without years of practice, he said. But learning even basic vocabulary helps peel back the history of language loss, religious persecution, boarding schools and land confiscation.

At some point, a certain spark ignites in the student, Sutherland said, and it starts to make sense.

On Tuesday afternoons, the world-class hoop dancer Lumhe “Micco” Sampson leads fitness in the gym. Wednesday evenings, he teaches drum and dance.

Watching the grandparents watch their grandchildren pick up these practices makes his heart melt, said Sampson.

“They say for us ... you dance for those that are there, those that aren’t there, those that are healthy, those that are unhealthy, those that need healing,” Sampson said. “We’re getting kids to learn to dance, but then also providing them with these items that help give them that power [the ribbon shirts and regalia], that confidence to carry this on throughout their lives, because it’s a way of balancing their mental health.”

Throughout the month of February, the milled trunk of a giant cottonwood tree lay on a bed of wood shavings in the lobby of the American Indian Center.

Anyone who happened to pass through was invited to help carve, and over the course of several weeks, it gradually assumed the shape of a 19th-century style Dakota dugout canoe.

It was a project of Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi and Great Lakes Lifeways Institute, organizations dedicated to cultural and environmental conservation.

Students from the American Indian youth nonprofit Migizi helped chisel one evening. At the end, when invited to ask questions, one of them wanted to know about the odd musk permeating the room, which had a tinge of decay or sweat.

Barry Hand, program director of Owámniyomni Okhódayapi (formerly Friends of the Falls) denied that it was him because he had worn deodorant that day. He then explained that the wood of the canoe was the same wood used in the Sun Dance, and that when the cottonwood is cut down in the summer for the ceremony, it’s thought to smell like the guts of a disemboweled man.

By mid-March, the trunk had been thinned to the size and rough shape of a seaworthy boat. The builders took it out into the garden of the American Indian Center and filled it with water. They built a fire to heat rocks, which they then packed into the canoe to bring the water to a simmering boil.

As it soaked, the boat became pliable. Wooden dowels were inserted in the hull to widen it, and the sides were clamped to shape. Gone was that distinctive cottonwood smell, replaced by cedar and sage.

As community members, many of whom had helped in the carving, came and went throughout the morning, they put their palms against the body of the canoe to feel its gentle vibration from the water roiling inside.