Storytelling map explores hidden stories of LGBTQ communities in rural Minnesota

Public historian Lizzie Ehrenhalt didn’t mean to create a flourishing map of lesser known queer histories of greater Minnesota dating back to the late 18th century. But curiosity got the best of her.

Ehrenhalt, a native of Arlington, Va., moved to Minnesota wanting to know more about the state’s trans and queer history. “I didn’t have any assumptions about where to look, so I kind of just looked everywhere,” she said.

That led her to initiate a participatory storytelling project called “Greater Minnesota Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ History Map,” which explores the stories of queer Minnesotans outside of the Twin Cities.

It began as “a humble little Google map of things,” including newspaper articles from greater and rural Minnesota. Facilitated by the Minnesota Historical Society, and in collaboration with its Inclusion and Community Department and many community partners, the project now has over 140 entries.

Visitors to the map can explore it with a “choose your own adventure” style, simply by clicking on various points across Minnesota, which are color-coded by time period. Or the map can be studied by themes such as Indigenous and two-spirit history, rural voices, drag and gender variance, celebrations and organizing.

Each point on the map offers a snippet of knowledge about a historical event, and often includes an image, sometimes as a newspaper clipping and other times as an archival photograph.

Denver-based illustrator B. Erin Cole, who used to work at MNHS, contributed six colorful illustrations based off images in the map project. In one illustration, Minnesota-shaped characters are shown waving Pride flags, canoeing through a lake with wild rice. One is even holding a hot dish.

“Most my characters are kind of indeterminate gender,” Cole said. “We wanted to do something that was kind of friendly, something people could relate to.”

Ehrenhalt and MNHS’ Inclusion and Community Department decided to make “Two-Spirit” its own separate word instead of attaching it to the LGBT soup acronym. The project creators also did this to recognize the historical and ongoing existence of Indigenous gender and sexuality outside of a colonial context.

“We really wanted to highlight the fact that Two-Spirit identity is often culturally specific, and it’s specific to the tribal nation that people are coming from,” she said.

Two-Spirit, a term that was coined in 1990 at the Inter-Tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a pan-Indigenous term, meaning a person who contains the spirit of a man and a woman.

Some of the earliest findings of gender nonconforming and what we might now call Two-Spirit people can be found on the map.

The 1847 entry “Dakota Trader” shows a transaction between fur trader Alexis Bailly and a customer who is first referred to as “her” and then “he.” Bailly notes that he loaned her a trunk. He did not name her, though, and instead uses a racial slur that “Euro-Americans used to describe a Native person assigned male at birth who took on women’s roles as an adult and/or had relationships with men.”

There are many fascinating stories, and they are told through photographs and snippets in the newspapers. They include a collection of pictures of Stillwater-based photographer John Runk posing in a dress, circa 1910.

Then there’s the story of Ojibwe women Beulah Brunelle and Edna Larrabee’s multiple escapes from Shakopee State Reformatory for Women in the 1940s. The women had posed as husband and wife.

Photographer Meadow Muska’s documentation of cooperative lesbian feminist farms in Aitkin County in the 1970s offers a look into a world of her lesbian friends who lived communally in rural Minnesota. (The Roseville native also exhibited these photos at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2019.) Aside from career paths as secretary, nurse or teacher, she said, there weren’t too many options for women. That’s when the idea for buying land came up.

When asked to be part of the map project, Muska was thrilled.

“I look over these stories that we have on the map and it’s like, we have been these strong, independent, fierce individuals forever, and there’s a stream of us, and it’s like we’re all a river,” Muska said.

Pride festivals outside of the Twin Cities are on the map, too. The East Central Minnesota Pride in Pine City, founded in 2005, was one of the first Prides in greater Minnesota.

Secretary Julie Redpath has been involved with East Central Minnesota Pride since its start. She and her partner Rebecca Hostetler left the Twin Cities over 20 years ago in search of a more rural life, but also wanted community.

“There is a queer community in rural areas, but they’re a little more hidden,” Redpath said. “It’s not quite as comfortable to be out in rural areas, for queer people. So this was another big reason why we were hoping to create a safe space at least once a year, for folks to come. And that’s what happened.”