Flags of change on the Iron Range

Today at 11:30 a.m., Hibbing Community College will dedicate its World Flags Project at the campus commons. Like many community and technical colleges around Minnesota, HCC has seen an influx of immigrants and first generation Americans.

HCC's diversity committee surveyed those students to determine their national origin. A flag from each nation is now displayed in the commons as a welcome to all. Come on down if you're in the neighborhood.

To call Northern Minnesota's Iron Range a land of immigrants is truth bordering on cliche. You can't talk about a major news story here without a history lesson involving an immigrant laborer posing for a stilted black-and-white photograph in between double shifts at an underground iron mine.

The immigrant story is important to the Iron Range because it was the source of the region's uniqueness, its collective "Something-American" culture. Our last names, our accent, our ethos all came from this identity. The immigrants came and quite literally sacrificed their health, happiness and very lives to provide opportunity to their children. Their children, hungry but educated, seized that opportunity with gusto.

But most of those folks are gone now. We're in the fourth generation. Or fifth. My children are sixth-generation on the Mesabi. The Iron Range's unique ability to raise up people in poverty, our distinguished hard-working reputation, our love of the arts and society -- these things have never been more endangered than they are right now.

This has been a miserable year to love the Iron Range. Our local politics today closes itself off from the outside world, divisive and ineffectual. Our towns decay. Mines brace for a long-anticipated shutdown, made tolerable only because of predictability and routine. It would be an easy year to give up on the Iron Range.

This is why I haven't.

The last few months have seen "good ol' boy" politics and another cyclical bust in the mining industry. I still hear racist and sexist jokes from people who should know better. It'd be tempting to say that nothing changes, which is somehow OK because "we're used to this."

But the truth is that the Iron Range has changed. Just as the Ojibwa lands of the 1800s become the industrial frontier for Carnegie and Rockefeller and their hired hands from around the world, the Iron Range of my ancestors is gone. Stories, remembered. We'd better. We're next.

The Iron Range changes still. Just look at the flags and spend some time with the young families scraping by on less than you think in jobs no one else wants. These are the people I am concerned with. These are my people. These are our people. Celebrate them. They bear the fruit of future prosperity. Protect and defend them. Carry their colors, no matter their nation. These are our colors. Do you remember?

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