In Round One of the NBA playoffs, the San Antonio Spurs lost home-court advantage to the Portland Trail Blazers, and then won two road games to take a 3-1 lead. Now the Spurs find themselves in a similar situation, with the chance to go up 3-1 on the Minnesota Timberwolves before heading back to San Antonio with a chance to win the series.
Minnesota
How Minnesota’s Native Americans are safeguarding their musical traditions
At summertime social powwows and spiritual ceremonies throughout the Upper Midwest, Native Americans are gathering around singers seated at big, resonant drums to dance, celebrate and connect with their ancestral culture.
“I grew up singing my entire life, and I was always taught that dewe’igan is the heartbeat of our people,” said Jakob Wilson, 19, using the Ojibwe term for drum that’s rooted in the words for heart and sound. “The absolute power and feeling that comes off of the drum and the singers around it is incredible.”
Wilson has led the drum group at Hinckley-Finlayson High School. In 2023, Wilson’s senior year, they were invited to drum and sing at graduation. But this year, when his younger sister Kaiya graduated, the school board barred them from performing at the ceremony, creating dismay across Native communities far beyond this tiny town where cornfields give way to northern Minnesota’s birch and fir forests.
“It kind of shuts us down, makes us step back instead of going forward. It was hurtful,” said Lesley Shabaiash. She was participating in the weekly drum and dance session at the Minneapolis American Indian Center a few weeks after attending protests in Hinckley.
“Hopefully this incident doesn’t stop us from doing our spiritual things,” added the mother of four, who grew up in the Twin Cities but identifies with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, whose tribal lands abut Hinckley.
In written statements, the school district’s superintendent said the decision to ban “all extracurricular groups” from the ceremony, while making other times and places for performance available, was intended to prevent disruptions and avoid “legal risk if members of the community feel the District is endorsing a religious group as part of the graduation ceremony.”
But many Native families felt the ban showed how little their culture and spirituality is understood. It also brought back traumatic memories of their being forcibly suppressed, not only at boarding schools like the one the Wilsons’ grandmother attended, but more generally from public spaces.
It was not until the late 1970s that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act directed government agencies to make policy changes “to protect and preserve Native American religious cultural rights and practices.”
“We had our language, culture and way of life taken away,” said Memegwesi Sutherland, who went to high school in Hinckley and teaches the Ojibwe language at the Minneapolis American Indian Center.
The Center’s weekly drum and dance sessions help those who “may feel lost inside” without connections to ancestral ways of life find their way back, said Tony Frank, a drum instructor.
“Singing is a door opener to everything else we do,” said Frank, who has been a singer for nearly three decades. “The reason we sing is from our heart. Our connection to the drum and songs is all spiritual. You give 100 percent, so the community can feel a piece of us.”
In drum circles like those in Minneapolis, where many Natives are Ojibwe and Lakota, there is a lead singer, who starts each song before passing on the beat and verse to others seated at the drum, which is made of wood and animal hide (usually deer or steer).
A drum keeper or carrier cares for the drum, often revered as having its own spirit and considered like a relative and not like personal property. Keepers and singers are usually male; according to one tradition, that’s because women can already connect to a second heartbeat when pregnant.
These lifelong positions are often passed down in families. Similarly, traditional lyrics or melodies are learned from older generations, while others are gifted in dreams to medicine men, several singers said. Some songs have no words, only vocables meant to convey feelings or emulate nature.
Songs and drums at the center of social events like powwows are different from those that are crucial instruments in spiritual ceremonies, for example for healing, and that often contain invocations to the Creator, said Anton Treuer, an Ojibwe language and culture professor at Bemidji State University.
Meant to mark the beginning of a new journey in life, the “traveling song” that the drum group wanted to sing at the Hinckley graduation includes the verse “when you no longer can walk, that is when I will carry you,” said Jakob Wilson.
That’s why it was meant for the entire graduating class of about 70 students, not only the 21 Native seniors, added Kaiya Wilson, who trained as a back-up singer – and why relegating it to just another extracurricular activity hurt so deeply.
“This isn’t just for fun, this is our culture,” said Tim Taggart, who works at the Meshakwad Community Center – named after a local drum carrier born in the early 20th century – and helped organize the packed powwow held in the school’s parking lot after graduation. “To just be culturally accepted, right? That’s all everybody wants, just to be accepted.”
The school had taken good steps in recent years, like founding the Native American Student Association, and many in the broader Hinckley community turned out to support Native students. So Taggart is optimistic that after this painful setback, bridges will be rebuilt
And the drum, with all that it signifies about community and a connected way of life, will be brought back.
“Nothing can function without that heartbeat,” said Taggart, whose earliest memory of the drum is being held as a toddler at a ceremony. “It’s not just hearing the drums, but you’re feeling it throughout your entire body, and that just connects you more with the spirit connection, more with God.”
As dancers – from toddlers to adults in traditional shawls – circled the floor to the drum’s beat in the Minneapolis center’s gym, Cheryl Secola, program director for its Culture Language Arts Network, said it was heartwarming to see families bring children week after week, building connections even if they might not have enough resources to travel to the reservations.
On reservations too, many youths aren’t being raised in cultural ways like singing, said Isabella Stensrud-Eubanks, 16, a junior and back-up singer on the Hinckley high school drum group.
“It’s sad to say, but our culture is slowly dying out,” she said, adding that several elders reached out to her and the Wilsons after the graduation controversy to teach them more, so the youth can themselves one day teach their traditions.
Mark Erickson was already about 20 when he went back to Red Lake, his father’s band in northern Minnesota, to learn his people’s songs.
“It’s taken me a lifetime to learn and speak the language, and a lifetime to learn the songs,” said Erickson, who only in his late 60s was awarded the distinction of culture carrier for Anishinaabe songs, a term for Ojibwe and other Indigenous groups in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States.
Believing that songs and drums are gifts from the Creator, he has been going to drum and dance sessions at the Minneapolis Center for more than a decade to share them, and the notions of honor and respect they carry.
“When you’re out there dancing, you tend to forget your day-to-day struggles and get some relief, some joy and happiness,” Erickson said.
NOTE: The original airdate of the video attached to this article is July 17, 2024.
Cori Roberts of St. Cloud, Minnesota, incurred more than $8,000 in medical bills after she was diagnosed at CentraCare with early-stage cervical cancer. She says the health system told her she made too much — about $41,000 a year — to qualify for financial aid.
Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
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Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Cori Roberts was living in a rented basement four years ago when she was diagnosed with early-stage cervical cancer.
Recently divorced, the former stay-at-home mother had returned to work in her mid-40s, taking a human resources job that paid $41,000 a year. Then, despite having insurance, she was hit with more than $8,000 in medical bills.
“I had my car and a basket of clothes,” Roberts recalled. “Medical bills were not something I could have afforded.”
Roberts sought financial assistance from CentraCare, the St. Cloud-based health system that treated her. It’s a nonprofit charity that receives millions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax breaks. In exchange, it’s obliged to offer charity care to patients who can’t afford their medical bills.
But Roberts said CentraCare told her she made too much to qualify.
Roberts instead scrimped on groceries and Christmas gifts for her kids and paid off more than $6,000 over two years. Then CentraCare sued her last year because she hadn’t paid off all the debt.
“They’re supposed to be a nonprofit,” Roberts said. “It’s like, ‘Come on!’”
This story was a collaboration between KFF Health News and the Minnesota Star Tribune.
A sliver of financial aid
CentraCare earmarks just a tiny fraction of its budget for helping patients with medical bills they can’t pay, but it’s not alone in that, a Minnesota Star Tribune-KFF Health News investigation found.
Minnesota’s hospitals and health systems are among the least charitable in the country, the investigation found, providing less financial aid as a percentage of their operating budgets on average than hospitals in almost every other state.
The investigation drew on a detailed review of every hospital charity care program in the state, an analysis of five years of hospital financial data, and dozens of interviews with patients, hospital executives and state officials.
Nationally, hospitals spend an average of about 2.4% of their operating budgets on charity care, according to federal hospital data compiled by Hossein Zare, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Minnesota hospitals spend about a third of that, on average.
CentraCare’s flagship hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota, earmarks only a fraction of its budget for helping patients who can’t pay their medical bills.
Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
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Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
Some spend considerably less. Of Minnesota’s 123 general hospitals, 62 devoted less than 0.5% of their operating budgets to charity care from 2020 through 2024, the Star Tribune-KFF Health News investigation found.
“The system is not working,” said Erin Hartung, director of legal services at Cancer Legal Care, a Minnesota nonprofit that helps patients with medical debt and other financial challenges. “And the burden is falling hardest on the people who are least able to bear it.”
CentraCare’s flagship St. Cloud Hospital spent less than 0.25% on charity care, according to the analysis. That works out to $25 in patient aid for every $10,000 spent on hospital operations.
A growing burden
Charity care will become even more vital in coming years as Americans lose health coverage or can’t afford rising copays and deductibles. The nation’s uninsured rate has been ticking up and is expected to increase further as budget cuts pushed by President Trump force states to pare back Medicaid and other safety net programs.
Nationwide, healthcare debt — much of it from hospitals — burdens an estimated 100 million people. And charity care, which was historically aimed at the uninsured, is now critical to many people with health insurance who can’t afford their bills.
Hospital officials say it’s unfair to expect them to solve this affordability problem when many of their facilities are financially strained. “No amount of charity care from hospitals will ever fully meet the needs of uninsured or underinsured Minnesotans. The need is simply too great,” Minnesota Hospital Association spokesperson Tim Nelson said in a statement.
But Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said hospitals have a duty to increase charitable help for all needy patients in exchange for the tax breaks they receive.
“There is a benefit you get from being a nonprofit hospital in the state of Minnesota,” he said. “But do the people get the benefit?”
Several factors help explain why Minnesota hospitals provide so little financial aid. For one, job-based insurance and an expanded Medicaid program offer broad coverage. Hospitals in states with less government assistance and more uninsured people typically spend more on charity care.
Eligibility standards vary
But patients also face significant barriers accessing financial aid at many hospitals, including inconsistent eligibility standards and extensive applications, the Star Tribune-KFF Health News investigation found.
To qualify at many hospitals, patients must submit detailed personal information, including bank statements, retirement accounts, mortgage documents and estimates of other assets such as cars, homes or livestock.
Cori Roberts, who was sued by her healthcare provider after she was unable to make full payments for her treatment, thumbs through copies of her payment records at her home in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
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Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune
And because Minnesota has not standardized the criteria for charity care, patients might receive aid at one hospital but not another. The investigation found that some hospitals give free care to patients with an annual household income of $47,000, while others cap it at about $15,000.
There are similar variations in charity care standards at hospitals nationwide, KFF Health News and other researchers have found. A recent analysis by the nonprofit Lown Institute found that one hospital in Boston set the limit for free care at less than half the level as another hospital just a few block away.
In Minnesota, had Roberts driven 30 miles east or 35 miles north, she would have found medical providers with more generous financial aid policies than CentraCare. But she didn’t know to look.
Roberts, now 49, has remarried and lives in a split-level home in St. Cloud decorated with inspirational plaques such as “Faith, Family, Friends.” CentraCare recently dropped the lawsuit against her, but only after she took out a loan against her retirement plan to pay off the medical debt. “It just feels very unfair,” she said.
CentraCare spokesperson Karna Fronden said medical privacy laws prevented her from discussing Roberts’ case. She also declined interview requests about the health system’s charity care spending.
In a statement, Fronden said CentraCare provides assistance in addition to charity care, such as helping enroll patients in insurance. “This helps provide broader, longer-term protection for patients,” she said.
Other hospital leaders said they serve their communities in ways besides forgiving medical bills, including training doctors and nurses and preserving money-losing services such as obstetrics and mental health care.
Hospitals in rural communities specifically also play an important role as employers, said Robert Pastor, chief executive of Rainy Lake Medical Center in International Falls, Minn.
“We are the second- or third-largest employer in town, running on razor-thin margins while navigating escalating labor and supply costs and routine underpayment by public programs,” Pastor said. “Meanwhile, many health insurers post billions in profits.”
“Rural hospitals like ours are often portrayed as though we are sitting on piles of cash and simply choosing not to spend it on charity care. That is far from the reality,” he said.
Hospital executives say they have a responsibility to ensure that limited resources for charity care go to patients who need them, said Travis Olsen, chief executive of Hendricks Community Hospital, near the South Dakota border.
Burdensome application process
To determine eligibility, some Minnesota hospitals consider only income, the Star Tribune-KFF Health News investigation found. But most demand information about patients’ bank accounts as well. More than two-thirds require even more information, including the value of retirement accounts, life insurance policies, property and vehicles.
In addition to copies of tax returns, W-2 forms, pay stubs and bank statements, Hendricks asks aid applicants 53 questions about their finances. These include questions about the make, model and value of vehicles; the current market value of farm equipment, livestock and land; and the purchase price and square footage of homes.
Other hospital applications ask patients to detail their monthly spending on food, utilities and other medical bills.
All these questions discourage patients from seeking assistance, said Jared Walker, founder of Dollar For, a nonprofit that helps people apply for charity care.
“The drop-off rates are much higher the more questions you ask and the more documentation you have to provide,” he said.
By contrast, most hospitals make it very easy for patients to click a button on the hospital website to pay their bills, Walker said. “Hospitals have optimized to get payment,” he said. “If you want to get on a payment plan, if you want to get on a credit card, it’s so easy.”
Back in St. Cloud, Roberts said that when she drives past CentraCare’s $200 million expansion at its Plaza campus in St. Cloud, she wonders why Minnesota hospitals don’t live up to higher standards.
“They have all the money,” she said. “But they can’t grant a good person some grace?”
This story was produced by KFF Health News and the Minnesota Star Tribune.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF.
Iowa City (Iowa) Regina linebacker Tate Wallace committed to Minnesota on Sunday. The 6-2, 226-pounder from the class of 2027 chose the Golden Gophers over offers from Arizona State, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kansas State, Nebraska, Notre Dame, and many others.
Victor Wembanyama’s heroics helped the Spurs take a 2-1 lead in a 115-108 victory. Much like the first game of the series, Game Three was defined by back-and-forth play and tough defense. It wasn’t until Wembanyama took over in the fourth quarter that a clear winner emerged. Minnesota desperately needs a win at home to avoid going down 3-1, so expect another physical game with a large sense of urgency from the Wolves.
San Antonio’s strategy of playing fast on offense, pestering the Wolves’ ball-handlers on the perimeter with full-court pressure and doubles, while funneling everything to Wembanyama in the paint, has worked so far. Minnesota’s head coach, Chris Finch, is one of the best in the business. He’ll certainly have adjustments to counter the strategies that have worked for the Spurs.
This series has been pretty close through three games. Game Four should be no different. San Antonio can put itself in a great position to win the series by stealing another game on the road.
May 10th, 2026 | 6:30 PM CT
Watch: Peacock / NBC | Listen: WOAI (1200 AM)
Spurs Injuries: No injuries to report.
Timberwolves Injuries: Donte DiVincenzo – Out (achilles)
Winning the possession battle
The Timberwolves took 14 more shots than the Spurs in Game Three. It’s rare to win a game where you lose the possession battle so brutally. Minnesota had 15 offensive rebounds compared to the Spurs’ 8. A lot of those offensive rebounds were long or contested 50/50 balls. If San Antonio had eliminated those second-change opportunities, the margin of victory may have been wider.
A great example of that was Game Two, when the Spurs forced 22 turnovers and grabbed more offensive rebounds, leading to a blowout. The Wolves have struggled to shoot the ball well in the series. Giving them easy opportunities and extra possessions is allowing them to make up for this weakness. The Spurs have to secure the defensive glass and take care of the ball to give themselves some more cushion in Game Four.
De’Aaron Fox’s shotmaking
San Antonio’s All-Star guard has been hot and cold in this series. He shot poorly in Games One and Three, but had a nice stat line in Game Two. Fox is averaging 18 points on 46.3% shooting in the playoffs overall. He, for the most part, has stepped up when the Spurs needed him this postseason. It’s been harder for him to get to the rim with guys like Jaden McDaniels and Anthony Edwards guarding him on the perimeter, and Rudy Gobert roaming the paint.
Wembanyama is sure to draw a lot of attention in Game Four. San Antonio is going to need another player to step up and take on some of the scoring load. Fox is the best equipped to do that.
Minnesota’s Wembanyama game plan
Wembanyama has dominated this series. Something has to change for Minnesota to minimize his impact. Will they play Gobert more minutes? Start sending doubles earlier? Give the Spurs more open three-pointers to prohibit him from scoring inside? On offense, will the Wolves look to generate more threes to avoid going at Wembanyama in the paint? Whatever adjustments Chris Finch makes will be important to watch for in Game Four.
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