Minnesota
Indigenous theater company brings its feminist, story-weaving style to Minnesota
CLOQUET, MINN. – Francesca Pedersen, an ensemble member for Spiderwoman Theater, had a moment of recognition after a recent welcome feast. The cast and other guests who had come to meet members of the long-running Indigenous theater company, were sitting around, sharing stories, and she saw the connection between what she is performing and the community that built it.
“I was like ‘This is the piece!’ This is literally what we are going to be doing on stage in a couple of days,” she said. “Theater is just storytelling.”
This is how the New York City-based company’s productions are born: a layered style called “story-weaving,” where personal and traditional stories are told, then strung together with bursts of color and pop culture and various art forms.
Spiderwoman Theater is in the middle of a Midwest Tour that is currently settled in this city 20 miles southwest of Duluth and adjacent to the Fond du Lac Reservation. In recent days there have been meetings, workshops and a ceremony, and there are runs of its most recent original production, “Misdemeanor Dream” at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday at Cloquet High School, where professional tech workers are mingling with local students to share tips and tricks. Tickets are $25.
The tour then moves on to Minneapolis, where there will be a story-weaving workshop for Native theater artists by invitation on March 6 and a fabric workshop open to the public on Thursday. Both are at the Jungle Theater.
Its leaders came here to meet with local Indigenous artists and offered a 4-hour master class in creating this style of theater. One of the founders, Muriel Miguel, asked her team to clear the stage and make a circle of chairs beneath the spotlights — then bumped anyone who wasn’t participating from the auditorium at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College.
It went well, she said the next day.
“People were laughing and talking — and the way we put the stories together made them laugh,” she said. “I’m aching. I wound everyone up.”
Spiderwoman Theater was the mid-1970s invention of sisters Muriel and Gloria Miguel, who remain active with the company, and Lisa Mayo, who has since died. It was formed as a response to the current climate for Indigenous women.
It has also been shocking and edgy to mainstream audiences. Its first show, “Women in Violence,” in the 1970s, included racist and sexist jokes. If members of the audience laughed, the cast members gave the laughter a look, then blew a raspberry. They threw pies at each other on stage and threatened to do the same to the audience. Detractors said “this isn’t theater; you aren’t actors,” Muriel Miguel recalled.
More than 40 years later, it’s still going and is believed to be the longest-running company of its kind in the country, if not the world. Gloria Miguel, 96, has a role in its current show. She plays an elder.
Darylina Powderface, a Stoney Nakoda and Blackfoot artist, was well into college when she first learned about Spiderwoman Theater from an Indigenous teaching assistant. In “Misdemeanor Dream,” she has translated Blackfoot language and will sing.
“I feel, as someone who’s gone to an institution that’s predominantly white and colonial, Western perspective, I never really got the opportunity to bring in who I really am,” she said. “When I did, those spaces weren’t really meant for that.”
“Misdemeanor Dream” is loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with an eye toward emphasizing personal stories of little people and fairies. Muriel Miguel’s early contribution to this piece was a memory: How her mother always planted nasturtium in the backyard. Fairies, she said, like to sit on the leaves. The show grew from a series of similar stories, which includes several different Indigenous languages, and dancing, singing and video projections. It’s driven by its narratives, not by a linear plot.
“It’s the ingredients inside, it isn’t the show,” Muriel Miguel said. “It’s liver pâté. I can’t eat liver pâté by itself, I need something else. I need to put it on toast and make it something that I and other people can eat.”
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Fox – Seattle
A bipartisan group of Minnesota lawmakers are hoping to limit how the artificial intelligence industry operates in the state, arguing that it’s evolving in ways that are harmful and unconstitutional.
Minnesota senators on Monday considered five measures to regulate AI, including a bill (SF 1857) stating that companies that create AI chatbots — like ChatGPT — ensure minors do not access them, and a bill (SF 1886) requiring that companies disclose when a person is communicating with AI.
Sens. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, and Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael, are leading the bipartisan effort to regulate AI. The duo — who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum — said they aren’t opposed to the technology but urged lawmakers to protect Minnesotans. Maye Quade and Lucero were co-authors of a bill regulating deepfakes — digitally altered photos or videos depicting events that didn’t actually happen — which became law in 2023.
“There’s a recognition that we need to do something to bring controls in place, to uphold the Constitution, to protect privacy and to empower individuals against these multi-billion dollar industries,” said Lucero, who works in cybersecurity, on Monday.
One of Maye Quade and Lucero’s bills (SF 1120) would prohibit the government from requesting reverse-location data, which many law enforcement agencies use when they do not know who specifically committed a crime.
Law enforcement can obtain a warrant that mandates a technology company give them data about which cellphones were in a certain location at a specific time or who has searched for a specific word or phrase on their phones or on an AI chatbot.
Civil liberties advocates argue warrants are supposed to be narrow, and these so-called “reverse warrants” allow the government to conduct widespread surveillance on everyone who was in an area at a given time or on people who are searching for words or phrases. This is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, advocates argue.
Law enforcement officials, including the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, testified against the bill, arguing that it would harm public safety.
“While I certainly appreciate Sen. Maye Quade’s intentions to protect individuals’ privacy rights with such technological capabilities, prohibiting this critical investigative tool would have extensive negative consequences in local and state investigations,” BCA Superintendent Drew Evans stated in written testimony. “It would impact the ability for law enforcement to prevent and solve crimes and to hold individuals accountable.”
A growing number of states are seeking to regulate AI, as more companies seek to capitalize on the technology. Last year, 38 states adopted or enacted around 100 AI-related measures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But the federal government has sought to curb states’ ability to regulate AI, as companies are furiously lobbying Congress and the White House to get rid of state regulations. Lawmakers last summer attempted to include a 10-year moratorium on state AI laws in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the Senate dropped it.
President Donald Trump in December signed an executive order giving the attorney general the ability to sue states and overturn laws that don’t support the “United States’ global AI dominance.”
Maye Quade said that minors should be prohibited from accessing AI chatbots because the machine could introduce virtually any topic including disturbing content.
Maye Quade said she’s been talking to AI companies about the regulations and believes they could reach a compromise, but she said she’s okay if they oppose the bills.
Maye Quade said that states shouldn’t back down from trying to regulate AI.
“For decades, tech companies have told legislators and the public that damage and destruction from their unregulated products are necessary byproducts of growth and innovation. They have told us that they can do amazing things, like cure cancer, but not comply with 50 different laws in states. We can no longer accept that narrative,” Maye Quade said.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) – ATMs that deal in cryptocurrency could be banned in Minnesota soon.
Crypto ATM ban considered
The backstory:
Police across the state are urging lawmakers to pass a DFL ban on those kiosks that convert cash to crypto.
They say the machines are used extensively by criminals trying to scam people or to hide the proceeds of their crimes. In 2024, lawmakers passed a law to regulate the machines. Still, last year Attorney General Keith Ellison warned of an increase in crypto ATM scams.
At a hearing last month, Faribault police reported their residents had lost $500,000 since 2022 from crypto ATM scams. Woodbury Detective Lynn Lawrence told lawmakers about a victim she helped who had completed at least ten Bitcoin transactions over six months at crypto ATMs.
By the numbers:
Right now there are about 350 crypto kiosks in the state. They are often located in gas stations and grocery stores.
Their owners say this proposed law goes too far, but they’d support a law requiring full refunds for any customers who were victims of fraud.
How crypto ATMs work
Dig deeper:
Crypto ATMs allow users to turn fiat money into digital currency or vice versa. Users typically have to scan their identification to be able to use the machines and then the currency is sent to a wallet of their choosing.
However, the machines are increasingly used by scammers who convince elderly victims to use the ATMs to use the machines to send them money. Once the money is sent, it’s impossible to recoup the funds from the scammers.
Exchanges can blacklist scammers’ wallets and block them from withdrawing ill-gotten funds. However, most scammers will use “mixers” which wash the funds through a service that makes the coins hard to track or find ways around large exchanges like decentralized exchanges and peer-to-peer exchanges.
The other side:
At a hearing on Tuesday, Larry Lipka, counsel for digital currency platform CoinFlip, which operates 50 crypto ATMs in Minnesota, recognized scams are an issue, but pointed out scamming won’t disappear if crypto kiosks are banned.
“While I understand that scams are a problem, scams are a problem everywhere in this country,” said Lipka, “They are a problem for crypto kiosks, they are a problem for wire transfers, and they are a problem for gift cards. But no one is here today saying we should ban exchanges or gift cards or wire transfers because scammers use them.”
Instead of a ban, Lipka urged lawmakers to instead consider smarter and better controls for kiosks. According to Lipka, back in 2024, CoinFlip pushed for further protections when the previous crypto ATM bill was being discussed, arguing that legislation didn’t go far enough.
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