In popular culture, Minnesota bring up images of hotdish, "Minnesota Nice," and white immigrant communities. While these are certainly part of the story, Minnesota has a rich history of racial diversity, beginning with the indigenous Chippewa, Ojibwe and Dakota communities and including more recent arrivals of Hmong, Somali and Mexican immigrants. Minnesota has also been home to a small but vibrant African American population. "Minnesota Nice" has not made us exempt from racism, and has a history of racism that stretches back for centuries. We compiled this guide to help you further explore the people who make up Minnesota and the issues they face. Be sure to search the catalog to find additional resources and please reach out to a librarian if you have any research questions related to this topic.
The Gustavus Library is committed to fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment for all our patrons. We acknowledge that harmful and outdated language or terminology exists in catalog records for our materials, though, and we would welcome your help in identifying such instances.
If you encounter any language that you consider to be harmful or offensive to yourself or others, please use this form to report it and suggest alternative language. We will contact the Library of Congress to request that changes be made whenever we come across items under their purview and will supplement our own descriptions with more respectful terms as necessary. We also direct you to our entire Harmful Language Statement for more information.
While these resources cover the entire geographic area of the United States, you can still find information related to Minnesota within these resources.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0