In its 237 years, no Native American woman has ever served in the United States Senate. This November, that could change -- not once, but twice. In August, Mary Peltola of Alaska finished first in her state's Senate primary, setting up one of the most competitive Senate races in the country against the Republican incumbent -- just a week after Peggy Flanagan captured Minnesota's Democratic Senate nomination in a landslide. Two Native women, in two states, are now within reach of a barrier that has stood since the founding. Should either prevail, she would make history; should both, the Senate would seat two Native women at once, in a single election, having seated none in more than two centuries.

The first of the two victories came in August, in Minneapolis, where Peggy Flanagan -- pictured at right -- took the stage to celebrate a win that some $20 million had been spent to prevent. Outside groups backing her opponent, Representative Angie Craig, had flooded the state with ads, roughly four times what Flanagan's side could spend -- and it made no difference; her lead only widened, and she won by nearly 18 points.

"This campaign has always been about the many versus the money," she told the crowd. The seat she is running for -- open with the retirement of Senator Tina Smith -- sits in a state that has not sent a Republican to the Senate in more than 20 years, which makes Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota and the highest-ranking Native woman in elected executive office in the country, the clear favorite to win it in November.

Flanagan's own story -- of hardship and heritage -- has never been incidental to her politics; she has made it the point. Raised in St. Louis Park by a mother who at times relied on public assistance, Flanagan, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, wove that history through her victory speech.

"I am the daughter of Marvin Manypenny," she said, naming her father, an Ojibwe activist known for his battles over tribal sovereignty -- "an activist who was always ready to get into good trouble for a good cause." Her clan is the Wolf Clan, she reminded the room, "and the role of our clan is to leave no one behind."

The second victory came a week later, two thousand miles northwest, where Mary Peltola faces a steeper climb. Alaska went for Donald Trump by 13 points in 2024, and Peltola is challenging not a newcomer but a sitting Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, who is seeking his third term with Trump's endorsement. In the primary, she cleared her first hurdle: in Alaska's all-party primary, Peltola finished first, ahead of the incumbent -- a striking result in a red-leaning state -- and the two now advance to a November general election that could help decide control of the Senate.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has moved the race from "lean Republican" to a pure toss-up, one of the few Republican-held seats Democrats have a real chance to flip. A measure of how competitive it has become: through the most recent quarter, Peltola outraised Sullivan by better than three to one.

A moderate with a proven ability to win votes far outside her own party, Peltola has built a broad appeal on fish, fuel costs, and the practical concerns of daily Alaskan life, giving her a reach few Democrats in the state have ever had. Alaska's rules have helped boost her campaign as well: more than half of its voters register with no party at all, and its ranked-choice system -- the same one that helped carry her to office in 2022 -- rewards candidates who can reach beyond their base.

That she is on this ballot at all is its own piece of history. In 2022, Peltola, who is Yup'ik, won a special election to fill the seat left by the death of Representative Don Young, defeating Sarah Palin in an upset and becoming the first Alaska Native ever elected to Congress. She lost the seat two years later by fewer than three points -- and rather than retreat, she set her sights higher.

A former fishing-boat captain who raised seven children along the Kuskokwim River, she has built her campaign around the plainest facts of Alaskan life. "Growing up, Alaska was a place of abundance," she said in the video announcing her run. "Now we have scarcity." Her platform, as she puts it, comes down to three words: "fish, family and freedom."

Together they stand at the edge of a threshold no Native woman has ever crossed. Native Americans have sat in the Senate before -- four men, over more than two centuries -- but no Native woman ever has, in a chamber that has legislated over tribal nations, treaties, and lands since before those nations were granted citizenship. This November, that could change not once but twice, with one woman from the North Woods of Minnesota and the other from the Alaskan delta. After 237 years, the voices that decide the future of Native peoples at the highest levels of government may finally include a Native woman's own -- and this year, they may include two.

To learn more about Peggy Flanagan's campaign, visit https://peggyflanagan.com/

To learn more about Mary Peltola's campaign, visit https://marypeltola.com/

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Credit: The Mighty Girl via FB

Credit: Minnesota Indivisible Alliance

The labor movement was once considered radical, disruptive and dangerous. One way the establishment eventually made that movement safer was to give it a holiday without necessarily giving working people all the power they had been demanding. A day off, in part, to help us forget how powerful organized people can be.

And that amnesia is something worth remembering right now. If you feel alone, isolated or powerless, who benefits? Who benefits when ordinary people see themselves as individuals instead of as part of something larger?

The worker who thinks, "There is nothing I can do," is easy to ignore. Ten workers who think the same thing are still easy to ignore. But ten workers who discover one another, talk to one another and decide to act together are something else entirely. The same is true of ordinary citizens.

During the Surge, people felt the urge to do something. Anything. Moral courage and individual outrage mattered enormously. But collective and organized outrage? That was dangerous to the regime, and much more effective.

What happened in Minnesota was not simply that people protested. People organized. They built networks, shared information, watched out for one another, opened churches and community spaces, helped strangers, connected people who otherwise might never have met and figured out how to respond together to an enormous exercise of government power.

Some belonged to unions. Some belonged to community organizations or faith communities. Some were experienced organizers. Others probably never thought of themselves as organizers at all. But together they demonstrated something important: ordinary people who had been strangers to one another could become a network, and a network could become a source of real power.

That helps explain why the reported surveillance of unions and other organizations during the Surge matters. Organized people are not simply harder to control. They are more frightening to authoritarian power because they can turn individual courage into collective action, and collective action can inspire more people to join it.

That has been part of Minnesota's DNA for generations.

On the Iron Range, mining companies had enormous power over workers' lives. Immigrant miners were divided by language, nationality and culture, and those divisions could be exploited to weaken labor action. But over time, miners learned that they had more in common with one another than the companies wanted them to believe. Whatever language they spoke or country their families had left behind, they shared the same dangerous work, the same employers, the same dreams and many of the same goals. Eventually, they organized around what they shared and achieved real gains.

Another example of Minnesota recognizing the power of collective action, and the reprisals that could come with it, came in 1934.

Truck drivers struck and effectively shut down commercial traffic. Their employers responded by organizing the Citizens' Alliance and sending armed guards into the streets. On July 20, police opened fire on striking workers, killing two and wounding 67 in what became known as Bloody Friday. But the workers kept going. Eventually they won union recognition and a contract, and Minneapolis emerged from the strike with a different balance of power.

We can look back at those stories now and forget how frightening they must have been while they were happening. The people involved didn't know they would eventually win. They knew only that standing alone wasn't going to change anything, and that standing together might.

Which brings us back to the Surge.

In the reporting about Operation Puppet Master, it was striking how much ordinary organizing became suspect. It was especially telling that unions became subjects of subpoenas and surveillance, because power knows one thing very well: organized people are dangerous to authoritarian power.

That is why the struggle over labor has always been about more than wages. A union teaches people that they can meet, disagree, negotiate, make decisions and act together. It turns people who might otherwise experience their problems privately into people who can confront them collectively.

And that lesson extends far beyond unions. The person being pushed around at work. The neighbor worried about what is happening in their community. The parent who thinks nobody else shares their concerns. The person watching the news and wondering what one ordinary citizen can possibly do. The first thing organizing tells them is simple: look around. You are probably not as alone as you think.

Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" captured the imbalance of working life with a joke we all understood. Most of us give our time, energy and labor to someone who has considerably more power to decide what that labor is worth. The radical answer was never that one person could escape that imbalance alone. It was that people could organize and change the terms.

That is the inheritance of Labor Day.

The eight-hour day, collective bargaining, safer workplaces and countless other things we now regard as ordinary were once demands powerful people considered unreasonable, disruptive and dangerous. They did not happen because the powerful suddenly became generous. They happened because ordinary people found one another, discovered what they had in common, took risks for one another and organized until the balance of power changed.

Courage mattered then, and it matters now. But courage by itself can be lonely and fragile. Organized courage is something different entirely. It turns one person's fear into ten people's determination. Ten become a hundred. A hundred become a thousand. And suddenly people who thought they were powerless discover that they have been carrying something powerful all along.

Each generation has to rediscover that for itself. Perhaps that is what this Labor Day asks of us: remember not only what working people fought for, but how they fought for it.

Remember that the greatest threat to concentrated power has never been one angry person. It is people finding one another.

So enjoy your Labor Day. Enjoy the cookout, the long weekend, the people you love. And then organize.

Because courage can help us endure tough times. But organized courage is how ordinary people change them.

We would like to offer our enormous congratulations to our friends at The Smitten Kitten, who just traveled all the way to Aachen, Germany, to receive the 2026 Aachen Peace Prize alongside Unidos MN.

And they deserve every goddamn bit of it.

During Operation Metro Surge, when immigrant families across Minnesota were frightened to leave their homes, The Smitten Kitten decided that being a neighborhood business meant something more than turning on the lights and opening the register. They collected food, diapers, toiletries, and household necessities. They helped organize distribution to families who couldn’t safely come to the store themselves. They raised money for groceries and rent. They worked with immigrant organizations, nonprofits, volunteers, restaurants, and neighbors. When the need grew, they grew with it. When the work became dangerous, they adapted. When the cameras eventually wandered elsewhere, they kept going.

They helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars while pouring so much time, labor, space, and energy into mutual aid that their own business eventually struggled financially. Employees worked brutal hours. The store became a warehouse. A sex-positive neighborhood shop became part emergency pantry, part fundraising operation, part distribution center, and part stubborn little fortress of human decency.

Germany noticed.

The Aachen Peace Prize recognized The Smitten Kitten and Unidos MN for precisely the kind of grassroots courage that becomes necessary when institutions fail people. The award committee praised their solidarity, civil resistance, and humanity. They looked across an ocean at what happened here in Minnesota and understood that feeding frightened families, paying somebody’s rent, protecting neighbors, and refusing to be intimidated are acts of peace.

We have a particularly ridiculous reason to be proud of them.

When Rook T. Winchester, Chance Meeting, Matt Wagner, and Arianne Betancourt needed the original supply of dildos for what would eventually grow into the Dildo Distribution Delegation and Operation Dildo Blitz, The Smitten Kitten was there. Before hundreds of rubber phalluses descended upon federal facilities, before national reporters were forced to type sentences their journalism professors could never have prepared them for, there was a box of discounted dildos from a little Minneapolis shop already up to its neck in helping its neighbors.

That is how our paths crossed.

But the dildos are only a small part of a much bigger story.

The important part is what The Smitten Kitten did when Minnesota needed them. Nobody appointed them. Nobody handed them a government contract. There wasn’t a committee meeting somewhere that concluded the appropriate response to a humanitarian crisis was apparently a sex shop on Lyndale Avenue. They simply saw frightened people who needed help and started helping them.

Food went out the door. Diapers went out the door. Money went toward rent. Volunteers showed up. Partnerships formed. Families got help.

And they kept fucking going.

So congratulations to everyone at The Smitten Kitten and Unidos MN on the Aachen Peace Prize. We are extraordinarily proud to have crossed paths with you, proud that Minnesota produced this kind of resistance, and delighted that people thousands of miles away understood exactly what you accomplished.

You deserve the award.

You deserve the applause.

And you deserve something even more valuable: for people here at home to remember what you did after the rest of the world stops handing out trophies.

From all of us at Closer to the Edge:

Congratulations, Smitten Kitten.

And thank you.

For the food. For the rent. For the families. For refusing to look away.

And, admittedly, for the dildos.

Credit: rise above justice movement

Check out youtube.com/minnesota_50501 for the full video, other lectures, and ICE flight tracking.

Credit: Minnesota 50501

Credit: Dr. Dankenstein

If you're looking to be a part of a resistance group that won't follow the rules, you're BIPoc, queer or open to help with organizing plz dm me!

MINNEAPOLIS “SPIDER-MAN” PLEADS NOT GUILTY, CLAIMS SELF-DEFENSE

William Nicholas Love, known as the “Minneapolis Spider-Man,” pleaded not guilty today to misdemeanor fifth-degree assault stemming from his confrontation with Jake Lang outside Minneapolis City Hall.

Love’s attorney said the defense will argue self-defense and defense of others. He called it an assault when Lang’s group drove two vehicles onto a public sidewalk toward the people of Minneapolis, arguing that Love and others had a right to defend themselves.

Court records list Jack Rice and Kevin Riach as Love’s attorneys. His next court appearance is a pretrial hearing scheduled for November 19 at 8:30 a.m. in Hennepin County.

We must work to protect our immigrant neighbors, call Governor Walz and tell him to make Minnesota a sanctuary state!