Amid encampment fires and evictions, advocates look at buying land

NINA MOINI: Advocates for unhoused people in the Twin Cities are scrambling to open warming centers during today's cold snap. You may have heard on our show last week, there were a string of fires at homeless encampments in Minneapolis this month. Two encampment fires ignited a week ago Monday, just six blocks apart in South Minneapolis. Advocates say more than 200 people were displaced from those incidents.

Two of those advocates are Christin Crabtree and Nicole Mason, who support unhoused people through Camp Nenookaasi. They're fundraising to buy land in the area to prevent the people from getting displaced over and over again. They both join me now to talk about it. Christin and Nicole, thank you both for your time.

CHRISTIN CRABTREE: Thank you for having us.

NINA MOINI: I want to start with an update on what happened last week. We mentioned the fires and the report about 200 people or so that were displaced. I know you two work closely with people. What have you heard from them following the fires, and how are they doing generally?

CHRISTIN CRABTREE: Absolutely. It's been a hard time. There is not enough shelter available for the people that were displaced. There were roughly 230 people living at the two locations. So we have been working to provide temporary warming shelter in partnership with lots of different neighbors and community groups.

The Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center has opened their doors to our unhoused neighbors so that they're able to stay there, access services, shower, have meals. Many of our relatives found that they were able to sleep for the first time, get some really good sleep at night, which was wonderful. So we've been really rallying as a community to make sure we can meet the basic needs of our people and help them access the services that they are worthy of having and deserve.

NINA MOINI: Christin, I want to take a step back for a moment and talk about Camp Nenookaasi, which has become this wraparound name for a handful of encampments around the Phillips neighborhood there in South Minneapolis. The group has faced a lot. This time last year, I can remember the city of Minneapolis conducted multiple rounds of clearing those encampments. I remember visiting Camp Nenookaasi It must have been December 2023 and talking with Nicole for about an hour inside one of the yurts there. And it just seems like a year later, where are we? What do you think of just these kind of repeated situations with largely the same group of people? What would it take to help them get to where they need to be?

CHRISTIN CRABTREE: Sure. And I just want to say Camp Nenookaasi, actually, there were a couple of iterations before we started in August of 2023 that our neighbors in East Phillips, the Native community, has come together, AIM and so forth, to try to interrupt some of these harms and provide services in the past. So I want to thank the people who have come before us too. Since the time that you met with Nicole, there's been a number of evictions. There are encampments throughout South Minneapolis, and the people have been moved around a lot, often only to settle back down a block or two away.

And with the absence of permanent housing and wraparound services, community is really doing the best we can to show up for and take care of each other. Through that time, we have really worked in partnership with several both nonprofit service providers, as well as our neighbors and community groups that mutual aid groups that provide support to neighbors to really make sure that we're serving people equitably. We've advocated for a public health response to homelessness at the city of Minneapolis. And thanks to our council members, a public health response is now something that is funded.

We have worked really hard to advocate for housing first, which is housing with wraparound services. And council member Wansley put forward a budget amendment that put dollars towards housing 50 families and 50 individuals. So there are things that are happening at a systems level, as well as our volunteers and people that we work with. So we now have a team of peer-recovery support specialists who go out into the camps and on the streets and assist and support our neighbors with accessing detox, treatment, shelter, case management, housing, health care.

We also have an outreach team that does food and supply and harm-reduction distribution. They're also watching over our neighbors to prevent missing and murdered Indigenous relatives. We struggle a lot with our people going missing, particularly after evictions. So this outreach team is critical. And then we also have a group called the Sobriety Warriors, which is a Native-led recovery support collective of different relatives who are in recovery that are helping neighbors to access services and have relational support when they do enter the recovery process.

NINA MOINI: OK, so things have really been in motion, it sounds like. And Nicole, I understand we have back on the line. Thank you again. You all are taking action, Camp Nenookaasi. I understand, your 2/3 of the way to your goal of raising $300,000 to buy land in South Minneapolis to focus on healing these wraparound services. You talk about helping people that are dealing with substance use disorders. Nicole, tell me more about what that space looks like once you buy it. What's your vision for it?

NICOLE MASON: So my vision has always been recovery for my Indigenous people, for the people in the streets. I'm a grateful woman in recovery myself. And I was in those circles. I was at the Wall of Forgotten Natives, staying there. And actually three people on our peer-support team lived in the Wall of Forgotten Natives and are now in recovery, and we're back to get our people into recovery.

And so I guess what we're facing right now is we've helped a lot of people from Camp Nenookaasi get into recovery. We're supporting them out there. We go into harm-reduction settings, and we do talking circles with our relatives that are still in active addiction and help guide them into recovery.

And so the people from the camp that are now in recovery, we also support them. We go and we pick them up. We take them to meetings. We take them to different positive, sober activities and trying to show them a positive way in life. But I have a woman that was from the camp. She went to intensive treatment to outpatient treatment. And then staying in outpatient treatment, because they have nowhere to go-- at this point, we have so many people in recovery, and they are still homeless. And so this vision is to continue to support these relatives that came from the camp that are now in recovery and they are still homeless.

We are not talking about just an issue of drug addiction. It's resource. And so if you can say, oh, I've heard-- where people argued with me and said, Nicole, why don't they get a job? If you have your children back, if you have worked so hard-- and I'm at their side where they want to give up and it's like, I want to leave. No, stay with it. You're doing awesome. And I'm kind of there as their cheerleader to keep them going and empower these women and these men. Like, you've worked so hard, and now look at you've got your baby. You're rocking it.

But in order to maintain that housing and sober living, they have to go to groups. They have to be in outpatient treatment through the facility to pay for the housing. And so then that means that 3 o'clock when group is done, their children come back home. They don't have childcare. It's either one or the two. I'm going to continue to miss out on my child's life or I continue to go to treatment. There's no getting a job in the afternoon. You get what I'm saying?

NINA MOINI: I do. You're talking about holistic, wraparound, ongoing services, individualized support, community, all of the things that people are trying to make happen together. Before I let you both go, Christin, what's the one thing that people at the city or people who have the power to help at the county can do right now to help you all meet your goals and work together?

CHRISTIN CRABTREE: We would welcome their support and partnership. This has very much been a community-led effort in the absence of systems support. We require for there to be a multi-jurisdictional response, one that is constructive. Because these politics come at the expense of human life, and that is not OK. So we would love their partnership in funding these initiatives.

We know what works. We know housing first works. We know that. And so being able to come together and fund these things that work, recognizing that maybe the best use of our public dollars isn't fences and dumping rubble on East Phillips, but rather putting those funding into housing, putting the funding into services. We demand services instead of sweeps because services meet human needs in are life affirming.

NINA MOINI: Christin and Nicole, I want to thank you both so much for coming on with us and wishing you all the best in this New Year.

CHRISTIN CRABTREE: Thank you.

NICOLE MASON: Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Those were Camp Nenookaasi organizers, Christin Crabtree and Nicole Mason.