The way it looks now, the Pohlad family will end up retaining ownership of the Minnesota Twins or selling at a price lower than initially anticipated.

It’s been nearly eight months since the Twins announced they would explore a sale of the club after 40 years of ownership. Some in the organization privately speculated a sale could bring at least $1.7 billion, the price for which the Baltimore Orioles sold last year.

The Twins figured then that a sale could be completed by March. At least one potential local buyer, after recently reviewing the club’s financial records, has lost interest based on the price, now believed to be $1.5 billion. The Twins reportedly are more than $400 million in debt, borrowing to pay bills.

Another potential local buyer has confided he’s not currently interested.

Still another, after reviewing the books, described prospects for a sale as “dismal.”

>> The major obstacle for a sale of the Twins is cash flow. A majority buyer would need myriad limited investors to cash-flow the operation, which could cost at least $25 million a year.

>> A major reason for the Twins’ recent financial losses is local TV deals. That eventually will improve, though. Meanwhile, other major league owners would frown on the Pohlads taking a lesser price because it could diminish the value of their franchises.

Also, after the 2026 season, complicated negotiations for a new labor agreement could lead to a work stoppage.

>> New York-based Allen & Company, hired by the Twins to explore a sale, also is exploring investment deals for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and New York Liberty.

>> Stationed just outside Target Field during Twins games are police armed with AR-15 rifles. Said one, “I hope I never have to use it.”

>> Lance Johnson coached Chet Holmgren, the 7-foot-1 Oklahoma City Thunder star, at Minnehaha Academy.

“What’s fun for me is that most everybody has seen him from his days at Gonzaga through now,” Johnson said Friday. “I’ve seen him from seventh grade through now, so it’s literally been the development from a boy to a man, and it’s made me very proud of him.”

Eight years ago, when Minnehaha Academy was partially destroyed due to a natural gas explosion, Holmgren had to re-route from home in Minneapolis and travel nearly an hour each day to get to another campus for classes.

“He had to take the city bus to a Burger King behind my house, and then from Burger King, I would drive him the rest of the way,” Johnson said. “The type of kid he was, he never once was late. He made friends with all the Burger King people. They loved him, gave him free food all the time. He was just a wonderful kid.”

>> After two years of litigation following dismissal for non-compliance over the NBA’s COVID-19 policy, St. Paul’s Ken Mauer, Jr., 70, who refereed nearly 20 NBA Finals, has won his pension appeal.

>> The Vikings will play the Steelers in Ireland on Sept. 28, but not because of deference to the Vikings. The game at Croke Park in Dublin is for the Rooney family, owners of the Steelers. Dan Rooney was U.S. ambassador to Ireland under President Obama.

It was the Steelers who sought a game in Ireland, and it just happened that the Vikings were chosen. Then the Vikings, who already have played four regular-season games in London, agreed to stay another week and play the Browns in London at Tottenham Stadium.

>> In 2019, Rocco Baldelli, at age 38, became the youngest winner of the American League Manager of the Year Award. The Twins — who won 101 games in 2019 — after a 13-20 start to this season, won 13 straight, and 15 of their next 17, to propel them to second in the AL Central.

Entering Saturday, only the Phillies (16-5) in Major League Baseball had more victories in May than the Twins (15-4).

As a player, Baldelli had three managers: Lou Piniella, Joe Maddon and Terry Francona.

“They brought very different things to the table. And man, I was lucky,” Baldelli said. “Lou was tough. Joe was incredibly creative and charismatic. And anyone who plays for Tito (Francona) finds a new appreciation for the game.

“All three of them might go to the Hall of Fame. Those are some good guys to learn from. And I got to work on Kevin Cash’s staff in Tampa when he took over and became a young major league manager.

“These were all essential for me, all in their own way mentors, and probably turned me into the baseball person that I am.”

>> The Lynx won’t host Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever until Aug. 24 at Target Center, but already the cheapest ticket is $167 via Ticketmaster.com. Most expensive: $3,176.

>> Former Gophers and Cretin-Derham Hall football player Casey O’Brien, 26, who has undergone more than 40 cancer surgeries, received a standing ovation after his emotional induction speech into the Mancini’s St. Paul Sports Hall of Fame the other day.

>> Former USA Olympic hockey gold medal star Jenny Potter’s son Cullen, 18, an Arizona State center from Minneapolis, is projected as a late first-round pick in next month’s NHL draft.

>> Minnesota Twins starter Pablo Lopez’s first full healthy season in the major leagues was 2022 with the Miami Marlins. He was pitching well and working hard in weight and training rooms. He finished the season 10-10.

But, he figured, “there must be something else I can do. Lo and behold, the season’s over and I’m weighting 242 pounds! The heaviest I’ve ever been,” he said.

Lopez, 29, is 6-foot-4.

“It wasn’t a huge 242 pounds. But I was a little fluffy here and there,” he said.

Then he began chatting with the Marlins’ team dietitian.

“I’m like, this is one gap I can shrink to elevate my game to get better. I started diving into diet and nutrition and made a lot of changes that offseason going into 2023,” he said.

He showed up to his first spring training with the Twins at 215 pounds.

“Down 27 pounds,” he said.

Lopez (4-2, 2.31 ERA) is in terrific physical condition. He used to enjoy cheeseburgers.

“Oh, yeah — just give me two cheeseburgers — I could eat so many,” he said. “Have you ever been to Shake Shack? Oh my God, I could eat six of them.

“I don’t, but I could.”

Now he’s learned the value of nutrition. “And what it brings to my life and career,” he said.

It’s brought him a $73.5 million, four-year contract. He’s gone from a size 38 waist to size 32.

Ever eat a doughnut, a candy bar?

“No doughnuts, no candy bars,” he said.

>> Twins reliever Louie Varland’s wife Maddie, an Irondale High School grad, is a dentist practicing in Brainerd. “She comes down (Twin Cities) here on weekends and on off-days I go up there — we make it work,” said Varland, playing for $768,150 this season.

>> Miles Bollinger, who was captain of his football, basketball and golf teams at Cretin-Derham Hall, is headed to Indian Hills (Iowa) Community College to play golf. Miles, son of ex-Vikings QB Brooks Bollinger, never received an academic grade other than A during his prep career.

>> Star quarterback for the Centennial girls flag football team is senior Allenah Loots, daughter of former record-setting Southwest State QB Jeff Loots.

>> Iconic local sports vendor Wally “The Beer Man” McNeil has turned 90 and plans to work the Vikings’ summer golf tournament next month at the Meadows at Mystic Lake.

>> As he recently announced, Warren Buffett, considered by many the greatest U.S financial investor in history, with an estimated net worth of $160 billion, is retiring this year at age 94. St. Paul Johnson grad/former Gophers hockey captain Ron Peltier worked for Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway company, having founded mortgage affiliate HomeServices of America, a national real estate firm.

Peltier, 76, worked for Buffett for more than 20 years.

“Absolutely great guy,” he said. “The things he expected were total honestly and integrity. He’s famous for saying, ‘Lose money for the enterprise and I’ll understand. Lose an ounce of reputation and I’ll be ruthless.’ And that’s still how he thinks. You can’t tarnish reputation, which is probably good advice for all us.”

What’s made Buffett an investment genius?

“First of all, he uses common sense,” Peltier said. “You want to surround yourself with the best people. But no compromising on honesty and integrity.”

Peltier retired two years ago and resides in Dellwood, Minn., where he owns 7 Vines Vineyard.

>> Eight players on Cretin-Derham Hall’s baseball team are committed to college programs next year, including infielder-pitcher Davis Fleming to the Gophers.

>> Among Twins starter Chris Paddack’s array of body tattoos is “236” inscribed on his ribs.

“The (overall) number I was drafted — round eight,” said Paddack, who starts Monday in Tampa Bay. “Just a reminder that I’m living out my dreams.”

Paddack, 29, was drafted in 2015 by the Miami Marlins. Other tattoos include roses as a reminder of his grandmother, who died of breast cancer last February; a lion with blue eyes, which he calls his animal of choice because he’s a proud Texan, and Joshua 1:19, his favorite bible verse.

“They’re all meaningful to me,” he said. “I want to finish (tattoo) out my left arm, but I haven’t rushed it because I want it to be something that means something to me or my family. So that way, whenever your kids ask, you have a reasoning behind it, and it’s not just a couple butterflies.”

Paddack, pitching for $7.5 million this season, is 2-4 with a 3.98 ERA after 10 starts. He can become a free agent after the season.

>> Gophers junior golfer Isabella McCauley has been named a member of the U.S. Palmer Cup team featuring men’s and women’s college golfers who will compete internationally June 5-7 at the Congaree club in Ridgeland, S.C.

>> Unless he gets another pay raise, the Gophers’ P.J. Fleck, at $6.8 million, this year will be the ninth-highest paid football coach in the 18-team Big Ten, per on3.com.

>> Former Gophers head football coach John Gutekunst, 81, is retired in Myrtle Beach, S.C. With the Gophers, he was paid $100,000.

>> Jose Valdivielso, a Cuban infielder for the original Twins in 1961, died recently at age 90. Al Worthington, a reliever, is the oldest living former Twin at age 96.

>> The Saint Paul Saints lead all of Minor League Baseball in rainouts this season with 13.

>> Former Richfield basketball star Jessica January is taking an assistant coaching job at alma mater DePaul University.

>> Monroe High Hall of Fame electees for June 22 induction at DeGidio’s: John Moravec, Dick Rudolph, Joe Corbo, Gordy Morrison, Paul and Jim Fearing.

Don’t print that

>> The Vikings so far this year are No. 1 in the NFL in cash spent on players, $362.3 million, per spotrac.com. The Packers at $259.5 million, are No. 27 in the 32-team league. Last season, the Vikings ranked 18th at $228.4 million, the Packers 19th at $234 million.

>> The 2025 NFL draft and free agency have been completed and Vikings GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, who has one season left on his initial four-year contract, remains without an extension even though Vikings ownership has said it will get done.

>> TV viewership of the Timberwolves-Oklahoma City Game 1 of the Western Conference finals last week was down 24% from the Wolves-Mavericks Game 1 playoff a year ago, per sportsmediawatch.com

>> So much of the coming Vikings season will depend on how rookie QB J.J. McCarthy plays. At this juncture, a 10-7 regular season record isn’t unreasonable.

>> The NBA is expected to wait until soon after the NBA Finals to announce that Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore are officially new owners of the Timberwolves and Lynx. Meanwhile, a second source has confirmed that Rodriguez and Lore did not have the $1.5 billion purchase price and needed mega-billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Eric Schmidt to step in to fortify.

>> A little birdie says a Gophers men’s sophomore basketball starting guard will play this year with a $700,000 name, image and likeness (NIL) deal.

>> If Gophers football sophomore defensive back Koi Perich, paid $250,000 via NIL last season, makes less than $1 million, he’s being underpaid.

>> Sophomore offensive line starter Phillip Daniels, who is 6-foot-5 and 315-pounds, has left the Gophers and is joining a reigning national championship Ohio State team that had a NIL player payroll of $20 million last season. Minnesota plays in Columbus on Oct. 4.

>> Don’t think there won’t be major competition among Minnesota casino tribes for more sports gambling rights when it’s officially announced that Grand Casino in Mille Lacs will succeed Xcel Energy Center as corporate naming sponsor for the Wild’s St. Paul arena.

>> A sports memorabilia collector the other day was able to get new Pope Leo XIV, an American baseball fan from Chicago, to sign a baseball.

Leo XIV is expected to be asked a lot to autograph baseballs. In 1987, former Gophers catcher Mike Sadek from Richfield, while working for the Giants, was able to get a baseball signed by Pope John Paul II during a papal appearance at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The Pope signed it “JPII.” It brought $34,000 in an auction.

>> Now word is it’ll take $17 million a season if Kirill Kaprizov’s representation squeezes the Wild to re-sign its star in July.

>> Wild first-round draft pick forward Danila Yurov from Russia will play for the entry-level $950,000 when he gets to the NHL.

>> Plans are underway for a huge retirement party in Montreal in August for Marc-Andre Fleury and teammates from his 21-year career, which ended with the Wild this season.

Overheard

> The Twins’ Rocco Baldelli, the 2019 AL Manager of the Year: “I could be wrong about this, but over seven years there’s only one guy in this clubhouse who was here in 2019, Byron (Buxton). It’s basically Byron and a different group. When it gets down to it, you’re going to have to win in a completely different manner.”

Related Articles

Charley Walters: Vikings all in on J.J. McCarthy as starting quarterback

Charley Walters: Vikings’ backup definitely won’t be Rodgers

Charley Walters: Sam Darnold likely to land in Seattle

 

CROSSLAKE, Minn. — In its 77 years, the Minnesota Governor’s Fishing Opener was never in Crosslake on the Whitefish Chain, specifically Cross Lake, until this year.

Requirements to host the event have changed since it was last held in the lakes area in 2014 in Nisswa on a much larger scale than in recent years.

Even so, it was a surprise that Crosslake was chosen as the host community this year.

“Crosslake has not applied in at least the past 15 years; however, the Brainerd and Nisswa chambers hosted the event in 2014,” Cindy Myogeto, Crosslake Chamber director, said via email.

“Back then the requirements included hotel and convention space that were beyond Crosslake’s capacity, making Grand View (Lodge) the natural choice as the primary venue. Post-pandemic, the scale of the event has shifted,” Myogeto said.

During this year’s media row event on Friday, May 9, at Manhattan Beach Lodge, state and local leaders met with media outlets for 10 minutes each. Nicole Lalum, industry relations manager with Explore Minnesota Tourism, shared with the Echo Journal how Crosslake was chosen this year, and how the Governor’s Fishing Opener has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why Crosslake?

Communities still apply to host the Governor’s Fishing Opener; however, this year’s applicants didn’t make the cut for various reasons, Lalum said.

“So the DNR and Explore Minnesota met, talked with a few different communities around the state and came up with a few options, Crosslake being one of those options,” she said.

They nominated a couple communities, and the governor’s office chose Crosslake.

New process

When it was last in the lakes area, the event operated under an older process.

“And to be honest, it was a bit heavy of a lift for a community to do. There were a lot of required things,” Lalum said.

When the event was hosted at Breezy Point Resort on Pelican Lake and the Breezy Point and Pequot Lakes communities in 2001 and 2008, and at Grand View Lodge on Gull Lake and Nisswa in 2014, co-chairs spearheaded the planning with the chambers and subcommittees.

Related Articles

Free steelhead identification decals help Lake Superior anglers avoid keeping protected fish

Skywatch: Virgo the Virgin, a large but faint constellation

Lake of the Woods, Rainy River deliver walleyes on Minnesota fishing opener

Skywatch: Crowded space

Northwoods comes to life with sounds of spring during evening by campfire

“And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken the event to its basic (form) to accomplish what we want it to,” Lalum said. “We want to tell the stories. We want to celebrate fishing. We want to encourage visitors. We want to share angling information.

“So what do we need to do that?” she asked. “We have this (media row) event. We do some tours, we go fishing, we have shore lunch.

“A host community now can choose to do a golf tournament. They’re not required to do a golf tournament. They can do a community picnic. They’re not required to do a community picnic,” she said. “So we’ve taken it to its basic core elements and then made it flexible for a community to really show who they are.”

The event used to be so big that only a few communities could handle it.

“We’ve made it more open to more communities across the state,” Lalum said, noting they’re really trying to explore all corners of the state.

“That’s another one of the reasons we made it smaller — so we could go more places, but still tell as many stories as we can,” she said..

Criteria to be a host community include having space to host events, such as Manhattan Beach Lodge for the media row event.

“You have to have lakes for fishing and you have to be able to find enough boat hosts who will volunteer to take guests out as well,” Lalum said. “You have to have a caterer or a civic organization that’ll do a shore lunch for you.”

She said communities that applied but didn’t qualify this year could still host in the future.

“It’s just maybe they weren’t ready this time,” Lalum said.

The 2026 application process closed May 2, and those applications are currently being vetted. Organizers hope to announce next year’s Governor’s Fishing Opener host community in June.

“Because Crosslake is hosting this year, it will likely place Crosslake outside consideration for at least another decade, which is unfortunate,” Myogeto said.

Economic impact

A potential boost in the local economy comes after hosting a Governor’s Fishing Opener, or after the media outlets that attend share the host community’s stories, Lalum said.

“The ripple of the media is really where the economic impact comes in,” she said. “So the stories that get told from the folks who are attending the event has that spread.”

As an example, she said Lake City hosted last year’s Governor’s Fishing Opener, and that community went on to have one of its best summers ever for tourism.

“They also made a real concerted effort to try and tell stories that would entice families to come because that wasn’t a demographic that they saw. They had a lot of empty nesters that would come to Lake City, and so they saw more families last summer,” Lalum said.

The Governor’s Fishing Opener began in 1948 and today promotes Minnesota’s $4.4 billion fishing industry and kicks off the summer tourism season.

Related Articles

Free steelhead identification decals help Lake Superior anglers avoid keeping protected fish

Lake of the Woods, Rainy River deliver walleyes on Minnesota fishing opener

Wisconsin angler fishing in Lake Michigan fog discovers remains of abandoned tugboat J.C. Ames

Gov. Walz encourages legislators, and anglers, to get the lead out

Walleyes take center stage as Minnesota Fishing Opener approaches

There’s a story haunting American politics. It’s a story told by right-wing populists like Donald Trump and JD Vance and left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders.

The story goes something like this:

There once was an America, in the 1950s and 1960s, that made stuff. People could go off to work in factories and earn a decent middle-class wage. Then came globalization and the era of market-worshiping neoliberalism. During the 1990s and early 2000s, America signed free trade deals like NAFTA. China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. Jobs were shipped overseas. Factories shut down. The rich prospered while members of the working class got pummeled and ended up voting for Trump.

The problem with this story is that it’s 75% bonkers — historically inaccurate on nearly every front.

In the first place, there never was a market-worshiping era of pure globalization. As economics writer Noah Smith has noted, top marginal tax rates were significantly higher in 2016 than in 1992. Federal spending on social programs went up, not down. Government policy became more progressive (favoring those down the income scale), not less. Much of the economy grew more regulated, not less. U.S. tariff rates were basically stagnant.

The era between the start of the Clinton administration and the end of the Obama one was not a libertarian/globalist free-for-all. It was an era of mainstream presidents who tried to balance dynamism and solidarity.

The second problem with the populist story is that it gets its chronology wrong. America really did deindustrialize. As American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain has shown, wages really did stagnate, but they did so mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, not in the supposed era of neoliberal globalism.

Smith helpfully divides the recent American economic history into three eras:

There was the postwar boom from 1945 to 1973.

Then there was the era of oil shocks, a productivity slowdown and wage stagnation, from 1973 to 1994.

Then there was a return to higher productivity and higher wage growth, from 1994 to today. That is to say: Median wages have grown since NAFTA and the WTO, not declined.

The third problem with the story is that it exaggerates how much foreign competition has hurt American workers.

Yes, the China shock was real. In a landmark 2013 paper, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that America lost an average of 90,000 jobs per year between 1990 and 2007 because of imports from China.

But put that in perspective. According to Strain, 5 million Americans currently separate from their employers per month. Plus, in a 2019 paper, Robert C. Feenstra, Hong Ma and Yuan Xu found that the China shock job losses were largely offset by job gains, owing to higher exports.

American manufacturing jobs have declined mostly for the same reason American farming jobs have declined. We’re more productive, able to make more stuff with fewer workers. That’s not primarily a story about neoliberalism or globalization; it’s progress.

If manufacturing jobs are moving, it’s often from the American Midwest to the American South. As Gary Winslett pointed out in The Washington Post, in 1970 the Rust Belt was responsible for nearly half of all manufacturing exports while the South was responsible for only a quarter. Today, the South is responsible for half of all manufacturing exports while the Rust Belt is only responsible for a quarter. The Southern states lured manufacturing investments with right-to-work laws, cheap energy, affordable housing, low-cost land and fast permitting. Today, the No. 1 auto-exporting state is Alabama. It’s really hard to argue that America’s problem is a lack of manufacturing jobs when nearly half a million manufacturing job openings are unfilled today.

The so-called era of neoliberal globalism has not produced the American carnage that Trump imagines. According to political scientist Yascha Mounk, in the 1990s and early 2000s, America and Europe were similarly affluent. Today, the American economy has left the other rich economies in the dust. American GDP per capita is around $83,000, while Germany’s is around $54,000, France’s is around $45,000 and Italy’s is around $39,000.

As The Economist recently noted, “On a per-person basis, American economic output is now about 40 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan — roughly twice as large as the gaps between them in 1990. Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.”

Trumpian economic populism is an attempt to move beyond the relatively moderate economic policies of George W. Bush Republicanism. Progressive populism is an attempt to move beyond the relatively moderate economic policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But the Obama years, to take one example, were not exactly horrific, either. Economic growth steadily accelerated over his presidential term. America saw one of its longest periods of job growth. Wage levels began to recover from the financial crisis around 2016.

These statistics are not abstractions that don’t touch regular people’s lives. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in 2023 American households had $63,000 in disposable income, while French households had only $35,000 and British households had only $36,000. The average home size in the United States is around 2,000 square feet. The average British home size is less than 1,000 square feet.

Americans pay for greater prosperity with higher income inequality. But as Mounk points out, the inequality gap is not as great as one might think. Between 2019 and 2023, wages for people at the bottom of the income scale rose much faster than wages for people at the top.

I am not saying that the American economy is hunky dory. There is, for example, the affordability crisis — housing, education and health care have become more and more expensive. But that, too, is not a story about globalization and neoliberalism.

I am saying that the populists on the left and the right are proposing a sharp break with the economic policies that have prevailed over the last 30 years, and that they are wrong to do so.

Related Articles

James Stavridis: How can Europe deter Putin? Revive the ‘Reforger’

Other voices: Gun rights vs. religious freedom — the Texas double standard

Trudy Rubin: Why the ambassador to Ukraine quit and Trump’s phone call with Putin bombed

Noah Feldman: Supreme Court understands the assignment on birthright citizenship

Allison Schrager: Even Democrats might like MAGA accounts

I am saying that the basic approach to economic policymaking that prevailed between 1992 and 2017 was sensible, and that our job today is to build on it. The abundance agenda folks suggest things like housing deregulation to increase the housing supply. Rahm Emanuel suggests combining the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit into a single family credit that could, for example, sharply reduce child poverty. Those are promising ways to keep the country moving forward.

I am also saying that the forces driving the current wave of global populism are not primarily economic. They are mostly about immigration, cultural values, the rise of social distrust, the way the educated class has zoomed away from the rest of society and come to dominate the commanding heights of Washington, New York and Los Angeles, and the way many Americans have lost faith in those leading institutions.

The crucial divide in our politics is not defined by income levels; it’s defined by educational attainment, with more educated people swinging left and the less educated swinging right. The smartest Trump supporters I read, like N.S. Lyons, see themselves fighting against the educated elite, the technocrats who value personal autonomy over everything, who seek to destroy moral norms and national borders. These populists rise in defense of strong gods — faith, family, flag — which they believe are threatened by the acid bath of modernity.

Many progressive Democrats imagine they can win back working-class votes with economic populism — by bashing the oligarchy and embracing industrial policy — but that’s a mirage. Joe Biden shoveled large amounts of money to working-class voters in red states, and it did him no electoral good. That’s because you can’t solve with dollars a problem that is fundamentally about values and respect.

If Democrats are going to win majorities again, they need to be both the party of the educated class and, at least somewhat, the working class. Given how vast the cultural and lifestyle chasms there are between these two castes, that’s just a phenomenally hard problem. Many Democrats are now rallying around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But a New York economic progressive with a 30% national favorability rating is probably not the right way to go.

If you didn’t like the so-called era of neoliberalism, wait until you experience how much fun postliberalism will be. Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the sources of American prosperity: global competition, immigrant talent, scientific research and the universities.

Healthy societies have the ability to assess their strengths and weaknesses honestly. The story the populists tell about globalization and neoliberalism is a gross distortion that leads to all sorts of terrible conclusions. America has many pathologies that drive the distemper of our times, but — at least until the populists gained power — economic decline was not among them.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

Several K’nyaw students visited Thailand as part of a Bethel University class in January. It was the first time many returned to the country since immigrating to the United States as children.

Led by professor Ripley Smith and Jesse Phenow, 18 students spent 24 days in the country visiting local students, staying with host families, meeting community leaders and learning more about the K’nyaw people, the diaspora and conflict in Myanmar.

Five of those students at the Arden Hills private school are K’nyaw, often known as the Karen. With their families, they had immigrated to the U.S. after leaving refugee camps.

K’nyaw people in Thailand

More than 3 million people in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, have been displaced in the country’s four-year civil war since a military coup seized power from the elected government in 2021, according to the Associated Press.

Thailand hosts more than 100,000 refugees from Myanmar in nine temporary shelters along its western border with Myanmar. Around 80% of camp residents are from the Karen ethnic minority.

“There are numerous ethnic minority groups within Burma that have been persecuted. The K’nyaw have been maybe the longest that have suffered the persecution because the Burmese government after World War II saw them as a particular threat because of their close relationship with the British when the British left,” Smith said.

More than 20,000 Karen people live in the state, making it the largest community of the ethnic group in the U.S., according to the Karen Organization of Minnesota, a social services agency for refugees.

Meeting family, community leaders

Students went to a number of cities — including Chiang Mai, Mae Sot and Bangkok. They visited refugee camps, met local students and learned more about the lives of refugees in Thailand. Sophomores Shem Paw and Htee Wah Moo were also able to meet family members still in Thailand.

The students also met with community leaders and organizations, such as Karen Environmental and Social Action Network, or KESAN, an Indigenous organization focusing on social and environmental issues.

“One of the ways the conflict has been perpetuated by the Burmese majority, the junta that’s in power, is to destroy the K’nyaw environment, because in Burma, they’re largely an agricultural economy, and so by destroying the environment, they destroy the villages and their lifestyle,” Smith said.

Not long after the visit by the students, USAID funding to Thailand, and other countries around the world, was cut off.

“The proximity to having just been there and having family there, and then when those cuts are made, it just makes it more real of the impact,” Smith said.

Reconnecting with their heritage

Besides learning about the work of community organizations and the K’nyaw people, students also had a chance for fun, from visiting local markets and an elephant sanctuary, to feeding water buffalo, to staying with host families.

“And they fed us homemade Karen food. It was so good, I ate so much,” Paw said.

It was the second year the trip was held, but it will not be offered in the next school year, according to Bethel University.

“For many, this was a profoundly meaningful opportunity to engage with the country’s culture and history — especially for students returning to their homeland and reconnecting with their heritage. The trip exemplified the transformational potential of global learning and reflected Bethel’s commitment to intercultural engagement rooted in Christ,” Virginija Wilcox, associate dean of international students and off-campus programs, said in a statement.

‘The shoes of my parents, my grandparents’

By the end, Paw didn’t want to leave, she said. Sophomore Nay Seya said he thinks the students’ sense of pride in their K’nyaw culture grew.

“Our parents talk about the oppression, the struggles, the hopes,” Seya said. “But for me, at least, I couldn’t really take in all the complexities of it. I could only sympathize with the problems. But then, once I went to Thailand, went to the camps, interacted, had cultural exchange with the students, and finally I got to embrace my culture. And then that sympathy became empathy, so I could finally put (myself) into the shoes of the students, into the shoes of my parents, my grandparents.”

Students Seya, Paw, Moo, Lulu Shwe and Kue Say all work on scholarship or do work-study at the Urban Village, a St. Paul nonprofit co-founded by Phenow that provides mentorship to Karen and Karenni youth.

“Going to Thailand was the perfect opportunity to embrace our culture and then come back and reconnect it with the youth here, especially in Minnesota,” Seya said.

Despite the conflict, many are not familiar with the K’nyaw people. But after meeting with community leaders and locals, such as Shee Lay, a Karen general, students also saw the impact and influence they can bring back home to the United States.

“For us, I think the one metaphor (the general) directly stated to us K’nyaw students was, our words reach way farther than his guns, which basically means, we have more of an … influence outside of the K’nyaw boundaries,” Seya said. “So like, over there, he can’t reach the K’nyaw people in foreign countries like the U.S. So it’s our jobs, or we’re obligated, to speaks about the despair, the oppression and the hopes of our people.”

Related Articles

U of M researchers are planting ‘survivor’ trees in hopes of defeating Dutch elm disease

Some states reexamine school discipline as Trump order paves go-ahead

Rapidly expanding school voucher programs pinch state budgets

Hill-Murray School breaks ground on $5.5M student union

Belgian princess left in doubt about her Harvard future following Trump’s foreign student ban