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.”

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Kent Nerburn cradles in his palm a small turtle carved from clay quarried at Pipestone, a place in southwestern Minnesota sacred to American Indian people. This little guy plays an important role in “Lone Dog Road,” the story of two Lakota boys on the run in Nerburn’s first novel after writing 15 nonfiction books.

“To the Lakota the sacred is in everything. It comes with their way of understanding the world,” he says. “The turtle represents patience, a vision of longevity.”

Patience and longevity are qualities of the wise and witty old great-grandfather in “Lone Dog Road,” which continues Nerburn’s efforts to honor Native people, striving to bridge the gap between Natives and the dominant white culture. His most popular books make up the trilogy that won two Minnesota Book Awards: “Neither Wolf Nor Dog” (made into a film), “The Wolf at Twilight” and “The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo.”

“My novel is a relative to ‘Neither Wolf Nor Dog,’ but more expansive in its voices,” Nerburn says. “It’s the capstone to the trilogy. The characters are different but the themes and heartbeat and inner and outer landscapes are much the same. I put everything I know into this book.”

(Courtesy of New World Library)

As he talks about writing and his early career as a sculptor, Nerburn settles into a chair in the University Grove home he shares with his wife, Louise Mengelkoch, a retired Bemidji State University journalism professor. He had just returned from North Dakota where he was cultural liaison for staff of Smiles Network International who were doing dental work at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Nerburn, 78, writes about Lakota and Ojibwe people but he claims no Native blood. His writing comes from traveling the “pow wow highway” with Indian elders, participating in a sweat lodge, teaching Indian youngsters, immersing himself in the people’s lives as a respectful outsider.

“I am a guest in their world,” he says of his Indian friends. “I loved introducing non-Natives to Natives, who see spirituality as fundamental to human experience.”

That spirituality is deep in “Lone Dog Road,” set in the summer of 1950 on the high plains of South Dakota. Part coming-of-age story, part fast-paced road adventure, the novel’s main characters are brothers Levi, 11, Reuben Long Dog, 6. When a man comes to the reservation to forcibly take Reuben to the government school where Indian children are stripped of their culture, the boys’ strong, fierce mother tells them to run. Before they leave, their beloved great-grandfather’s ceremonial pipe is broken and given a dignified burial because it cannot be used again. The boys journey some 400 miles to Pipestone to get clay they use to fashion a new pipe for Grandpa that has a small turtle on its shaft. An image of the turtle is also on the first pages of the book’s sections.

As the brothers travel they are helped by Natives and non-Natives, including a wandering white man caught in the American cowboy myth who’s missing his dead dog, a cheerful Black entertainer who joins his beautiful voice to Reuben’s, a Lakota woman and her white ex-seminarian husband grieving the death of their child, a mixed-blood man who has lost his culture. On the reservation lives an elderly Dakota woman in a wheelchair who advises the boys, knows the old ways and maybe has a little magic in her.

“My books tend to speak from the heart. I try to touch people,” Nerburn says. “With this one I wrote the book I wanted to write; a book about good people, each struggling. Every character embodies someone I knew or admired. I love my characters. If I love them the reader can love them too.”

Nerburn’s writing has been praised by Louise Erdrich, Pulitzer Prize-winner and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians; Anton Treuer, professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University; and the late Ojibwe civic leader Roger Jourdain.

William Kent Krueger, white author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series featuring a protagonist who is Irish and Ojibwe, is an admirer of Nerburn’s writing. He will be onstage with Nerburn when “Lone Dog Road” is launched Thursday at the University Club of St. Paul.

“Kent opened the door for many of us writing about a culture not his own,” Krueger says. “I so appreciated his nonfiction, which captured so well from a white guy’s perspective the beauty of the Dakota culture. And in ‘Lone Dog Road’ he does a spectacular job of writing in multiple voices.”

It’s no surprise Nerburn’s novel is permeated with spirituality. He’s proud of being described as a “guerrilla theologian” who found emotions in wood before he turned to writing.

A Minnesota kid becomes a sculptor

“I’ve always tried to be a watcher. It’s what I do in my books,” Nerburn says, looking back on growing up “in a tiny cracker-box bungalow outside of Minneapolis.”

Author Kent Nerburn talks about his career in his St. Paul home on Wednesday, May 14, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

His attention to what was happening around him was learned when his father, director of disaster relief for the Red Cross Midwest region, would sometimes get him out of bed in the middle of the night to race to an emergency that might be a four-alarm fire on the North Side or a drowning.

“Seeing disasters and crises in other people’s lives made my life pale in comparison,” he says about staying on the sidelines while the Red Cross team offered support services. Later in life, these experiences gave him the ability to stand aside and let others talk, a valuable attribute for a writer.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Nerburn attended graduate school at Stanford University in California. He was interested in studying religion but was not happy about the way it was taught at Stanford. So he traveled to Marburg, Germany, to learn the language. Visiting beautiful churches and museums in the old city, Nerburn was mesmerized by the woodworking of farmers and peasants.

“The carvings had been so filled with heart, so honest in their spiritual learning, I, who was in graduate school for the study of religion… had found in them a spiritual presence I experienced nowhere else,” Nerburn writes in his 2018 book “Dancing With the Gods,” made up of essays on life in the arts.

Securing a job at an antique-restoration shop, Nerburn cut into a piece of maple for the first time: “I dug into that wood with no understanding of what I was doing. I only knew that something was alive and waiting to be released from inside the block of wood on the bench before me.”

Returning to Minnesota, Nerburn studied with the late Kostas Papadakis, world-renowned artistic woodcarver. In 1980 he graduated with a doctorate in religion and art from Graduate Theological Union and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nerburn’s larger-than-life wood sculptures are in a monastery in British Columbia and the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Japan. His only work in bronze is the figure of St. Francis commissioned by the Hennepin County Humane Society for their headquarters in Golden Valley.

To the reservation and beyond

Nerburn met his future wife when they worked on The Northsider, an award-winning Minneapolis community newspaper. After their marriage in 1989, Louise got a job at a newspaper in Bemidji and Kent went with her. Living in a house on a lake, the couple raised their son, Nicholas, and Mengelkoch’s children: Stephanie, Alexandra and Creighton Penn.

During those years  Nerburn also founded and directed Project Preserve, an oral history project on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation. He and his students published oral histories “To Walk the Red Road” and “We Choose to Remember.”

After co-writing “Native American Wisdom” with Mengelkoch, Nerburn’s first solo book was Letters to My Son: A Father’s Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love” (1993). That was followed by others inspired by his Indian friends, including “The Wisdom of the Native Americans,” “Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Pierce,” “Voices in the Stones,” and the Wolf/Dog trilogy.

After Louise retired in 2011, the couple relocated to Oregon, hungry for different experiences. “I envisioned us sitting in our robes, watching daytime TV,” Nerburn says with a laugh. “But I could never find my footing there, or my heart.”

The boy in the chair

Last year Nerburn and his wife moved back to Minnesota to be near family, but they were still living in Oregon when the pandemic hit, and Kent recalled a  picture he’d seen 25 years ago of a little Indian boy sitting in a rocking chair. He didn’t know the child’s name, or where the old photo came from. He only knew the boy haunted him and was one of the inspirations for “Lone Dog Road.”

“Finally, the boy could no longer be denied,” Nerburn recalled in a social media post. “His face said what I had been trying to say in words for almost three decades. He was innocence stolen, promise denied, confusion and defiance in the face of a world he did not make and could not understand.”

“Lone Dog Road” took a three-year journey to publication and Nerburn is clear-eyed about why publishers were wary of this book: “Old white guy. No history as a novelist. A 400-plus-page book. No social media presence other than a faithful but small following on Facebook. Writing in voices of people whose experience it’s assumed I cannot possibly understand… Ending up in the rejection pile of any publisher that keeps an eye on the bottom line. And that’s all of them.”

Happily, Nerburn’s best friend from Hopkins High School, Marc Allen, loved the novel and published it through his New World Library. Allen, who has published the majority of Nerburn’s books, recalls that young Kent first sculpted a life-sized Indian head at the Allen family’s cabin in Deerwood.

“I always knew Kent could write because of the way he talked,” Allen recalled in a conversation from his home near San Francisco. “We’d be walking along when we were 12, 13, and he’d say something so fresh and beautiful.”

During the years Allen published Nerburn’s books, he watched his friend’s nonfiction gradually take more fictional form. So he wasn’t surprised when he got the manuscript for “Lone Dog Road.”

“To make money in publishing these days you need a good backlist and an occasional bestseller to keep going. Kent has both,” Allen said. “And, he has a great soul.”

Summing it up

The afternoon grows more cloudy as Nerburn poses for a picture with one of his sculptures in his side yard. When he’s asked about writing, he says he followed the counsel of an Indian elder: “Always teach by stories, because stories lodge deep in the heart.”

If you go

Nerburn will launch “Lone Dog Road ” with a free program at 7 p.m. Thursday at the University Club, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul, presented by SubText Bookstore. He will be at Comma Bookshop, 4250 Upton Ave. N., Mpls. at 6:30 p.m. June 9, and at Stillwater Public Library on June 21.

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Like it or not, the Like button has changed the world

After nailing a jumper to help the Timberwolves stretch their lead to 38 points — yes, 38 points — Julius Randle delivered a message loud and clear while pointing at the hardwood beneath his feet.

“We home now!” Randle shouted at the top of his lungs. “We home now!”

The response from the 19,112 fans in attendance was deafening, like an orchestra rising to a crescendo for its conductor.

No longer did the Oklahoma City Thunder look like surefire bet to reach the NBA Finals. All of a sudden the Timberwolves felt like they had some life.

“The crowd had me going,” Randle said. “It gave me a lot of juice. I just wanted to feed off of that energy. I was just having fun out there.”

Let’s just say the vibes were immaculate on Saturday night at Target Center as the Timberwolves rolled to a 143-101 win over the Thunder.

After falling behind 2-0 in the Western Conference Finals and looking vastly overmatched in the process, the Timberwolves finally punched back, putting together a flurry that staggered the Thunder for perhaps the first time in the series.

As he reflected on the performance from his players, Chris Finch credited them for having the right approach, which is something the Timberwolves have struggled with against the Thunder to this point.

“We wanted to be the aggressor in everything,” Finch said. “We felt most of the series we’ve been on our heels.”

The catalyst was none other than Anthony Edwards.

He set the tone for the Timberwolves with 16 points the opening frame, outscoring the Thunder all by himself, and looking every bit of the superstar that he is. He finished with 30 points to lead all scorers while playing with a tenacity on both ends of the floor that proved to be infectious.

Some other key contributors for the Timberwolves included Randle, who responded the right way after getting benched the last time out, Jaden McDaniels, who locked up defensively like he always does, and Terrence Shannon Jr., who was a pleasant surprise that provided a spark off the bench.

There was also signs of life from Naz Reid and Donte DiVincenzo, both of whom look like they might slowly but surely be busting out of their shooting slumps.

All of it added up to the Timberwolves dominating the Thunder from start to finish. Not that the final score is worth reading into.

“It doesn’t matter what the margin of victory is,” Finch said. “They still have a 2-1 series lead.”

That was the message from the Timberwolves in the immediate aftermath and that’s exactly how they should be approaching the next 48 hours. As impressive as the effort was in Game 3, they need to bring a similar intensity in Game 4.

They can’t be satisfied. There’s still work to be done.

That wasn’t lost on the players in the Timberwolves locker room.

“We’re still down,” Edwards said. “They’re the best team in the NBA. We’ve got to be able to beat this team more than once. It’s going to be tough.”

Tough? Yes. Impossible? No.

That much the Timberwolves have now proven to themselves.

The heavyweight bout is back on and they are very much in the fight.

“We haven’t done anything,” Randle said. “We got to go and do it again and play even better and play even harder because we know they’re going to bring it.”

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Timberwolves blitzed again in third quarter to fall down 2-0 in West Finals

After getting punked twice in Oklahoma City, Minnesota’s season was on the line Saturday at Target Center.

Game 3 of the Western Conference finals wasn’t only a must-win, it was a must-set-a-tone. The Timberwolves had to remind the world — and, frankly, themselves — of who they are: A talented, physical, relentless collection.

Who better to deliver the message than Anthony Edwards.

The superstar guard did just that Saturday to power Minnesota to a 143-101 victory. The Wolves pulled within 2-1 in the series with Game 4 set for 7:30 p.m. Monday in Minneapolis.

Yes, Edwards scored 16 points in the first quarter, actually outscoring the Thunder as a whole in that frame. But more importantly, he was tenacious in every aspect of the game. His defense was harassing out on the perimeter, producing a number of steals that led to highlight finishes in transition.

He was a monster on the glass, even nabbing an offensive board off a Rudy Gobert missed free throw.

Offensively, Edwards finally started to hit the step-in 3-pointers that have become a trademark of his this season, and Oklahoma City has left available with its drop pick-and-roll coverage.

Edwards came out throwing haymakers. When your best player exerts his dominance, others feel more comfortable to fulfill their roles. Suddenly, the 3-pointers of everyone else started to fall. Mike Conley, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Naz Reid and Donte DiVincenzo all started raining down triples with confidence.

The Wolves snapped out of a shooting slump by going 20 for 40 from 3-point range in the win.

Timberwolves coach Chris Finch went to Terrence Shannon Jr. in the first-half rotation, and the rookie responded with nine points in four minutes of action in the first half alone, finishing with 15 for the game. Minnesota also shifted to a more aggressive perimeter defense that held Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in check and prevented Oklahoma City from ever getting comfortable offensively.

Minnesota led by 19 after the first frame, 31 at halftime and was never threatened by the top-seeded Thunder.

Edwards had 30 points, nine rebounds and six assists. He was everywhere, which was exactly where he needs to be if Minnesota is to win four games out of five against this Thunder team.

One down, three to go.

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