08/30/2026
We know what we saw. We will not forget. These memories and our experiences live in our bones. The art and creative works at the MN State Fair reflect that. The lived experience of many. You experienced too. Maybe it was not first hand, maybe it was only on the news, or through second or third hand recounts, yet you experienced it. As I walked these halls at our state fair it struck me how many people process through art, be it by the creation or the viewing of. These acts help us process and friends, we have a lot to work through.
Last winter is at the State Fair.
A ceramic sculpture called "We Know What We Saw," by artist Kordula Coleman, honors the neighbor in St. Paul's Cathedral Hill who stood on an icy sidewalk in nothing but her bathrobe, filming ICE agents after an operation ended in a car crash. Her photo went viral in February. Most Minnesotans knew her simply as "the bathrobe lady." Coleman gave her a name and a shape in clay.
Walk further and you will find more. A painting called "ICE Driven Out in Shame." A seed art reimagining of Picasso's "Guernica," with the Rebel Loon at the center and the faces of Renee Good and Alex Pretti woven in. A piece showing St. Paul resident ChongLy Thao, a blanket around his shoulders, being taken from his home on a frigid January morning.
This year's Fine Arts competition and crop art show both drew record numbers of entries. And artists across Minnesota seem to have reached for the same thing: a way to remember.
That turns out to be important, because the forgetting has already started.
There are people who say it wasn't really that bad. That the stories were exaggerated. That this was basically ordinary immigration enforcement and Minnesotans got hysterical about it. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called Renee Good's actions "domestic terrorism" days after federal agents shot and killed her. State Rep. Steve Drazkowski has claimed Democratic officials ran something like a "paramilitary organization" that got Good and Pretti killed.
Eventually there will be people who say the videos were misleading, the stories were manufactured, maybe even that the whole thing was fake.
We've seen this play a few times.
Which brings us to the other story we noticed this week.
Gov. Walz appointed a Truth Council, and it has begun the formal work of remembering.
The Council is not a courtroom. It cannot prosecute anyone or award damages. What it can do is build a public record of what happened during Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS, both the harm that was done and the ways Minnesotans responded.
Its first public hearing was this week. Immigrants and community leaders described detention, fear and conditions inside the Whipple Federal Building. More public sessions are scheduled in September, and the Council is collecting stories from people who experienced, witnessed or responded to the Surge.
Put the Truth Council next to the State Fair art and something becomes clear.
Minnesota is bearing witness.
Some of it will be formal: testimony, documents, transcripts and eventually a report with the state seal on it. Some of it will be paintings and photographs and sculpture and, because this is Minnesota, seeds glued to a board at the State Fair.
And some of it belongs only to the people who were there.
We remember the whistles. The groceries left on porches for families afraid to leave home. Teachers organizing parent patrols outside schools. Churches opening their doors. SUVs with tinted windows idling too long. Cars left running. Restaurants suddenly empty.
And it did not stop at the Twin Cities. Agents moved through Elk River, Willmar, Rochester, Mankato, St. Peter, St. James, St. Cloud and communities across Minnesota. Children stayed home from school because families were afraid. Businesses closed. Neighbors protested. Communities learned what rapid-response networks and mutual aid meant.
That kind of learning is troublesome for a government that wants to control the story and suppress dissent. Much harder to do when people carry cameras on their phones, when people keep notes, when social media shares pictures and stories. When artists put it into clay and seed. And when people give testimony. Ordinary people seeing things with their own eyes and telling their own stories are inconvenient that way.
There will be pressure to move on. Some of it will sound less like denial than simple exhaustion: haven't we talked about this enough?
The answer is "no." We have not talked about it enough.
There's a reason that countries set up Truth and Reconciliation commissions. You can't have the latter without the former.
And it's hard to forget when we're still living in the moment. There is an election coming. We have doors to knock, calls to make and voters to turn out. November happens next. The people we send to St. Paul and Washington will help determine what gets investigated, what gets repaired and what we are willing to allow again.
So remember while we move forward.
If you are at the Fair, go see the art. If you experienced or witnessed what happened here, consider sharing your story with the Truth Council or attending one of its September sessions. Save the video somewhere besides your phone. Keep the photograph. Write down the story while the details are still clear.
The deniers will come anyway. We cannot prevent that.
But we can leave behind such a mountain of testimony, video, photographs, court records, journalism, art and ordinary people telling what they saw that denying what happened becomes an act reserved for lunatics and trolls.
Kordula Coleman found four words for all of that in clay.
We know what we saw.
Let's make sure Minnesota remembers.
