{"id":3233,"date":"2026-09-17T16:11:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/?page_id=3233"},"modified":"2026-09-17T16:52:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:52:06","slug":"mila-roller-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/studentopportunities\/chuck-green-fellowship\/past\/2025-chuck-green-fellows\/mila-roller-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Aidi Flores"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Elk drum boom, onion sizzle, and sage smoke fill an otherwise unassuming office building in East Phillips, Minneapolis. The neighboring plot of grass, with its scores of leaf and root vegetables, feeds a community under the wall of State Highway 55. This is Little Earth of United Tribes \u2013 a one thousand native member Housing and Urban Development (HUD) complex focused on holistic empowerment whom I cooked for daily and partnered with for my Chuck Green Fellowship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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I met the Little Earth community in a transition period with a thousand projects underway, and jumped into leading food distribution, creating a community calendar, and sizzling steaks for community cookouts. I worked primarily with the Little Earth Resident Association’s Adult and Family Empowerment team to facilitate weekly healing groups with different needs and paths toward empowerment.

My fellowship benefitted from collaboration through Little Earth’s deep roots and contacts in the Minneapolis Native American Corridor. I collaborated with the Domestic Abuse Project to help advocate for multicultural treatment plan training and better communication for resident crises. I delivered locally-grown vegetables from Dream of Wild Health. I made natural watercolor pigments from stone and helped the Native Youth Arts Collective paint a mural with a local artist at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. I facilitated ceremonial healing with the Native American Community Clinic on powerful days with cedar and fire, and I helped bring local wellness practitioners to the Urban Farm for a community wellness event.

From fire cider brewing and editing youth resilience PSAs, to fire-tending full moon ceremonies till 11:00pm, I learned that empowerment takes many forms and demands long hours. I left after many twilight skies, but even through hours of emails and mountains of dishes, there’s nothing good food can’t make better when there’s a community to eat it with.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elk drum boom, onion sizzle, and sage smoke fill an otherwise unassuming office building in East Phillips, Minneapolis. The neighboring plot of grass, with its scores of leaf and root vegetables, feeds a community under the wall of State Highway 55. This is Little Earth of United Tribes \u2013 a one thousand native member Housing […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1207,"featured_media":0,"parent":2901,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3233","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3233"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3319,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3233\/revisions\/3319"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/political-science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}