Maggie Lorenz - Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi

Maggie Lorenz, Executive Director of Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi, or Lower Phalen Creek Project. Photo provided by Maggie Lorenz.

As a citizen of Mni Sota Makoce / Minnesota, Maggie Lorenz says she “walks in two worlds.”

She is an urban conservationist; a protector of land who is inspired by water. She is of Indigenous (Dakota, Ojibwe) and European (Irish, German) descent. Maggie is a modern woman who laces traditional understanding and customs into daily living in St. Paul. She is a guardian of education and higher learning who learns best, she says, by getting her hands in the dirt.

As Executive Director of Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi, also known Lower Phalen Creek Project (LPCP), Maggie’s hands get plenty dirty as she helps plant native grasses and trees, and as she raises funds and environmental and cultural awareness within her community. Maggie and LPCP are focused on a special project on St. Paul’s East Side: daylighting Lower Phalen Creek, a storied local waterway that was long ago forced underground.

Lower Phalen Creek as seen today. Photo by tracy nordstrom.

Lower Phalen Creek had been a local asset for centuries in what is now St. Paul, both for Indigenous people and early settlers The asset became a liability, however, as developers sought flat, dry land on which to build. From then on, the river was engineered away, severing a vital link to Wakpa Tanka / Mississippi River and a community’s connection to water.

Early photo of Lower Phalen creek, circa 1920. Photo: Minnesota historical society.

Maggie admits always being fascinated by the natural world and the human connection to it. As a child, Maggie heard about, and was motivated to save, the rainforests and the ocean. “I wanted to help,” she remembers thinking, “but some of these problems were so far away.”

Maggie’s family reinforced how special the natural world was right outside their East Side door: “My mom used to take me to pick wild raspberries along the railroad tracks,” she says. “I remember thinking that really amazing food was just out there; there was such abundance! I remember thinking that our earth is providing this, and how beautiful and amazing that was.”

The same railroad tracks Maggie and her mom walked beside were one reason Lower Phalen Creek disappeared from view almost 100 years ago. Here is how LPCP describes the area’s evolution:

Phalen Creek historically flowed from the south end of Lake Phalen, meandering for about four miles through what is now the East Side of St. Paul, emptying into the Mississippi River near Wakan Tipi cave. This creek served as a corridor for the Dakota people who lived here, traveling from the Wakpa Tanka (Mississippi River) up the chain of lakes by canoe to Bde Mato Ska (White Bear Lake) - one of many areas where they gathered psin (wild rice).

Later, the creek served as the home site of one of Saint Paul’s first European colonists, Edward Phalen, who resided on the banks of the creek in 1838. As one of Saint Paul’s first white settlers, the creek, and eventually the lake from which it came, took on his name. By the 1930’s, the creek was driven entirely underground in a large storm pipe to make way for housing and other development.

Minnesota historical society photo of Lower Phalen Creek engineered into a pipe

In 1997, Maggie’s East Side neighbors began a campaign to return the creek to the surface. That effort became Lower Phalen Creek Project, a nonprofit focused specifically on the creek’s daylighting, and more broadly on ecological restoration and local environmental education. As neighbors and activists, volunteers and resource champions, those East Side founders committed to cleaning up the land, re-creating aquatic and riparian habitat, teaching the medicinal benefits of native plants, and inviting broad participation. An accessible Phalen Creek, they argued, would offer recreation, better manage stormwater, bring back beauty, and connect neighbors once again to nature and to the powerful, healing presence of water.

In 2019, LPCP hired Maggie (who had been an LPCP volunteer) to lead the organization. Maggie says she had long felt a “heart connection” to the work and describes the organization’s impact as “healing justice for the land, the water, the plants, and for the animals and the winged and finned relatives” of this place. Her connection is historic and personal, at once decidedly Native and uniquely East Side: “These spaces were part of my upbringing,” she says. “I learned stories from my mom and aunties about the sites I work on now.”

Significantly, Maggie’s leadership appointment highlights an institutional shift at Lower Phalen Creek Project toward what Maggie calls a “purposeful, Native-led but not Native-exclusive” approach to environmental justice. Once predominantly white, the organization is now guided by the values of the Dakota people (the original people of this land) and includes cultural activities and ceremony across programming. Maggie says the organization’s staff, board of directors, and many partners - municipal, individual, tribal, foundational, corporate – increasingly reflect the diversity of St. Paul’s East Side. Her broad smile punctuates the pride she feels for LPCP’s commitment to honor and invoke the “deep ecological knowledge Native people have about how to care for their native homelands.”

Recent good news: The Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council (a grant organization funded through the Minnesota Legislature) has awarded Lower Phalen Creek Project $3.2 million dollars to daylight the first quarter mile of Phalen Creek, a section flowing south out of Lake Phalen. Work is scheduled to begin in 2024. “The creek will be back!” Maggie bursts, pumping her fist in elation.

Imagine a cherished necklace: Lower Phalen Creek is the vibrant thread uniting multiple LPCP programming sites – like colorful beads - through Wakan Tipi Cave, Indian Mounds Regional Park, Swede Hollow, and Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. The creek binds the sites and reminds us how people lived, traveled, and cared for each other in this place. It will be a living laboratory where LPCP will offer education, inviting disparate groups to volunteer, learn, and play together. The hope is that bringing back the flowing water will help community move forward together, despite differences, because the watershed touches everyone.

Daylighting Lower Phalen Creek offers a “second chance” for St. Paul’s residents and visitors to connect with nature in the neighborhood once more. The project will continue in phases and rely on ever more partners and creativity to work the living creek into a developed and diverse urban landscape. Maggie is measured and patient, enthusiastic and optimistic. And as she draws on history, her family’s heritage, and the diversity of people on the East Side, she says Lower Phalen Creek Project is “not trying to re-create the past but hang on to what is important in our Dakota culture and bring it into the future.” After all, Maggie says with a knowing smile, “these are powerful and spiritual places for all people.”

Resources

Lower Phalen Creek Project: https://www.lowerphalencreek.org/

Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council: https://www.lsohc.mn.gov/

Pronunciation Guide for Dakota words related to LPCP’s work: https://www.lowerphalencreek.org/resources

Photo Credits: Tracy Nordstrom, Lower Phalen Creek Project, Minnesota Historical Society