This North Dakota group is simply punk. But there’s also much more to Red Willow Collective, based in Minot—population just under 50,000.
“It’s about building spaces where people can connect, heal, and imagine something beyond survival,” the collective says.
What is that something? Here, it’s a Native-run music and arts program. It centers a growing all ages, sober community of queer and BIPOC artists. Red Willow Collective formed in 2023, 30 years after Minot’s underground punk scene started taking off.
Organized in part by Maria Cree, the collective hosts and organizes low-cost shows, workshops, and events around town. Think gatherings inside museums, bookstores, and cafes (though the collective has plans to soon expand into a brick-and-mortar nonprofit).
Events often start out with an off-the-cuff idea, $100 in the bank account, and a love for showing Native kids they can make art. Cree coordinates these with a loose handful of teachers, musicians, writers, and photographers, handing out fliers to passerby youth. It’s all to create an inclusive, genuine music scene across town.
‘We’ve Always Needed This’
Cree, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, describes herself as a queer “older punk.” She does this work because it’s what she knows from growing up in her reservation.
“What connected me with the DIY punk scene was the community aspect and how everybody took care of each other despite whatever. And that is so culturally connected to me as an Ojibwe person,” Cree says. “It reminded me so much of home.”
Her people saved her, she says—and knows how punk culture can help others, especially Native youth in North Dakota.
“For us as really young adults at the time, that was the community we needed to survive. We were each other’s family. We were each other’s people to lean on when we’re struggling in our things,” Cree says. “You have to take care of your community for you to sustain yourself.”
Red Willow Collective honors the accessibility and therapeutic nature of art, Cree says—especially when it also honors Indigenous culture. Starting (or even watching) a band is a time-honored way to share that necessity.
“We’ve always needed this, especially in this area . . . We’re around a lot of very tiny, tiny towns,” Cree says. “We’re just trying to exist, dude, in the prairie. It’s hard . . . but it creates this little foundation.”
That foundation looks like North Dakotan cities and artists showing up for each other, from Fargo to Bismark to Minot, Cree says. And Red Willow Collective is an important spoke in the punk wheel of community, spinning toward togetherness.
“North Dakota has a lot—the Midwest has a lot—a lot of weirdos doing their sh*t. It’s just getting them in one spot. It’s cool to watch it. It’s like cracking the glow slick, you know?”