Sleeping Giant
Statement
In 2011, I became visually aware of Minnesota’s Iron Range, the Sleeping Giant, the meaning of Mesabi, the name given by the Ojibwe to the Laurentian Divide where vast accretions of iron where deposited eons ago. What caught my attention where the vermillion piles of overburden, low grade ore that appeared as low mountain ranges alongside the mines that stretch 110 miles along the divide. For years I like most Minnesotans also passed through the area without realizing the exciting and important story iron mining that occurred there over the past 140 years. I revisited the range often over the next four years for experience, conversation and portraits of the strong, proud, resilient culture of range mining. Over the years, 43 nationalities came to dig the vermillion gold of iron that built America, starting with picks and shovels and growing to 300-ton trucks and shovels of today. Sleeping Giant presents the many facets of this great American story of engineering, entrepreneurship, immigrant nation building, and arts and culture.
Vance Gellert, 2026
Foreword
First there was iron under the ground, hurled from distant supernovas to Earth’s creation.
Then there was water, shaping the land, exposing the earth.
Then there were trees, ever taller, swaying with hard continental winds.
By the time people arrived, the Giant was resting comfortably.
Missaba, Mesaba, Mesabi. The Ojibwa called it the ‘Sleeping Giant.” Dakota called it the Big Man Hills before that. Today it’s labeled the Laurentian Divide. When people speak of the Iron Range region of Northern Minnesota, we speak of a place that has represented an imposing challenge to many different human cultures over many thousands of years, a sleeping giant in the North.
Hard places often end up becoming the origin points for new societies and civilizations. Mongolia, the Andes, Egypt: lands of plenty that also seem to want to kill their inhabitants. Northern Minnesota is also like this. Something about a challenge makes humans gather, change, grow, adapt and survive. From this instinct, first peoples on the Mesabi learned to sustain themselves on wild rice, hunting in rough terrain. Only 130 years ago, just two human lifetimes, the iron belly of the Giant was torn open. Immigrants from 43 nations came to mine the iron blood of Minnesota’s iron ranges, lured by opportunity that would ignore their many differences. In this short time the world changed rapidly. But the Mesabi’s tendency to change the people who touch it lives on, even as an exceedingly modern world unfolds.
Today’s Iron Range region is often called “unique,” but many — even hearty natives — struggle to explain why. I’d argue that the evidence is visual. No where is that more evident than in the collection of Vance Gellart’s photographs you are about to see.
The Iron Range possesses its own color palate. Our red is darker and browner, while our greens often alternate between pastel and nearly black. We have two skies, one bright blue and the other flat grey. The subject matter is colossal. Natural landmarks blur into manufactured ones. Often it is difficult to tell what was here for 50 years and what was here for an eon. All that is new soon covers with dust. So it is for the human subjects as well.
Gellert shows the Iron Range’s colors and turns them into a succinct story of a place where people collide with elements, both forever changed. Quirky attributes of Range culture bring a quick smile, but mostly one may view these images with abject awe at what was, what was done, and what unknown future may be.
I recall a summer job I had back in college that sent me driving around the region in my old Chevy station wagon. Something about driving through the cut in the Laurentian Divide caused me to shoot a photo out my window, a sort of reverse of the shot Vance took with his opening picture of the Divide. The pictures of Ojibwa sights just off the iron formation show how these worlds collided so violently not that long ago.
Vance did things to shoot this collection I always wished I would do someday. He actually climbed the loose, dirty red piles of overburden we pass on the highways and shared a new view of a landscape I only thought I understood.
I grew up the fifth generation of my father’s family to live in this region and the first in that line to never work in a mine. The stories of the underground shafts, the blasts, the plants, the trucks — these were the background vernacular of my life and countless other Iron Rangers. Only later, though, did I come to realize the power of the immigrant story in Northern Minnesota. At one as diverse as New York, this remote place bore the weight of America’s 20th Century expansion. Try to understand that every giant hole you see in this collection was dug by thousands of human beings, often with picks and shovels, whose children learned a language they didn’t know as they worked.
The picture of the Dupont Power House outside Hibbing is one of my favorites, perhaps because Vance’s shoot just barely beat the building’s demolition. Multiple explosions couldn’t make this building disappear from the Earth, but eventually decades of apathy did the trick. In many ways that’s part of the value of this Sleeping Giant collection; part of the Iron Range is fading to dust even though the people live on. Even some of the people show in the pictures are fading to dust; replaced by a new generation that will never remember the glory days as living fact the way grandpa did. They live for new purpose, as foreign to past generations as the past is to them.
Photos of the Hibbing High School auditorium and Kaleva Hall fill me with pride. The dedication Iron Range community founders and their immigrant citizens showed for the arts was boundless and resolute. From the big (Hibbing’s ornate theater) to the small (Kaleva’s modest stage and hardwood floors), the Range was once place where human expression was the reason to live; mining just paid the bills. These images pull us back to that mission.
Snippets of groundbreaking Iron Range stories wisp through the collection, ranging from Lois Jensen, whose role in the groundbreaking sexual harassment lawsuit against the Eveleth Mines changed the workplace for women around the nation, to groundbreaking Range newspaper publisher Veda Ponikvar, who was for a time one of the most powerful people on the Iron Range, never mind her being one of the few women at the leadership table. Truly, the faces in all of Vance’s portraits seem familiar, only some of the time because I know the subjects.
Taken together, these photos show the cut, color and culture of the Iron Range, perhaps better than those of us who live here can see with our eyes as we go through our daily routines. Look and see what pressure, time and people can do.
~ Aaron J. Brown
Author, “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” and MinnesotaBrown.com
Host of the Great Northern Radio Show
Opinion Columnist, Minnesota StarTribune