Mid-Americana: Stories from a Changing Midwest

Adam Hammes grew up in rural Richland, Iowa. He spent much of his 20s traveling the world leading environmental education trips. After this series of adventures, he moved back to Iowa to establish Urban Ambassadors, a Des Moines non-profit that supports community sustainability projects and connections.

Adam is a leader in corporate sustainability. He was the first manager of sustainability for Kum & Go, the founder and Executive Director of the Iowa Sustainable Business Forum, and the author of two books on corporate sustainability: Stress-Free Sustainability: Leverage Your Emotions, Avoid Burnout & Influence Anyone (2010) and Sustainable Business in Iowa (2017).

Shelley Buffalo is a visual artist and Food Sovereignty Coordinator for the Meskwaki Settlement near Tama, Iowa. Shelley was born near the Settlement, and much of her extended family still lives in Tama County. But her own journey has led her away and back more than a dozen times. For Shelley, sources of hope can come from anywhere, like her lifelong identification with punk rock, but the Meskwaki Settlement most recently called her back with its food sovereignty initiative, which restores ancestral foods, like corn and squash, and the traditional recipes that go with them. Shelley hopes to reverse the influence of government commodities on indigenous diets and to revive the stories of resilience that guide the Meskwaki lifeway. We talked about Shelley’s experience of racism in rural Iowa, how her birth experience in a hospital compared with her second birth experience at home, and why her work with food sovereignty may mean more to future generations than to her own.

Learn more about the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative at the official website for the Meskwaki Nation and on Facebook.

Brian Bruening lives in the northeast Iowa community of Elkader, where he is the owner and head chef at Schera’s Algerian American Restaurant, which he established together with his French-Algerian husband, Frederique Boudouani. A native of New Hampton, Iowa, Brian spent several years in Boston, Massachusetts, where he received a BA in English at Boston University and an MFA in poetry at Emerson College. In this episode, he shares what it was like growing up gay in the rural Midwest, and why he and Federique chose to move back, believing small town Iowans could appreciate unfamiliar flavors and cultures. Brian also talks about how poetry has helped him find his public voice in a region that values privacy, reflecting on the article he wrote for the Des Moines Register in response to the 2016 shooting at the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Megan McKay is founder and owner of Peace Tree Brewing Company in Knoxville, Iowa. Megan was born and raised in Knoxville. She left home after high school, drawn to greener pastures on the West Coast. After four years in the Bay Area, where she worked as a nanny and part-time auto mechanic, Megan felt Iowa calling her back, and in 2009 she left the family insurance business to start a brewery in her hometown. Megan believed Knoxville could become the kind of place that might have held her as a young person, even the kind of place that could grow and thrive, drawing new residents and entrepreneurs. We talked about the brewery’s experiments with wild yeasts harvested at a local farm, how a business comes of age and remains resilient over time, the story of the Peace Tree her company is named for, and her work as a community leader in Knoxville.

Follow Peace Tree Brewing on their website, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Dawn Martinez Oropeza is Executive Director ofAl Exito, a mentoring and youth empowerment organization that works with hundreds of middle and high school-aged Latinos across Iowa. She has deep roots in Des Moines, on both the Jewish and Mexican sides of her family. Since childhood, she has navigated blended identities and cultural divides. Dawn shares about her pilgrimage into the private world ofCésarChávez, as she preserved his legacy and helped establish anational monumentin his honor. We talk about her explorations of art, food, and religious practice, a journey that took her to Seattle, Chicago, Miami, California, and back home to the Midwest.

Mike Draper is the founder and owner of RAYGUN, a Des Moines-based T-shirt store that opened in 2005 and has since grown into a regional powerhouse with locations in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Kansas City, and Chicago. As a kid, Mike heard his Connecticut relatives speak about Iowa to other New Englanders as if it needed defending. He later felt that difference more keenly at an Ivy League university, where his peers saw him as a mystery: a guy from a blank spot on the map. We also talk about the ironies in Midwest history, the strangeness of a region that is not a navigational direction and that serves as a gateway to everywhere else, and the cultural origins of tropes, like modesty, that dominate Midwestern identity.

Browse the RAYGUN collection, “The Mighty Midwest,” and follow the store on Facebook and Twitter.

Mike Draper’s book, The Midwest: God’s Gift to Planet Earth, is available on the RAYGUN site and on Amazon.