A NONPROFIT, TAX DEDUCTIBLE ORGANIZATION P.O. Box 3544 Mankato, MN 56002
NEWSLETTER
Vol 28, No. 6	September, 2004

Big Changes For the SKP

We did very well in the charitable gambling business for most of ten years, but once the IRS decided to go after us, things unraveled rather badly. To be sure, no one has accused us of corruption or of misusing the gambling money. Our mistake was to save up money to buy a parcel of land from UNIMIN.

We knew that under the rules, all the proceeds of gambling were to be spent by the end of each year, but we had it on good authority that we could still save up some money if we put it in a dedicated account and made it clear that it was being saved for a specific purpose and was part of our mission. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

The Gambling Control Board was fine with the way we did it, but the IRS disagreed and the rest is history. Ironically, if we had given all the money away for blues concerts or tee shirts for 4H kids, or new basketball hoops for the school, we would have been ok.

It appears that we will again be able to qualify to conduct a charitable gambling business by sometime next year. Whether or not anyone in the SKP organization would be willing to get back into the business after our recent experience is an open question.

Prairie Dirt

After nearly eleven years of monthly newsletters it has been somewhat disorienting to have gone nearly two months without having to scrape up something to write about. Let's see if I still remember how.

As many of you know, I took advantage of the break in routine to do some traveling and it's hard to imagine that I won't spend a little time addressing that here or elsewhere in this newsletter. But I missed the Prairie and was pleased to see that it looked well well into a growing season that has been cooler and wetter than the average.

These are conditions that benefit invasive plants as much or more than heat- and drought-adapted native prairie plants, of course, but there doesn't seem to have been a surge of exotics. Prairie Restorations carried out the planned late burn in Zone Four and this seems to have been highly successful in controlling sweet clover there, and also seems to have knocked back patches of sumac that have been spreading nearest the Gulch and the bluff above the Beaver Pond. Bob Huffman from PR tells me that they have been so encouraged by the benefits of this tactic that they are contemplating an even later burn in the western part of Zone Two, another area that has seen the spread of sumac on the inside slope of the High Bluff. Some of the opportunistic and less desirable natives like horse nettle have surged, but the grasses have come back quite strongly and even woody forbs like lead plant are showing a second growth that should keep them competitive. He also said that PR has marked some areas where they are monitoring the recovery of forb populations with orange "Caution-Pesticide" flags, but there was not any chemical use in those areas -- just the late burn and some follow-up spot mowing.

The pond remained at the historically low levels I wrote of in the Spring through all of June's rains, but in mid-July water pumped by Unimin from the mining operation began to flow from the holding pond to the east and quickly filled the basin of the Prairie's major pond between Zones Three and Five. The level has dropped back a few feet from what we considered normal a few years ago, but it's looking good and has knocked out the smartweed that had been filling in the exposed bottoms. Reed canary grass had been a concern on the margin on the pond but it doesn't seem to be that evident this year. PR has not made any specific effort in that direction this year but the efforts of previous years seem to be paying off.

All in all things are looking good. The brilliant pink flowering spikes of showy tick clover have continued to spread in Zone Five nearest the Prairie Entry and parking lot. Lead plant and prairie clovers and nodding wild onion are lush on the little bluestem-dominated hilltops there and over the balance of Zones One, Two and Three to the north and east, and the blazing stars are just starting to open. In the tallgrass areas off the hilltops there has been a glorious mix of gray-headed coneflowers, wild bergamot, black-eyed Susans, giant hyssop and ox-eyes, and the Maximilian sunflowers are getting ready to bloom.

Big bluestem and Indian grass have developed seed heads flecked with golden pollen, and bees and butterflies are busy.

We are in excellent shape for our major scheduled public outreach event, the Prairie Open House 8am to Noon the morning of September 11, 2004, the beginning of Rock Bend weekend. Unimin, as always, will be our principal co-host and provide the tent, cookies, coffee, water and pop. Unimin representatives will be offering their always-interesting display of current mining activity with aerial photographs of the whole property. Prairie Restorations, SKP, and Friends of the Minnesota Valley, will also have displays and various goodies to offer. Representatives of all these groups will be available to participate in guided tours of the Prairies as needed through the morning. This will be the first time the Friends have taken part in this event and Lori Nelson tells me that some of their members and directors will be down. This would be a good opportunity to meet them.

At or about Noon, Saturday, and continuing through Sunday, we will be shifting our attention to Minnesota Square Park in St. Peter for the annual Rock Bend Folk Festival, and at least one or two of the visiting Friends are going to take advantage of this opportunity to take in southern Minnesota's premier cultural event and will join us at the SKP tent there. So if for some lame reason you miss us at the Prairie, stop by and chat and enjoy the day and the music and cultural offerings of Rock Bend.

An "open letter" to one of our ³Ozzie² guides from my and Judy Cooper¹s recent trip to Australia...

Ian Morris, Noonamah, Northern Territory, Australia We received your account of your adventures returning to Darwin after you left our group and I was amazed, amused and thankful that you and Dan and Travis came through unscathed.

It's been a little over a month and I have been attempting to put our wonderful Downunder Adventures trip in some kind of context and share it with some of my mates in Save the Kasota Prairie via our newsletter. I hope you don't mind.

Our group are "custodians," perhaps, of the Kasota Prairie, a small patch (c. 100 hectares) of native prairie grassland and bottomland along the Minnesota River. This area is surrounded on all sides by intensive agriculture, towns and busy roadways. The sounds, sights, and pollution of human activity are a constant, but for all that there is a certain beauty and peace which we try to preserve and even enhance.

When you asked us what our favorite part of the trip had been my answer was the night sky, darker than we ever see in the middle of the excessive artificial lighting of North America, and brilliant with the rich star fields only visible in the Southern Hemisphere. You said that my answer reminded you to appreciate something you tended to take for granted, and you were grateful for that. On my part, you taught me to always be aware of the living beings, human and animal, for which the most spectacular scenery is a context.

I have an unfortunate egocentric tendency to see the world in terms of light and shadow, color, shape, texture, as if these were abstract things to be manipulated and displayed in my photographs. But your teaching and the people you brought us into contact with, had the effect of nudging me into a dawning awareness that these are all not the ends but the means to discovering how we fit in and relate to our world. This is something the original Americans understood, as well as the Aboriginal Australians we met through you. Unfortunately we drove our teachers away generations ago and have changed too much of the land to make it easy to recover our loss.

You describe the Aboriginals, especially within reserves and national parks, as "traditional owners" or "traditional custodians" of the land. I tended to favor "custodians" in my mind, in spite of the inevitable image it brings of a janitor or even a prison guard. A lot of the time at the Kasota Prairie picking up litter or trying to cope with destructive intruders, whether vandals or exotic plants and animals, I have had the feeling I am nothing more, and fighting a losing battle at that. But "owner" seemed to have even worse connotations of alienation from the land; of land that is divided, bought, sold, commodified and consumed. Well, the fact that I cannot adequately describe or understand the traditional relationship of people and their homeland is a product of the limitations of my language and culture, not of theirs.

Bruce Chatwin, in his excellent book, The Songlines, has given me some understanding of how, in traditional culture, your ownership of land is not based on the ability to keep others out, but on the ability to go in, understand, name, use and protect a particular piece of land. "The definition of a man's 'own country' was 'the place in which I do not have to ask'" People grew up learning all there was to know about the particular place they lived. They knew its plants and its animals, its soil and waters and seasons, and passed on the ancestral songs that preserved this knowledge. And, of course, the songs necessarily changed as you moved across the changing landscape. "No one was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the Ancestor's song and the stretch of country over which the song passed, A man's verses were his title deeds to territory. He could lend them to others. He could borrow other verses in return. The one thing he couldn't do was sell or get rid of them."

There used to be people in this valley that knew the songs of this land and spoke the languages that described it so well. Today we have to try and bend our language and culture to fit and, quite predictably, we have a lot of trouble. We've destroyed the traditional way of life that used to sing this land's songs, and we've killed off many of the animals and birds that once gave it balance and harmony. And yet, when I returned from my trip and went out to look at the Prairie, I knew the place, knew what had happened there in the weeks I had been gone. I did not have to ask. With every step I could name the plants to the right and the plants to the left; I knew those that were blooming and those that soon would and those already gone to seed. Oh, there's a lot I don't know and there's a lot missing that once allowed people to live there. The song I can sing is pretty thin and weak. But I feel like I own that place.

Thanks for bringing me into your place and allowing me to learn about mine.

Cheers, Eric

New Format for the SKP Newsletter
By Bob Idso
As you know (if you have been coming to SKP meetings or reading our newsletter) SKP is now out of the gambling business. After two years of audits by the IRS, Minnesota Revenue, Minnesota Gambling Control Board, and our own audit by a CPA firm, we are about finished with the whole thing. Speaking for myself, I couldn’t be more fed up with the whole process.

We did very well in the charitable gambling business for most of ten years, but once the IRS decided to go after us, things unraveled rather badly. To be sure, no one has accused us of corruption or of misusing the gambling money. Our mistake was to save up money to buy a parcel of land from UNIMIN.

We knew that under the rules, all the proceeds of gambling were to be spent by the end of each year, but we had it on good authority that we could still save up some money if we put it in a dedicated account and made it clear that it was being saved for a specific purpose and was part of our mission. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

The Gambling Control Board was fine with the way we did it, but the IRS disagreed and the rest is history. Ironically, if we had given all the money away for blues concerts or tee shirts for 4H kids, or new basketball hoops for the school, we would have been ok.

It appears that we will again be able to qualify to conduct a charitable gambling business by sometime next year. Whether or not anyone in the SKP organization would be willing to get back into the business after our recent experience is an open question.

Since SKP has recently lost it’s primary source of income, we need to make a few changes in the way we do business. Our largest ongoing expense is the newsletter which costs us more than $400 per month. This will be the last of the expensive newsletters. We are getting this one out to to let our readers know how the newsletter will be done in the future. Kris Higginbotham has done a beautiful job on our newsletter for many years and we will miss her involvement and we will miss the classy look she gave to our newsletter. Too bad but it is now history.

We now expect to do the newsletter quarterly and to have it out before our meetings, which will also be quarterly. Our newsletter will be posted on the web at www.skp.org and we plan to send an email notice to each of our members when a new one comes out. For those of you who have not yet entered the computer age, contact us and request a paper newsletter. If your dues are paid up, we will print one off the website and send it to you in the mail. It would help us if each our members would give us a current email address. If you don’t give us your email address though, you can still just check our website periodically and see what is new.

This plan seems simple and makes a lot of sense to us. Most of us have a computer or have access to one. We already have a website which has been rather badly underutilized in the past few years, so this is a way to make better use of an existing resource.

We have also been fortunate to have one of our newer members volunteer to be our Webmaster. His name is Jerry Ibberson and he is from North Mankato. We REALLY appreciate his help in patching up our old website and taking care of our newsletters. I am afraid he is not as pretty as Kris Higginbotham, but we like him anyway.

We used to send our newsletter out to about 300 people. Now it will be available to about one billion people, give or take a few million. Cool. See you on the Internet.

Thanks! SKP Board, members and friends...I loved designing this newsletter, and will miss it! I know the board won¹t miss my tardiness, especially getting this out early enough to announce SKP¹s booth at the Rock Bend Folk Festival ( the reason for my tardiness!) and the annual Open House.

I¹ll be joining you on the internet, and reading this newsletter in my free time!

Kris Higginbotham

Discovery of the Scurfpea
By Judy Cooper

Walking along the prairie path these late summer days you can't help but notice the tall and beautiful plants with purple flowers and silver leaves. If you look closely the flowers are recognizable as being from the pea (or legume) family. This is the silverleaf scurfpea, or silverleaf psoralea, a common prairie perennial native rising from a deep and thick taproot. The single stem branches into a bushy top and the 3-5 leaves are palm shaped; they also are covered with white, silky hairs - pull one off and feel it! The mature plant grows generally 2-4 feet high. Obviously it loves the full sun and open space; the mature seed pod contains only one seed, which is unusual for a legume - think about the peas and beans we eat! Reproduction is from the seeds and/or root rhizomes, at maturity in late summer a cut layer forms in the stem near the ground that causes the plant to break away, tumble with the wind, and scatter seed. Our very own tumbleweed!

Scurfpea is found in the Northern Great Plains and throughout South Dakota, in the dry tallgrass prairies. It's a common associate of little bluestem-big bluestem communities, when little bluestem is dominant. Native Americans drank a tea (leaves and stems) for fever, but scurfpea has poor nutritive value; it has sometimes been poisonous to livestock. A child in the early 1900s reportedly dies from eating seeds of a silverleaf..so no nibbling please. I have a further list of plants now blooming and maybe you can discover one you never knew a thing about - like I did with lovely scurfpea.

Wild Flwers

BLACK EYED SUSAN
Rudbeckia hirta
Abundant and long-blooming. The leaves and stems are rough and hairy, the petals (ray flowers) a clear, bright yellow, and the center disk chocolate colored. Several cultivated varieties available. Blooms July-August. Daisy Family -12-24² high.

BUTTERFLY WEED
Asciepias tuberosa
Conspicuous bright orange-yellow flowers in flat-topped clusters. Leaves oblong. Plant hairy, spreading, bushy. Seed pods about 4² long. No milky juice in this species. The root was widely used by Indians and pioneers alike to treat bronchial and pulmonary disorders. Blooms summer. Milkweed Family -12-24" high.

Guant HYSSOP
Agastache foeniculum
Flowers blue or purplish; leaves bluish or whitish underneath and have the fragrance of licorice or anise when lightly crushed. Blooms August-September. Mint Family - 3-5¹ high.

HOARY or WOOLY VERVAIN
Verbena stricta
A weedy-herb, the usually lavender to pink blossoms form a long, fleshy spike, blooming from bottom up. The stout stems and leaves have a dense cover of gray hair. Grazing animals avoid it because of its bitter juice. Blooms June-September. Vervain Family - 2-4' high.

LEAD PLANT
Amorpha canescens
The leaden-gray, hairy leaves give this plant its name. Lead-plant produces a blue-purple flower in a dense six-inch long spike. One of the few shrubs found in the prairie. A deep root incorporates nitrogen from the air into the soil. Prairie Indians stripped the leaves to make a hot tea. Blooms late July- early August Legume Family - 20-40² high

PRaIRIE Onion
Alium stellatum
Flowers are pink, rose or lavender-colored and clustered at the end of the stalk. The plant tastes like an onion and allium means ³garlicky². Cows grazing on wild onions give sour-tasting milk but it helped to flavor the meals of Indians and explorers such as Lewis and Clark. Found in meadows and upland prairies throughout the state. June-August. Lily Family -12² high.

WlLD BERGAMOT (Bee Balm)
Monarda fistulosa
Stem square in cross section, like most mints, and vegetative parts have the characteristic minty odor. Lavender to blue flowers in dense, terminal clusters. Flower shape is highly adapted for insect pollination. Native Americans boiled leaves in water for the vapor treatment of colds and other bronchial disorders. Blooms July-September. Mint Family - 2-4¹ high.

Area Prairies submitted by Judy Cooper

Prairies are ever-changing and may be experienced during any season of the year Prairie plants are best appreciated in their native, living environments - visitors are requested to refrain from picking, digging or collecting plants or in any way damaging these sites. if you wish to add prairie to your home garden please seek out one the many nurseries now selling seeds or plants of cultivated native prairie wildflowers.Help preserve these fragile remnants of our state's and nation's past ...walk gently!

1. Treaty Site History Center
1851 N.Minnesota Avenue Hwys. 169 N. and 22 (Dodd Road) on the North edge of St. Peter.
Native prairie plantings and prairie gardens landscape the home of the Nicollet County Historical Society. Plant identification brochure with map available.

2.Within the St. Peter city proper:
Uhler Prairie
Gustavus Adolphus College Linneaus Arboretum. Follow 169 south to Jefferson Avenue. turn west, proceed to the top on the hill: enter the campus at the sign, the arboretum and parking lot lie to your left on the south and west sides of the campus.
Grasses and flowers native to the drier areas of Minnesota. At the time of European settlement the Gustavus Adolphus campus was prairie.

McGill Park Prairie Plantings
Traverse Road and 9th Streets Follow Broadway Avenue west to Washington Avenue, turn right and proceed to Traverse Road, turn left, park will be to.your right at the top of the hill at the intersection of Traverse Road and McGill Place.
A community service project of the fifth grade of North Intermediate School. Students planted nearly 1500 prairie plants in the spring of 1997.

3. Rob and Janice Meyer Farm
3 miles west of St. Peter on County Road 5, the Old Fort Road
A small virgin prairie plot at the intersection of County Roads 5 and 40. ³Under this virgin sod lie the bones of several Sioux Indian members of Chief Sleepy Eyes band in the 1830s.

The Following people were elected to the
SKP Board of Directors on July 13, 2004:

Michael Myhra
St. Peter, Minnesota 56082
medeamyhra@aol.com

Judy Cooper
St. Peter, Minnesota
No email

Media Myhra
St. Peter, Minnesota
medeamyhra@aol.com

Mark Halverson

Mankato, Minnesota
mchlvrsn@halverson.com

Bob Idso
St. Peter, Minnesota
basehit@myclearwave.net

Eric Steinmetz
emetz@mctcnet.net

Jim Tracy
North Mankato, Minnesota
No email

Officers Bob Idso President
Medea Myhra Secretary
Mark Halverson Treasurer
Jerrold Ibberson Webmaster
Jerold222@charter.net
The board of SKP established the following dues for the coming year effective immediately:

Basic $25.00
Student $10.00
Patron $50.00
Organization $100.00

Minutes

Save The Kasota Prairie, Inc.
Annual Membership Meeting
And Board Meeting Minutes
Kasota Park Shelter House
Kasota, MN July 13, 2004

Minutes taken by Medea Myhra, Secretary

Present: Robert Idso, Mark Halverson, Eric Steinmetz, Jim Tracy, Judy Cooper, Medea Myhra, Mike Myhra, Don Gerrish, Lynn Gerrish, Jerry Ibberson Absent: John Goranson, Gary Campbell

1. President Bob Idso handed out the agenda and called to order the meeting at 6:45 PM, after a delicious potluck supper, and before the arrival of the mosquitoes. Bob mentioned that he did not get the 2004 newsletters back from the auditors.

2. President¹s Report:
SKP went out of the gambling business after 10 years, effective April, 2004. Bob and Eric recapped the sequence of events that led to this happening.

3. Treasurer¹s Report:
Treasurer Halverson reported that the tax assessments are as follows: $7,700 State, $1200 Federal, $9,000 Other taxes. SKP currently has $19,000 in the treasury, $5800 cash in checking, $8100 vestments, and $5000 tax refund.

4. Gambling Manager¹s Report:
SKP wishes to thank Mr. Lever for his help with the gambling business. Gambling Manager Campbell did not attend the meeting so the gambling report will need to be given later.

5. Old Business: None.

New Business:
6. Rock Bend Folk Festival is September 11th and 12th. The Open House with Unimin is on Saturday morning, September 11th. News about Rock Bend will be in the newsletter in August. John Goranson will be in charge of volunteers. Anyone interested, please contact John.

7. The newsletter will be looked at after consulting with Kris Higginbotham. The idea is that the past newsletter will be on the website. If someone does not have internet access, contact SKP now, and the newsletter will be mailed to you if your dues are currently paid up. E-mail addresses will be asked for on the website, in the last newsletter, and at Rock Bend. August 13th is the deadline for the newsletter to Kris.

8. Dues increase:
Recommend to the Board that dues be increased to $25.

9. Judy will write up a story about a sign update and about one of the flowers currently in bloom.

10. Annual report prepared for SKP. Approval moved by Eric Steinmetz and seconded by Jim Tracey. Annual report prepared for SKP was approved.

11. Board elections:
Current Board: Bob Idso, President; Judy Cooper, Vice President; Mark Halverson, Treasurer; Medea Myhra, Secretary; Jim Tracey, John Goranson, Eric Steinmetz. Election of new board took place. Mike Myhra was nominated by Medea Myhra and seconded by Judy Cooper. Motion carried to have Mike Myhra replace John Goranson on the Board. Note: John Goranson, via a phone call, had no objections to this. Rest of Board was nominated again. Nominations seconded. Motion carried. Membership meeting moved to adjourn by Jim Tracey. Judy Cooper seconded. Membership meeting adjourned at 8:30 pm.

Board Meeting Minutes:
1. Board members agreed to keep the officers of the board the same. Mark Halverson moved. Jim Tracey seconded. Motion carried.

2. Board members gave Jerry Ibberson, the new webmaster, board member information for the website.

3. Dues increase to $25. Mark Halverson moved. Mike Myhra seconded. Motion carried.

4. Current tier of membership dues is as follows: Organizational: $100; Patron: $50; Contributor: $25; Regular: $5. A new tier was proposed: Organization: $100; Patron: $50; Basic: $25; Student: $10. Mark Halverson moved. Jim Tracey seconded. Vote was taken for the new tier. Vote unanimous. Motion carried.

5. Jim Tracey moved to adjourn Board meeting. Mike Myhra seconded. Motion carried. Board meeting adjourned at 8:45 pm.