Before there was Minnesota or North Dakota, there was a lake.
Glacial Lake Agassiz once covered much of the land we now call home. Its waters stretched across present-day borders, leaving behind the Red River Valley, fertile soil, lakes, wetlands, and a landscape that continues to shape how we live.
The lake was temporary. Its influence was not.
I am drawn to Agassiz because it offers a way of understanding this region that is older and larger than the lines we have drawn across it.
I identify as both Minnesotan and North Dakotan. I grew up in Detroit Lakes, studied in Minneapolis, and have lived and worked across communities that are often discussed as if they belong to separate worlds. Yet the border between the two states has never felt like a complete explanation of who we are.
Water does not recognize that border. Neither do watersheds, weather systems, economies, families, or ideas.
The name Agassiz gives us a geography broad enough to hold these connections. It joins lake country to the prairie and small towns to growing cities. It allows Fargo and Detroit Lakes, Grand Forks and Bemidji, tribal nations and agricultural communities to appear within the same frame.
That shared frame feels increasingly important.
Minnesota is called blue. North Dakota is called red. Those labels tell us something about elections, but very little about the full lives of the people who live here. They flatten communities filled with contradiction, complexity, and change.
A border can make us believe that different values begin abruptly on the other side of a river. Agassiz offers another view: beneath our political boundaries is a shared landscape.
We drink from connected water. We work within connected economies. Our children attend one another’s colleges, our families cross state lines, and the decisions of one community flow outward into many others. Whatever our political identities, we belong to something that cannot be understood through red and blue alone.
Agassiz also invites us to think on a longer timeline.
Human institutions often feel permanent because they are the structures we inherited. State borders, political parties, industries, and civic traditions can seem fixed. The ancient lake reminds us that permanence is often an illusion.
This land has been repeatedly transformed. Ice became water. Water became prairie, lake, and valley. Communities formed, moved, adapted, and rebuilt. What looks settled is always in motion—sometimes too slowly for us to notice.
That perspective can be humbling. It can also be liberating.
The world we inherited was shaped by people who came before us, but it was not delivered to us complete. Our past shapes us, and we are actively shaping the future. The institutions we build, the stories we tell, and the ideas we choose to elevate will become part of someone else’s inheritance.
The question is not whether this region will change. It is whether we will participate thoughtfully in shaping that change.
The name Agassiz carries complications, too.
Glacial Lake Agassiz was named for Louis Agassiz, a nineteenth-century scientist whose work helped advance the understanding of glaciers—and whose racist theories contributed to some of the most harmful currents in modern science. The name itself comes through a colonial tradition of naming landscapes for European men, long after Indigenous peoples had already known, inhabited, and understood these places.
That history should not be ignored or smoothed over.
Shared identity cannot be created through nostalgia alone. It requires us to examine the stories we have inherited, including the uncomfortable ones. If Agassiz is to become a useful name for this work, it must hold that tension honestly.
Perhaps that is another reason the name feels appropriate.
This project is not about presenting the region as uncomplicated. It is about becoming more capable of engaging its complexity. It is about asking how we can inherit a place without becoming trapped by the limitations of its past. It is about recognizing that we can value where we come from while still questioning the stories we have been taught about it.
Agassiz is both present and absent. The lake is gone, yet its shape remains visible everywhere. We see it in the flat horizon of the Red River Valley, in the soil beneath our feet, and in the water that continues to connect us.
Ideas can work in much the same way.
A conversation may last an hour, but change how someone thinks for years. A story may outlive the person who first told it. An idea can disappear beneath the surface of a community and reemerge later as a project, an institution, or a new understanding of what is possible.
That is what I hope Agassiz Ideas can become: a place for ideas that leave a mark.
A platform rooted in this region but not confined by it. A meeting place between Minnesota and North Dakota, rural and urban, red and blue, memory and possibility. A place where we can consider not only what this region has been, but what it might become.
Agassiz is not a perfect name.
But perhaps a shared identity should not feel perfectly resolved. Perhaps it should ask something of us. It should remind us that we live on layered ground, that our histories contain both beauty and harm, and that belonging carries responsibilities as well as pride.
The lake was impermanent.
What it shaped remains.
So will we.