Rainy, Like a Rainy Day

Native drumming, violent arrests, and one unforgettable act of civil disobedience.

A Profound Act of Civil Disobedience

A young man just sat, comfortably on the pavement, neither resisting nor complying.

Law enforcement officers had pulled him to the ground as he was walking away from them. Five of them wrestled his arms behind his back and took several minutes to figure out how to zip-tie his wrists that couldn’t reach more than a few inches behind his back.

Then they rolled him over from his belly and ordered him to stand.

He refused.

They tried to lift him. They couldn’t.

So there he sat, calm as a stone in a river, while the current of the day rushed around him. Native drummers and dancers performed in the background, ceremonially keeping the heartbeat of Minnesota’s resistance alive.

He smiled toward the camera of independent journalist @bgonthescene and said, “They can’t lift me up.”

I thought I recognized his voice, and definitely his smile. But I couldn’t be sure.

Here were all these officers with their gear and commands and zip ties, completely befuddled by one peaceful young man refusing to make their job easier.

How, exactly, did they expect a man of his size to rise from the pavement with his hands bound behind his back? Did they imagine he would simply tuck his feet beneath him and spring upward like some limber gymnast? Their order made no sense in the physical reality of the body they were commanding.

Civil disobedience has always lived in that space where the body tells the truth that power wants to ignore. A body seated at a lunch counter. A body remaining in a bus seat. A body walking calmly across a bridge.

Or in this case, a body going limp during an arrest.

Two Separate Protests Converge

Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE was a Week of Action running from February 25 through March 1st, culminating in a march and gathering at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, housed at the convergence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, now known as the ICE detention center in Minneapolis, MN.

54 protesters were arrested, cited, and released.

On the south side of Whipple, Native dancers danced, drummers drummed, and people came together for what was meant to be a peaceful, prayerful, public gathering.

On the north side of Whipple, protesters planned an act of civil disobedience. They arrived with helmets, goggles, gas masks, umbrellas, and makeshift shields fashioned from blue-and-white plastic trash bins. They intended to form a human shield at the parking lot entrance so ICE vehicles could not exit the headquarters and spill out into Minneapolis streets where they had been causing violence and trauma to the people for months.

However, before the human shield could form, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department met them with tear gas and flash bangs. The first arrests came fast, with no dispersal announcements before that initial rush.

That split-screen image tells the capital T-Truth about Minnesota in this season. Native dancers moving with rhythm in ceremony on one side, and on the other, officers surging, tackling people, and chasing those attempting to retreat. Two rivers converge.

After months of violence in our communities, after thousands of neighbors have been abducted off streets from ordinary moments of daily life, through sheltering-in-place and rapid-response-networking and coordinated-mutual-aid, Minnesotans are still showing up in ceremony, documenting, legal observance, and community solidarity.

We are still trying to place our bodies between vulnerable people and the machinery that keeps swallowing them.

The Fierce Love and Desire for a Peaceful Home

I watched the video over and over again. I suspected it was him. It looked like it was him, but I hadn’t seen him in eight years. I couldn’t be completely sure.

But then I found a second video, a different angle of the same scene, and my suspicions were confirmed.

“What’s your name?” a protestor yelled across the crowd to the young man.

“Rainy Cunningham. Rainy like a rainy day.” Just as his dad had taught him to say when he was a little kid.

My throat closed, and I choked on my breath.

It is him. My husband’s son.

I am a childless mother. Once upon a time, I hoped this young man might someday embrace me as his stepmother. But he estranged himself from us on his eighteenth birthday. We’ve had no contact, and gone through all the processes of grieving someone who is still alive. We went on with our lives, loving from afar with a quiet hope that one day we’d see him again.

We never thought we’d see him again on a social media feed getting arrested for civil disobedience.

The first clip I saw that morning was dated and timestamped, 3/1/26, 11:11am

11/11 ~ Rainy’s birthday.

Later that night I found an hour-long livestream video, beginning with the violent arrests on the north side of Whipple and ending with a dozen officers trying unsuccessfully to lift Rainy into the back of a nearby Sprinter van.

We watched the whole thing in awe.

I saw the strong-willed, good-hearted kid who once devoured my home-cooked meals and shook Yahtzee dice with exuberance while laughing in loud machine-gun bursts of joy. He had grown up into a young man with a passion strong enough to place his own body in the path of harm on behalf of other people.

This story is larger than one arrest.

I don’t know what comes next, but I do know what I saw.

I saw Native drummers and dancers holding ceremony while officers tackled and zip-tied protestors nearby. I saw a community still showing up for each other after months of fear and violence.

And I saw a peaceful act of civil disobedience so simple and so complete that a whole cluster of befuddled officers could do nothing with it.

I also saw a defiant teenager I once knew, now grown up into an exquisitely stubborn young man, representing the whole of Minnesota.

And I felt myself loving him fiercely for standing up for his people by sitting in his power, handcuffed, calm, and absolutely unwilling to help the machinery that was trying to carry him away.

Rainy, like a rainy day.

Heavy rains don’t last all day.
~Lao Tzu