As a young boy, Moua Yang often saw his parents go on outdoor adventures without him. Frequently they were rigorous hiking excursions that might include rocky paths that were not suitable for kids. It left him yearning for his own outdoor experiences.
One activity they did together frequently, though, was fishing, and by age 5 Yang already was developing a passion for it.
“My mom would always take me to Phalen Lake, because that was always the closest thing to us,” said Yang, who grew up in St. Paul’s East Side. “My community was there as well. The Hmong community goes there a lot.”
Yang carried this passion on throughout his childhood and young adulthood, integrating it into his high school job at Urban Roots, a St. Paul nonprofit that seeks to expose youth in East Side St. Paul, where a majority of the population is people of color, to outdoor activities.
Yang started as an intern at Urban Roots five years ago, during his first year of high school. He now works on staff as a crew lead, teaches fishing lessons to youth and is currently developing his second curriculum, which will focus on intermediate level fishing.
Yang also builds urban rain gardens, removes invasive species from local parks, and clears debris from outdoor drainage. All of this work earned him recognition last year from the Capitol Region Watershed District, which gave him the Young Watershed Steward Award.
Yang’s laid-back attitude and easy-going demeanor belie these accolades. Now 18, he’s one year removed from graduating from Johnson Senior High School and is taking some time off before starting college.
Teaching sustainable fishing
When he first came onto Urban Roots as a 14-year-old, Yang knew he wanted to focus on improving accessibility of public parks, Woods said.
“In his community there is not a lot of deliberate outreach about helping them know that these places exist,” Woods said.
The first summer he worked at Urban Roots, Yang remembers spending a lot of time working with a crew to remove buckthorn, an invasive species, at Pig’s Eye Park in St. Paul. The work was exhaustive but rewarding.
“I enjoyed it a lot,” he said. “I love moving my body around. I was really sweaty. But back then it wasn’t too hot.”
Yang doesn’t remember that summer being as warm or dry as more recent summers, which is a trend that concerns him. In particular, he noted that the last summer and the winter that just ended didn’t yield much rain or snow.
“It makes me worried that we’re going to go into a drought again,” he said. “The lakes and rivers, their shorelines will be lower, and that’s going to hurt the ecosystem.”
Yang incorporates thoughts like these into his fishing curriculum. Fishing runs deep in Hmong culture, Yang said, because it was at one point a survival skill the population relied on to feed itself. The curriculum involves basic sustainability tips on fishing, like refraining from using lead tackle, which the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency warns can kill loons that consume fish exposed to lead, and tips to avoid “gut hooking” a fish, which is when they swallow the hook and have minimal chances of survival if released back into the water.
But another key part of the curriculum focuses on what Yang describes as the gifts of the Mississippi River. This includes how the river has provided food, water, shelter, and habitat and animals and people throughout its existence.
“It’s the main source of the water that we drink,” he said. “But part of the Mississippi is toxic, and we can’t eat fish from it, which is sad.”
Currently, the Minnesota Department of Health urges limited fish consumption from the Mississippi River stretch between St. Paul and Wabasha. The guidelines recommend no more than one serving of Mississippi fish every month, and urge all children under 15 and those who are pregnant and breastfeeding to stay away from eating Mississippi fish.
Another big part of his curriculum involves storytelling and narrative, Woods said, which helps participants in the class build their relationships with the outdoors.
This includes a narrative history of fishing, which Yang writes goes back at least 10,000 years in Minnesota. At one point, he writes, “the Ojibwe and Dakota revolutionized fishing culture by venturing away from the shoreline to drop lines from their birchbark canoes.”
Yang then writes that fishing for fun and sport in Minnesota began in the 1800s, when Europeans arrived.
“They had a taste for carp, which led to a federal train car full of carp arriving in the late 1800’s,” Yang writes. “In less than 10 years, this displaced species almost completely destroyed native bass habitat.”
The creation of ice shacks for ice fishing and fish openers followed, which established modern fishing culture in Minnesota.
Yang’s curriculum also promotes sustainable fishing, and he fits his family’s cultural practices into it. His family, for example, tries to consume as much of the fish they catch as possible. This can involve consuming any fish eggs they find after gutting the fish, and boiling the head of the fish to make a broth.
Exploring together outside
For the last year, Yang has been a part of a subgroup within Urban Roots led by Thia Xiong, the organization’s conservation program manager.
Like Yang, Xiong, 36, grew up an outdoors enthusiast, often taking trips to the North Shore with her parents. This kind of hobby can be uncommon in Hmong culture, she said.
Financial and transportation barriers can prevent Hmong youth from participating in regular outdoors activity, Xiong noted. So can cultural practices.
“Parents may not allow them to do these things because they’re seen as fun instead of learning,” she said, “and they don’t want their kids to just have fun, but it needs to have meaning, too.”
Xiong’s group includes 10 Hmong youth, including Yang. It goes informally by the name “Ua si ua Ke Nrawm Zoov,” which roughly translates to “exploring together outside.” Once a month, Xiong leads the group on a daytrip that usually involves hiking and exploring nearby public parks.
The simple activity goes a long way, Xiong said.
“It’s a huge combination of experiential learning, social emotional learning, and place-based learning,” she said.
Yang, she said, makes her job easy, and the two often have meaningful conversations.
“Every adventure that we go on and everything that we do at work, I just learn something new from him and all the other kids that I’m working with,” Xiong said.
The two also have had memorable experiences. Yang, in particular, recalls how Xiong took him on an unplanned excursion along University Avenue one day after work. They ended up at XIA Gallery and Cafe, where Yang said he was exposed to Hmong art and literature that he otherwise never would have seen.
Yang plans to stay at Urban Roots for the time being. But now that he’s close to entering his second year since graduating high school, he faces a common dilemma for many people his age: He isn’t sure exactly where he wants to go to college or what exactly he wants to do for a living. He’s definitely interested in incorporating conservation work into a profession, if possible.
“I can see myself doing this for a long time,” he said. “But I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to do that.”
