Native American Minnesota

Today is the 146th anniversary of the start of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In the fall of 2002, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) (with financial support from the Blandin Foundation) did a six part series on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 titled, Minnesota’s Uncivil War. The content is still available, including some audio:

Part 1: The remnants of war
Part 2: “Let them eat grass”
Part 3: Broken promises lead to war
Part 4: Hundreds of settlers die in attacks
Part 5: Execution and expulsion
Part 6: The Dakota - still a divided people

See the photo gallery and three supplemental stories:

• Exiled at Crow Creek
• A woman of contradiction 
• What should we call it?

Minnesota-based author/historian John ‘Jack’ Koblas gave a slide presentation at the Northfield Historical Society last night on Let them Eat Grass, his three-volume history of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

The Bush Foundation in St. Paul has announced its new strategic direction for the next decade. (See the Strib article titled, Bush Foundation changes its focus and the way it will issue grants; the Strib editorial, Bush Foundation makes a smart shift; Pioneer Press article titled, Major state funding group alters grant focus; MPR story titled, Bush Foundation to change course of giving efforts and the companion audio interview with president Peter Hutchinson.)

One of the three new goals is:

Support the Self-Determination of Native Nations. Goal: By 2018, all 23 Native nations in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota are exercising self-determination and actively rebuilding the infrastructure of nationhood.

Back in April, I blogged about the terrific Dakota Concentration Camp display at Fort Snelling St. Park. (The MN Department of Natural Resources (DNR) operates all state parks. They do not operate Historic Fort Snelling, the site of the fort. It’s operated by the MN Historical Society.)

This exhibit, according to one of the display books on the site, "… was written with the advice and contributions of many Dakota people."

I was pleased when MN Sesqui Executive Director Jane Leonard mentioned it in her speech on the steps of the State Capitol on May 18, in part because so few people seem to know about it.

It seems, however, that the DNR is missing a huge opportunity by

• Not having anything about the exhibit on its Fort Snelling State Park website; and
• Not even mentioning the existence of the concentration camp on the History section of the park’s website, where the narrative reads:

For hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, generations of Dakota people lived in villages along the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers that meet in Fort Snelling State Park. The river confluence was believed to be the place of origin and center of the earth by the bands of Mde-wa-kan-ton-wan Dakota, the "Dwellers by Mystic Lake." By the late 1600s, Europeans had visited the area. In the 1820s, historic Fort Snelling was built on the bluff above the two historic rivers to control the exploration, trade, and settlement on these waterways. The area was established as a state park in 1961. The swimming beach, added in 1970, remains a popular recreation attraction in the park. In 1997, a new visitor center opened to the public.

To its credit, as part of the MN Sesqui, the Park has scheduled an event titled Bdote - Rivers and People Coming Together for Saturday, July 19 at 10 am. The description of the event includes the phrase "concentration camp:"

The area now known as Fort Snelling State Park has worn many titles in Minnesota history, from Dakota homeland to concentration camp, military post to recreation area. Explore the history of this site and its impact, past and present. Begin at the visitor center.

So what could be done?

1. I’d really like to see a multimedia version of the Dakota Concentration Camp exhibit on the Fort Snelling State Park website, or possibly a separate web site altogether. This would be an inexpensive project for the DNR’s web team and make it much easier for many thousands of Minnesotans to discover the exhibit and learn more about the Concentration Camp.
2. I’d really like to see a mobile version of the Dakota Concentration Camp exhibit that could be easily set up at civic events, classrooms, and other temporary locations around the state. Volunteer interpreters could be trained, a DVD with a narrative could be created, and it could be a significant first step towards getting the full story told in the Minnesota History curriculum of our public schools.

A couple of weeks ago, my sister and I visited the MN150 exhibit at the Minnesota Historical Society.

The exhibit and book, Minnesota 150: The People, Places, and Things that Shape Our State by Kate Roberts, displays and documents "… responses to the following question: What person, place, thing, or event originating in Minnesota do you think has transformed our state, our country, or the world?"  (See the MN150 wiki for nominated answers.)

I took photos of all the exhibit displays that have some relevance to this blogsite and project, i.e., Native American Minnesota.

But rather than writing about my reaction to/detailed opinion of the exhibit all at once here in a blog post, I’d rather do it a little bit at a time in the comment thread attached to this post. And I’d like to invite visitors to this blog to comment here as well.

I’ve created a Native American Minnesota in the MN150 exhibit photo album, and I’ve uploaded the photos so that most are 1600 pixels wide which allows you to use the Picasaweb ‘zoom’ tool to read the text.  (Click the screenshot image on the right to see the red arrow pointing to the zoom icon.)

So when you’re viewing a photo in the album (this one, for example), click the zoom icon to display the larger photo, click and hold your cursor on the enlarged photo, and then drag the image left/right/up/down as desired.

See the album of 42 photos or this slideshow:

 
At the Sesqui celebration at the Capitol last weekend, there were several tents for a variety of exhibitor displays. Among them was the Archives and Special Collections department of the University of Minnesota Libraries, displaying their Becoming Minnesota: A Sequicentennial Sampler exhibit.

 
One of table displays was called ‘Where We Began’ and it conveyed a very narrow and 100% positive version of the early history of the state. Click the photos to enlarge and you’ll see. Even more telling: The web page for the "Where We Began" portion of the exhibit contains the following narrative. (It uses scrolling Flash text but I’ve manually transcribed it.)

Encounter between the native peoples of this region and Europeans is where the story of our statehood begins. The European perspective on the nature of these encounters — captured in accounts written by Jesuit missionaries, explorers like Father Louis Hennepin, early settlers like Jonathan Carver, and illustrated in early printed maps — is what remains for us today of this early time, enriched by the memories and life experiences, captured nearly a century later, of such men as Chatonwahtooamany, chief of the kapoja band of Mdewakanton Sioux.

By the 19th century, encounter gave way to widespread settlement and industrialization. Cities like Duluth attracted businesses and immigrants; the expanding milling industry brought additional prosperity, so much so that Minneapolis could undertake such projects as the dredging of Lake of the Isles to expand its parkway system. Immigrants from Sweden and elsewhere throughout Europe, including the Isle of Man, flocked to Minnesota, changing the nature of our history of encounter. We acknowledge this rich heritage today in the names of our lakes and rivers, our counties, cities, and streets, our institutions, and our celebrations.

The text completely avoids any mention of horrible realities of Euro-American treatment of our state’s indigenous people. It uses phrases like "By the 19th century, encounter gave way to widespread settlement" when it should use phrases like "By the end of the 19th century, decades of broken treaties and policies of ethnic cleansing allowed for widespread settlement…"

I think that it’s seemingly innocuous exhibits like this that, when they’re part of a pattern, continue to contaminate the state’s relationship with its Native people.

It’s too late to do anything about this particular exhibit, as it ended in late March. But maybe something can be changed with the web version. And maybe the U of M Libraries would consider creating another exhibit, similar to the terrific one that the DNR has done at Fort Snelling State Park about the 1862-63 Dakota Concentration Camp that I blogged about a few weeks ago.

In today’s StarTribune: Ancestral Mi-Ni-So-Ta: "Paul Durand’s life work unearthed hundreds of American Indian names for area landmarks. The work continues even after his death."

Right: Paul Durand’s family has a memorial web site dedicated to him:

"…. a humble historian of Native American place-names of the Upper Midwest. Paul’s lifelong research has helped to preserve a history that might have otherwise been forever lost. Two unique books with accompanying maps document Dakota and Ojibwa place-names, including their English translations. Many of the books’ entries also describe the geographical features, historical events, and mythology that contributed to each place’s name."

Durand’s two books:

• TA-KU-WA-KAN TI-PI "Dwelling Place of the Gods"
• Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been reading books about Minnesota’s history with its Indian population around the time of statehood.

• 
  I first read a historical novel set during the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, titled Uprising, by MN State Representative Dean Urdahl. Strib editorial writer Lori Sturdivant had mentioned it in her column last fall. 

  Urdahl’s no James Michener but I found it be an interesting and even-handed treatment of the war and another way to learn about the important characters.
   

•   
  At the visitor center at Fort Snelling State Park, I picked up a book titled The Dakota Indian Internment at Fort Snelling, 1862-1864, by Corinne L. Monjeau-Marz.

  It’s a massive and helpful collection of maps, photos, and compelling first-hand accounts from both whites and Indians. I found two things troubling about the book, however: 

  * Page 9 of the Foreward by Alan Woolworth, a former curator for the Minnesota Historical Society, in which he writes that the "… long caravan of peaceful Dakota women, children, and elderly men… went to a camp where they could be fed and protected until they were removed to another reservation far distant from Minnesota." Huh?

  * On pages 67-69, the author treats the issue of whether the camp should be referred to as an ‘internment camp’ or ‘concentration camp.’ She ultimately argues for the former because the conditions of the camp and its purpose can not be equated to the Nazi concentration camps. I’d argue that to just call it an ‘internment camp’ arguably puts it in the same category as the Japanese American internment camps after Pearl Harbor where few died.

• 
  Dakota Life in the Upper Midwest by Samuel Pond, written in the 1870s. Pond and his brother spent decades learning the Dakota language and observing how they lived. I’ve not read it yet.
• 
  Let Them Eat Grass, Volume I: Smoke, by John Koblas.  I just got this book from the Northfield Historical Society. It’s the first book of his Let Them Eat Grass trilogy. Volumes 2 and 3 are due out in a month, I’m told.