MinnesotaHistory.net

It was a tense evening at the meeting of the executive council of the Minnesota Historical Society on November 11, 1901. An invited speaker had given a speech for the ostensible purpose of telling the ancient history of the state, but at the end of his speech had condemned the white settlers and the U.S. government for its treatment of Minnesota’s Native inhabitants and had prophesied disaster for the whites of Minnesota if they did not renounce such actions.

Despite these plain words, the speaker went home that night thinking that he had been too polite; he had failed to tell the whole truth. Writing in his diary he stated: “Several members of the Historical Society are related in various ways…

Janet D. Spector, who died on September 13, 2011, worked in the 1980s with Dakota people to study the history of Little Rapids, a 19th-century Dakota village site on the Minnesota River. This work led to her pioneering book What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village. Spector’s work was pioneering not just for the topic—the historical village and the roles of the men and women who lived there—but also for the methods employed, the collaborative nature of the work itself and what it represented about the connected fields of anthropology and archaeology.

As a feminist, Spector was interested in questions about the roles of women in communities and the ways in which the gendered roles of men…

There are people who are concerned that nothing will be done to tell the story of the white people in 1862. They seem to believe that what happened to white people that year has yet to be told and that this topic will be neglected once again when the 150th anniversary of those events is noted next year.

I am not sure I know why people are worried. For myself I am worried for entirely different reasons. Since 1862 the public story of the events of that year has been largely about the experiences and points of view of whites. As the winners of the battles of 1862 and the years that followed, white people wrote the history books in which…

[Minnesota Historical Society press release. Commentary on this choice will follow in the weeks ahead.]

Current President of the New York State Historical Association and The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., will head state’s premier historical organization.

The Minnesota Historical Society announced today that its Board of Directors has named D. Stephen Elliott as director and chief executive officer, effective May 1, 2011. Elliott is currently the president and chief executive officer of the New York State Historical Association and The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“It is an honor to be chosen to lead an organization that is a national model for historical preservation and education,” said Elliott. “I have tremendous respect for the Minnesota Historical Society and the manner in which…

The Republican Party of Wisconsin is seeking the email records of William Cronon, a respected historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after Cronon wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times concerning the efforts by the Republicans in Wisconsin to cripple the rights of public workers. On March 15 Cronon also began a blog called Scholar as Citizen, presenting a study guide for understanding these efforts to cripple public unions.

The request by the Republican Party is made under Wisconsin’s Open Records Law. Whether the Republicans have a right to the emails they are requesting will have to be sorted out, but it is worth considering what purpose the Republicans may have in obtaining the information they are seeking. While there are…

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as William Faulkner wrote. I was not deliberately thinking of this quotation on February 5, 2011, when I again stood in the circle of peoples around the fire, honoring the memory of of those Dakota women, children, and older men who in November of 1862, were force-marched across southern Minnesota to the fenced-in camp below the bluff on which sat Fort Snelling.

I was remembering those people, the hardships and cruelty they suffered from the treatment they received from the military personnel, the harsh Minnesota winter, the illnesses for which they had no immunity nor reserves to resist — the on-going trauma of the events of the summer of 1862 etched into…

Mary Black Rogers, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian from Minnesota who studied the culture and history of Ojibwe and Métis communities in Canada and the United States, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on January 27, 2011.

The daughter of Fred R. Bartholomew and Stella LaVallee Bartholomew, Mary Rose Bartholomew was born on May 6, 1922, in Minneapolis, where she grew up. In the 1940s she married a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot from Texas named Alan J. Black, from whom she was later divorced. After World War II she contracted tuberculosis, which she survived after the removal of part of one lung. In 1950 she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where she received a BA in 1954 and a MA in…

In honor of the recent snowstorm of December 11, 2010, the 12-11-10 Blizzard, which hit a good part of southern Minnesota, here’s an article I wrote in 1986, on the history of Minnesota’s blizzards and how they were viewed by the people who lived through them. The article makes the point that weather is one of the characteristics of Minnesota that has helped to create a regional culture in this place.

Blizzard Tales: When the weather outside is frightful, Minnesotans go for a walk
By Bruce White
Minnesota Monthly, December 1986.

My neighbor shovels snow like there is no tomorrow. This is the same guy who vacuums his lawn in the summer. When the first flakes begin to fall, he is out there with his…

The quotation in the title concerning the powerful underwater beings known also to the Dakota Taku Wakan demonstrates the perils of government bureaucrats attempting to substitute their own judgments about Dakota places of cultural importance for the cultural interpretations of Native people. The statement makes clear the primacy that government officials place on written documents, even in discussing cultural matters about which oral tradition and the testimony of living people has been presented, and it is so full of errors of fact and interpretation that it is difficult to know where to begin in addressing them.

When public officials present themselves as arbiters of the meaning of Native beliefs and spiritual practices, the results are unfortunate if not embarrassing for all concerned.…

Without the free flow of information there is no accountability. Public servants, agencies, organizations, and businesses which can conceal the details of their operations from public scrutiny are free of accountability.  This applies to many institutions in the United States and in Minnesota, including history organizations like the Minnesota Historical Society.

At the Minnesota Historical Society building entrance, looking along John Ireland Boulevard toward the State Capitol in St. Paul, December 4, 2010. Bruce White photo.

In 2005, in the case of Lille Ledbetter, involving discriminatory pay, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that she should have sued her employer within 180 days of being paid less than male employees in the same firm. Unfortunately Lille Ledbetter had no way of knowing that…