MinnesotaHistory.net

The Minnesota Historical Society is looking for someone to take on the problem of 1862 and its 150th anniversary. The job will remain open until filled, that is until someone is found who is willing to plunge into this  thorny topic. For anyone who is not familiar with 1862, it may be hard to imagine how difficult it will be to find someone who is willing to do this, and even more,  someone capable of taking on the job and making it successful.

First of all 1862 refers to the events known by various names relating to conflicts between Dakota people and white people starting in Minnesota in August 1862, and all that flowed from those events. In the job announcement the…

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By Daniel Shagobince

The multifarious, extensively pervasive, unpersuasively extensive, existential influence of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and its Mystical Lake Casino is made embarrassingly clear when you go to the Star Tribune web site to read about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Wolfchild case, a decision that does a great job of shoring up the revenues from Mystical Lake Casino for the paltry percentage of Dakota people in Minnesota who are officially enrolled members of the alleged Shakopee community. If you click on that itty bitty metaphorical buttony thing that helps you to print out the article, an ad for Mystical Lake will appear on your printed page. This mystical and transcendental, juxtapositional conflagration is made possible…

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What will happen to Historic Fort Snelling, the anachronistic product of Minnesota’s Statehood Centennial celebration of 1958? It is hard to read the tea leaves at the Minnesota Historical Society these days, especially from a distance, but the proposed cuts at the Historical Society give some suggestions. It may be that in the very near future, beginning July 1, 2009, Fort Snelling will shut down so that careful work can begin to remove 16% of the walls of the fort. It would be a good start. But maybe this is all wishful thinking.

Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie's playful view or critique of Fort Snelling as a White Castle hamburger stand, with an Edward Curtis paparazzi in the foreground, a Minnesota state…

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Ninety four people will be laid off. The library will be open only four days a week. Historic Forestville in Preston, North West Company Fur Post in Pine City, and Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site in Little Falls will be closed to the public. The Minnesota Historical Society Press will reduce by a third the number of book titles it publishes each year. These are just a few of the layoffs and reduced services to the people of Minnesota that will result, beginning July 1, 2009, from the proposed 16% budget cuts that may be asked of the Minnesota Historical Society by the State Legislature and Governor Pawlenty.  What follows is based on a press release by the Historical Society describing the…

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What does Fort Snelling say when no one is speaking? The answer to this question is the reason for tearing down the fort. When this idea was first suggested several years ago, it caused the tearing of hair and rending of garments, even among those who never cared for the fort in the first place. When I first heard it myself, I did not embrace the idea. Now after careful thought, I suggest a gradual process of deconstruction, starting with the northwest or southwest walls, so that in the future a person arriving at the fort from the nearby visitor center will see a breach in this monolithic diamond. That would be a good start.

The truth is that many who…

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This summer will be the 75th anniversary of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike. Last December was the 10th anniversary of the raid on the protest occupation near Coldwater Spring, said by some to be the largest police action in Minnesota history. Next September will be the first anniversary of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in St. Paul. August and September 2012 will be the 150th anniversary of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862. Each of these anniversaries will be controversial in one way or another, but weighing the nature of the controversy created by such anniversaries produces some interesting results. Perhaps the most interesting question is: When is an event too controversial for commemoration by institutions that consider themselves or strive to be mainstream?

One of…

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Wiyaka Sinte Win or Tail Feather Woman, a Dakota woman who had a vision about the construction of a great drum, designed “to bring unity and healing” among peoples, is to be honored this year by Dakota people. Sometime after 1862, Tail Feather Woman, who is usually described as being Santee, or simply Dakota, was living in a particular village when it was attacked by “blue coats”–American soldiers. She took refuge in a swamp, hiding there for days, sometimes under the water so as not to be seen, breathing through a hollow reed. During that time she prayed for deliverance and she received a vision about the construction of a drum the beat of which had a transformative power that would…

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There are many versions of what happened at the Coldwater Spring/ Bureau of Mines open house on February 23. One of them is the official version which is the one that the National Park Service would like everyone to adopt and which they have spoon fed to a few reporters who may not have gone to the event. This official version is represented in the March 11, 2009 (St. Paul) Villager. This report by Kevin Driscoll says that people were milling about having an “electric” time talking with each other and talking with Park Service representatives, when “a group of activisits dominated the open house to argue that the land should be returned to the American Indians.” The article then goes…

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One of the definitions of the word “monument” is “a stone shaft or other object set in the earth to mark a boundary.” This is not exactly what Heid E. Erdrich had in mind in her brilliant new book of poems, National Monuments (MSU Press), though she leaps across boundaries, knocking over markers. The book is about the nature of the monument as metaphor and endangered sacred space, and “the places indigenous people would consider their national monuments,” and the human body as monument, and a few other things, which all make perfect sense to readers as we follow her developing thoughts, one leaping to the next.

The first and title poem in the book describes a once familiar scene in Minnesota, Wisconsin,…

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New information has been found about the stone house of the fur trader Benjamin F. Baker,  located above Coldwater Spring from the 1830s to the 1850s. The house, which was the site of many firsts in Minnesota history, was destroyed by fire in March 1860. The new information shows that the house was built as early as 1836, prior to the Henry H. Sibley house in Mendota, which makes the Baker House the first recorded private residence made of stone in Minnesota. It later housed other traders, merchants, missionaries, a hotel, and the first public school in the region of Minnesota (in 1837-38).

The site of the Baker House is on a hill just to the west of Coldwater Spring on the…

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