MinnesotaHistory.net

This article was first published on this site in January 2010. The information is also discussed in the new book Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. Although the National Park Service’s final EIS for the Coldwater/Bureau of Mines property in Hennepin County, Minnesota, contains the statement that “no historical documentation of American Indian [...]

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Anyone holding a ceremony at Coldwater Spring, a sacred and culturally important place for Dakota people, is required to get a permit from the local office of the National Park Service office in St. Paul, known as the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area or MNRRA.  However as of August 30, 2012, no permits are [...]

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Could the National Park Service be a fit guardian for the Gettysburg Battlefield if it announced publicly that it did not accept the belief that a profoundly important battle took place there, one that was a turning point in the history of the Civil War and indeed for the history of the country, and that [...]

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It is time for the National Park Service to leave Coldwater Spring in Hennepin County, Minnesota. The NPS, or its local branch, the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA), is unfit to manage this sacred and culturally important site which first entered federal hands through the Dakota Treaty of 1805. As reported in the [...]

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“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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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The recent statement by John Anfinson, historian with the National Park Service’s Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA), that Coldwater Spring was “latched onto” by various groups including American Indians as a sacred place is merely one more example of the Anfinson’s closed mind and biased point of view. He and the agency for [...]

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When a National Park Service spokesperson in the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area in St. Paul compared the interest of Dakota people in the historic and culturally important Coldwater Spring, located in Hennepin County, Minnesota, to that of “Wiccans, New Agers, more-traditional religious people,” and said that Native people like all these other groups [...]

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Robin Johnson of Alexandria, Minnesota, says in a recent letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “until Minnesota adults stop thinking of their state’s history and culture as being the almost sole province of children, the complex arguments [about the history of Historic Fort Snelling] will never make an appearance inside the forts, museums or zoos.” [...]

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