MinnesotaHistory.net

Bureaucratic approaches to the study of history and culture are fundamentally authoritarian. Understanding bureaucratic knowledge-gathering and bureaucracies in general requires ethnographic knowledge, including the folk knowledge, traditions, and practices of bureaucrats, which is sometimes only retrievable through the Freedom of Information Act.

Bureaucrats insist on the codification of rules for gathering and interpreting history. Though apparently scientific and unbiased in nature these rules are self-serving for the bureaucrat, serving the goals of government agencies or private bureaucracies. It is always easier when dealing with information that is challenging to the position of the bureaucrat if one can question its adherence to a set of bureaucratically-established rules, rather than deal with the meaning of the information itself. Similarly, it is easier to call attention to…

The local Twin Cities office of the National Park Service, known as MNRRA, the National Mississippi River and Recreation Area, has provided clarification on who it was within the agency who made the decision almost four years ago to reject the findings of a government consultant–which stated in an Ethnographic Study, that Coldwater Spring at the Bureau of Mines Twin Cities Campus property near Fort Snelling in Hennepin County, Minnesota, is a place of traditional cultural importance for Dakota people.

According to a document–a “White Paper”–from MNRRA recently released by the Park Service under a FOIA, or Freedom of Information Act request made by MinnesotaHistory.net,

For the Draft EIS, MNRRA’s Cultural Resources Specialist, Dr. John Anfinson, evaluated Coldwater Spring’s eligibility for the National…

Here’s the hyper-truth, the real truth, not the truthiness, but the truth-will-set-you-free-ness, the truth that no one, even if they are people not monkeys, wants to see, touch, hear, smell, imagine, or even deny: First of all the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is not a tribe, it’s an economic octogolopoly, I mean a sextogolopoly, made up of people who just happened to get control of the right money faucet at the right time. But that’s not the business end of it. The main part is this: They’re not a real tribe and they don’t care! They are crying about it all the way to the bank! Why would rich guys like them care anyway? They’ve got the MONEY! And whose going…

By John Negonsott

I’m a Kickapoo Indian from Kansas. My Great Grandpa received a drum like that from the Sauk and Fox tribe of Oklahoma. In 1987 I went up to the Sundance to return my respect for Tail Feather Woman’s blessing to our people in Kansas. I’m a 5th generation of followers of the dream dance. My family still has the drum and we were all raised around it and understand the importance of it. When we put our tobacco offerings out we we always mention wahnaniquah tail feather woman–”ahoe mishomsinon wahnoniquah cosnon megwich.” We of the drum faith all appreciate what this website is doing with this story (megwich)

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her 1999 opinion upholding hunting and fishing rights in the case of Minnesota v. Mille Lacs: “We interpret Indian treaties to give effect to the terms as the Indians themselves would have understood them.” She said that to interpret the meaning of specific treaty provisions, one had to look “beyond the written words to the larger context” that framed the treaty—the history of the negotiations and the “practical construction adopted by the parties.”

Stories and articles have recently appeared in Minnesota newspapers and other media about assertions of hunting and fishing rights under the 1855 Ojibwe treaty, which covers a large chunk of northern Minnesota. Since I was an expert witness for the Mille Lacs Band of…

There will be mixed feelings among many about the announced retirement of Nina Archabal, long-time director of the Minnesota Historical Society. People may have disagreements about the legacy she leaves in the institution she led. The good news is what Archabal said in the interview reported in the Pioneer Press this morning. Archabal stated that Fort Snelling would be a challenge for whoever replaces her as director of the Society: “The new director will have to ‘figure out how to knit Fort Snelling back together; it’s like Humpty Dumpty, it’s falling apart. That’s probably a 10-year undertaking.’”

Unfortunately too many people, including some in the Minnesota Historical Society, view Fort Snelling as a stone and mortar problem. What is really falling…

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…

The following analysis was written in January 2010, to discuss two important issues, the effort by the Internal Revenue Service to seize land belonging to the Crow Creek Sioux Creek, and the rejection by the National Park Service of claims by the Dakota for Coldwater Spring. Since this was written an agreement was reached between the IRS and Crow Creek allowing the tribe to buy back their own land. But in mid-January the National Park Service asserted that it plans to keep Coldwater Spring and continue to reject any Dakota claims to the land.

In support of a petition on Crow Creek land seizure and National Park Service seizure of Coldwater Spring, under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868

By Jason Wakiyan…

What will happen to the endangered archival collection in the Iron Range Research Center (IRRC) on the campus of the Minnesota Discovery Center (MDC), formerly known as Ironworld Discovery Center? The fate of the archives, which opened in 1980, is up in the air because of the closing of the center in the fall of 2009, due to funding cutbacks.

The center’s collections contain thousands of cubic feet of unpublished materials including government records, personal records, church records, and records of numerous business, civic, and social organizations. They include the papers of former governor Rudy Perpich, mining company newsletters, maps, photographs – many very rare, oral histories, and microfilmed newspapers. According to Barbara Sommer, whose book, Hard Work and a Good…

John Anfinson, historian with the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area or MNRRA, the branch of the National Park Service that recently completed the Environmental Impact Statement for the Bureau of Mines Twin Cities Campus property in Hennepin County, Minnesota, wants to make sure you understand that he did not write the historical sections of the EIS.

If a historian familiar with the history of the Minnesota region had written this portion of the EIS or the historical study included with the EIS, perhaps he or she would have done it more competently. In 2005 Anfinson had thought he might be involved with writing the historical portions of the EIS, but, in an email to me, he wrote:

Thanks for your thorough comments…