Category Archives: Minnesota culture

What’s in a name? Spirits, water, stones, earth

March 25, 2009Bdote: A Public EIS, Minnesota culture, Reclaiming Mini Sota MakoceBruce White

Asking the Dakota to supply a unique name for Coldwater Spring, located near Fort Snelling, is a bit like asking the Catholic Church to supply the unique name for the front steps of the Cathedral of St. Paul. For the Cathedral, the steps are important and derive their significance from their connection to the larger place, even though there may not be a name commemorating something or describing some unique aspect of those steps as apart from any other steps. Among the Dakota there are various names for the Coldwater area, some unique and some more generic. But the bigger question is what is the significance of such names, anyway?

In the case of Coldwater Spring, the National Park Service in St. Paul has seized on the significance of any possible name the Dakota might have for the spring apart from any other spring as determinative of cultural significance. But Park Service officials have yet to provide a cultural basis for assuming that having some kind of unique name should be overriding in this determination.

The front steps of the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking north, September 2008

Among Dakota and Ojibwe in Minnesota many names are generic, that is they refer to factors that the place shared with other places of the same type. Many of these Native names for places have survived in English names such as Mud, Portage, and Rice lakes. So, the real special significance of such places derives from the oral tradition or knowledge that Native people might supply for them, such as the fact that a particular lake had rice that ripened much earlier or later than that in other lakes. But the characteristics of the rice might not be recorded in the name. Names of rivers were sometimes given simply because the river flowed out of a certain lake and might not be descriptive of any other special characteristics of the river.

European-Americans have generic names too. There are Pilot Knobs all over the country, some adjacent to rivers, others out on the plains. The names refer to some characteristic shape in such places that made them unmistakable from a long distance. Other generic names just describe the place or the fact of the generic thing being at a place with a unique name. Appomattox Courthouse was the name given to a courthouse which happened to be located at Appomattox. This is a place of some traditional significance for European-Americans, though the unique aspect of the name derives from a particular community of the Powhatan tribe. The significance of the courthouse in history and tradition is not recorded in the name, that is, Appomattox Courthouse is not called: “the-place-where-Lee-surrendered-to-Grant.”

Among Dakota and Ojibwe there are some names which seem to be unique to particular places. For example, the large central Minnesota lake called Mille Lacs (in French, “a thousand lakes”) was a place of great significance for Dakota, who called it Mde Wakan, that is Spirit or Mysterious Lake. The origins of the name are bound up in Dakota traditions and creation stories and like most such names have yet to be fully explained. The most eastern branch of the Dakota call themselves the Mdewakantonwan, “the people of spirit lake,” a name which is still used today, 200 years after the people moved away from the lake.

Another unique place name among the Dakota is Taku Wakan Tipi, which might be translated as “the dwelling place of Taku Wakan.” European-Americans in the 19th century believed that this name referred to a hill called by the soldiers Morgan’s Hill or Morgan’s Mound, which is the present location of the VA Medical Center. However, while the English name does refer to a hill, there is nothing in the Dakota name that specifically describes the Dakota place as a hill. Lower down the Mississippi River in St. Paul is Wakan Tipi (dwelling place of the sacred), said to refer to Carver’s Cave, though it may be that it describes a larger area that includes the cave. Assuming that a place one cultural group identifies in a particular area has the same boundaries as the place identified by another cultural group in the same neighborhood is an error of interpretation, though it is an easy one to make.

The name Taku Wakan, as many recorded in the 19th century is a polite way of referring to a powerful being or set of beings named Unktehi. The Unktehi were beings connected to sacred ceremonies and to more than one creation story. Male Unktehi resided in water, in lakes or rivers or waterfuls, but are often identified as being in water that is present or underneath landforms, such as Taku Wakan Tipi. Such landforms often have elevated springs that come out of them. The springs are dwelling places for this powerful spirit, but also avenues through which the spirit travels, just as a human being might sit on their front steps on occasion, but spend more time inside their houses.

Among the earliest European-Americans to take seriously and record Dakota beliefs were, paradoxically, the missionaries Samuel and Gideon Pond. While they were intent on changing and “civilizing” the Dakota, they also wanted to understand them in ways that later anthropologists sought to do. In various books and articles, the Ponds recorded a great deal of information about the Unkethis, their role in the Dakota medicine ceremony or Wakan Wacipi, and their presence in Taku Wakan Tipi. This information provides a basis for understanding Coldwater Spring and its relationship to the area of Taku Wakan Tipi.

Lincoln Spring, photographed in the 1860s may be present day Coldwater Spring, or the falls where the stream from Coldwater falls into the Mississippi River. Minnesota Historical Society photograph. — Lincoln Spring, photographed in the 1860s, may be the spring known earlier and later as Coldwater Spring, or the falls where the stream from Coldwater falls into the Mississippi River. A man named George Lincoln lived at Coldwater Spring in the 1860s and 1870s. Minnesota Historical Society photograph.

The Ponds noted that the Unktehi lived within Taku Wakan Tipi and traveled through underground passageways into the Minnesota River. The entire ground adjacent to the hill called Morgan’s Mound, including Fort Snelling and the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport is full of water, fed by an elevated water table. Massive dewatering was necessary to build the tunnels for the new light-rail system under the airport. There may be Dakota who would define the dwelling place of Taku Wakan as including the airport. As for Coldwater Spring, it happens to be closer to the hill European-Americans call Morgan’s Mound than are Fort Snelling or the airport. The spring flows out of a cleft in the rock below the hill. Long before the construction of Highway 55 which is now what separates the hill and the spring, the intervening area was described as a wetland.

Do I have to connect the dots for you? In fact some people already have. John Hotopp, Randall A. Withrow, and others working with the Berger Group in 1999 drew the connection between Coldwater Spring and the area called Taku Wakan Tipi. They were working for the Federal Highway Administration in relation to the construciton of Highway 55. Of course at that time the highway was not believed to have any effect on the spring, so it was an easy thing for a federal contractor to admit. Now ten years later, another federal agency, the National Park Service, working more directly in the area of the spring, has rejected the conclusions of Hotopp and Withrow, and of other later experts working for the federal government, about Coldwater Spring as a place of traditional cultural importance for the Dakota.

Does it bother the National Park Service that the Ponds referred to the underground passageways flowing into the Minnesota River when in fact Coldwater Spring comes out of the ground and flows into the Mississippi River above the mouth of the Minnesota River? Is that aspect of the wording of the description by the missionaries enough to suggest that the spring that flows from Morgan’s Mound has nothing to do with Taku Wakan Tipi and that Dakota people are blowing smoke when they state that Coldwater Spring is a place of traditional cultural significance for their people? These are questions for government agencies and for others who would like to argue with Dakota people about what Dakota beliefs mean. Such agencies and individuals may continue to insist that the area of Coldwater must have a Dakota name that spells things out a little more than the name Mni Sni, or Mni Owe Sni–a Dakota name for the spring which essentially translates as “cold water spring.” Why don’t the Dakota have a name for the spring or the spring area that refers to events or special characteristics of the place, say one that begins “the place where . . .”

Did I forget to mention that there is a special name for the Coldwater area that refers to events or special characteristics of the place? In addition to all the other documentation about the importance of the Coldwater Spring area for Dakota people in the 19th century, which I have discussed in the past, I recently came across the record of a unique name for Coldwater in Paul Durand’s book Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux. Durand (1994: 36) refers to a place called KA-HBO-KA TE, meaning “Where-the-Drifter-Was-Killed.” The Drifter was one of the Dakota chiefs who took up farming at the instigation of the Pond Brothers. He was shot in early April 1841 within fifty rods from the house where Samuel Pond was living at the time, the Baker House at Coldwater Spring. Samuel Pond heard shot and came to give the man aid. The Drifter lived a month and died while recovering from his wounds.

Why would the Dakota give this unique name to such a place, especially since there were other Dakota people killed by Ojibwe near Fort Snelling. The reason is that despite the warfare between the two groups, they had met peacefully at Coldwater Spring for several decades at least, as recorded in the records of the Indian agency. There were continuing peaceful relations between some of the Mdewakanton Dakota groups and the Mille Lacs and St. Croix Ojibwe, who were, in fact united by ties of kinship going back to the 17th century. But in the 1840s relations between all groups of Dakota and Ojibwe worsened. The death of The Drifter was clearly a marker, a sign that even in a place of neutrality, peaceful relations were hard to maintain. Things would get a lot worse in the years ahead.

So, what is in a name? Lots of things, spirits, water, earth, beliefs, history, and much more, but sometimes the actual words used in the names belie the complexity of rich, historic, and culturally important places.

The official laundered version of what happened at the Coldwater Spring/ Bureau of Mines open house

March 21, 2009Bdote: A Public EIS, Minnesota culture, Minnesota's 150thBruce White

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 on to quote liberally from Park Service representatives, but no one else. The who, what, how, or why of the protest is completely ignored.

The basic, obvious, unreported fact about the protests at the open house was that these were Dakota people asking that the lands be given back to the Dakota, from which people permission to build a fort was obtained in the Treaty of 1805. Instead, the article quotes John Anfinson saying that “there was no one particular tribe represented.” This is a complete untruth, although be fair, some in the government do not perceive the existence of Indian people unless they are tribal officials.

At the Bureau of Mines open house, Paul Labovitz of MNRRA and Angela Waziyatawin listen while Steve Johnson of MNRRA gestures and explains something. Waziyatawin was one of those speaking that evening on behalf of Dakota ownership of the Bureau of Mines property. — At the February 23, 2009, Coldwater Spring/ Bureau of Mines open house, Paul Labovitz of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA) and Angela Waziyatawin listen while Steve Johnson of MNRRA gestures and explains something. Waziyatawin was one of those speaking that evening on behalf of Dakota ownership of the Bureau of Mines property.

If newspapers are dying it one of the reasons is because they no longer serve the interests of the communities in which they operate. This insulting story is a perfect example. It is insulting not just because it ignores the protesters, but because it insults the truth and the right of its readers to know that truth. How does it serve the interests of the community to report only what government agencies have to say, without reference to dissenters? Anyone who has read these pages has a much better idea of what happened at the event than from reading the Villager article.

Certainly there were good discussions going on prior to the speeches by Angela Waziyatawin, Sheldon Wolfchild, and others. And there were people in other groups at the meeting who resented what happened and wanted the small group discussions to continue. There were also a lot of differences of opinion about what should happen to Coldwater Spring. But those discussions continued after the speeches, including an extended conversation between Waziyatawin and Paul Labovitz and Steve Johnson of the National Park Service. This does not accord with the statement of one Park Service quoted as saying : “There was no dialogue. They didn’t want to listen.” The photo above of Waziyatawin listening to Steve Johnson of the Park Service suggests otherwise.

You cannot find a better example of how public dissent is stifled in Minnesota than this article. People sure have a lot of opinions don’t they? How about a discussion of the various opinions represented at meetings like this, taking seriously all points of view, giving them a full airing? Isn’t this what “gathering comment” is all about? In conversation with Park Service representatives prior to the event I urged them to have an actual public meeting where the audience could hear the Park Service representatives speak, then allow the audience to speak back to them. This would allow everyone to hear the opinions of all those who spoke. I was told that an open house was planned because at a public meeting some group or person might dominate. Also one of the officials stated that he did not want to speak at the meeting because “If I go to a meeting and I do all the talking I don’t learn anything.”

In retrospect, the strategy backfired, but at least Park Service officials did a lot of learning that night, although apparently they do not remember much of what they learned.

Where is Carol Bly, now that we need her?–Minnesota in its 150th year of denial

March 10, 2009Minnesota culture, Minnesota's 150thBruce White

“Minnesota–150 Years of Denial.” That was my motto proposal for Minnesota’s statehood centennial which began in May 2008. All through this year I’ve been thinking of Carol Bly. She died in December 2007, but if there was ever a time that needed her spirited involvement it was the year of Minnesota’s sesquicentennial—the uproar, the arguments, the anachronistic nostalgia, the covered wagons, and the Lincoln impersonators teaching children how to make stovepipe hats. All of this could have used her skills at making people who disagree sit down and talk.

In the 1970s Carol Bly wrote a series of essays in the magazine of Minnesota Public Radio—first called Preview, then Minnesota Monthly—under the title that was later given to her book Letters from the Country. These letters explored the difficulties of sorting out questions of public culture and interpersonal communication in small towns and in the country. Carol Bly had a reforming spirit. She was not from the area of southwestern Minnesota where she and her husband the poet Robert Bly lived. Born in Duluth, she was educated at Wellesley, had lived in the east, and had gone to graduate school at the University of Minnesota before arriving in Madison, Minnesota.

A page from one of Carol Bly's letters as originally published in Minnesota Monthly magazine in August 1977.

Carol Bly always reminded me of the fictional Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, an outsider who took life in small towns seriously and wanted to make things better. Personally, when I was younger, I did not care for Carol Bly’s writing. But I was not a real Minnesotan and had never lived in a small town for very long so I did not really understand her work. My mother lived in a small town then and she had a grudge against Carol Bly, which was odd because they were two peas in a pod when it came to speaking up when speaking up was necessary. It is only recently that I have begun to see the profound value in Bly’s forthrightness (and in my mother’s for that matter).

Carol Bly’s letters were begun during the Vietnam War and were continued in its aftermath. Bly was insistent that even people in small towns should confront the nature of the what was going on in the world then, not back away from it. Bly had an unerring sense for spotting hypocrisy and the little evasions of everyday conversation. In this her work is the converse of Howard Mohr’s. What Mohr saw as humorous in how Minnesotans talked, Bly saw as tragic denial.

Bly’s letters are a Babette’s Feast of humanizing strategies for making people become better human beings, better listeners, better talkers, better sayers and doers of hard things. Of course, there is no question that Bly drove a lot of people crazy whether they lived near her or simply read her essays. She admitted in the new preface to the 1999 edition of her book that the first third of the letters were “a little cross,” with an edgy tone, and that the later essays were “directive and even more opinionated,” even though at the end she said she felt more sure of her subject “informally analyzing rural life and trying to figure out ways to live both more seriously and more happily than seemed to be the general custom.” Bly’s work speaks to a larger human condition, about how to confront things and change them. But it also describes the general public culture of this 32d state, this arbitrarily constructed place called Minnesota, the state that is now almost 151 years old.

What makes the Bly’s work even more remarkable is that it was published in Minnesota Monthly, which is now a slick advertising vehicle designed to raise money for public radio. But in those years the magazine was a far cry from what it is now. It had less advertising but it was a far better magazine. It started out as a monthly program guide but gradually turned into a stimulating and ground-breaking journal of opinion and analysis about Minnesota and its culture. One issue from August 1977 that I still have included an essay by Paul Gruchow entitled “Pieces of the Prairie,” illustrated with photographs by Jim Brandenburg, a piece by Bill Holm on “Icelanders, Box Elders, Soybeans and Poets,” along with Carol Bly’s letter from the country on the topic of facing evil. This was a vital magazine that helped to explain Minnesota to Minnesotans. It has left a great legacy, through the work of each of those writers who have now sadly left us and particularly in the work of Carol Bly.

The cover of the August 1977 issue of Minnesota Monthly, an issue containing writing by Carol Bly, Bill Holm, and Paul Gruchow, and photography by Jim Brandenburg

So much of what Bly speaks about in Letters from the Country rings true for public discussions throughout Minnesota, not just in those small towns. There is an evasive quality to the way Minnesotans in general and in particular deal with problems and issues that they share in common. There is an avoidance of conflict and a desire to smooth things over before they’ve gotten out in the open.

In Minnesota when you complain about something that involves society and general but also affects you in particular, you are likely to get the response suggesting that your complaint was motivated by egotism. I think of Carol Bly every time I complain to someone about something I believe to be a public wrong. Often the response is something like: “Why take it personally? It’s not about you.” Often this is said as a consolation but at other times it is intended as crushing retort, as though it answered all objections. What does one have to do to try to change society here in Minnesota, file a class action lawsuit, to prove that you know it is not just about you?

Similarly when things are heating up at public meetings in Minnesota and a few people have gotten angry enough to actually express an opinion, someone is likely to try to look on the bright side of things and say: “Isn’t it nice we have so many opinions represented here?” You want to respond, “Actually, no, it’s not nice, it’s hell, but then that is the price you have to pay for talking about tough topics.”

The key problem in Minnesota is that a lot of times people don’t want to talk with people with whom they disagree. Someone will say something occasionally but often the response will be silence. The difficulty is to keep the conversation going until everyone has had a chance to have their say, air their views, find a few things to agree on, identify the real issues and then try to do something about it. Instead grudges will be formed that become a real obstacle to progress.

Carol Bly’s solution was described in an essay entitled “Enemy Evenings.” She wrote that in Minnesota towns “one sometimes has the feeling of moving among ghosts, because we don’t meet and talk to our local opponents on any question.” According to Bly people didn’t air their differences because it was a “hassle,” and people would get upset. The result, she said, was a dismal loneliness, exercised in hypocrisy. Bly’s solutions was the enemy evening, a phrase inspired by Nixon’s enemies list, where people who disagreed with each other on particular issues would come and present their differences as panels of speakers. The event would be moderated by “a firm master of ceremonies in whom general affection for human beings would be paramount, not a chill manner or a childish desire to get the fur flying.”

Bly wrote that rural Minnesotans needed more “serious occasions” and serious discussion, such as these enemy evenings. Minnesota manners were pleasant and friendly but at a price to individual Minnesotans:

To preserve our low-key manners they have had to bottle up social indignation, psychological curiosity, and intellectual doubt. Their banter and their observations about the weather are carapace developed over decades of inconsequential talk. [Take that Howard Mohr!]

She concluded the essay stating: “I commend frank panel evenings with opponents taking part: let’s try that for a change of air, after years of chill and evasive tact.”

A former non-Minnesotan like myself ought to point out that the phrase enemy evenings betrays a lot about Minnesota culture. It implies that if you disagree with someone here you may soon be classified as an enemy. But Bly’s strategy was to figure out how to make enemies into co-conversationalists. Elsewhere in her letters she proposed further ways of airing disagreements. For thing she noted that one evening was not enough to really cover these kinds of discussions. Overnight conferences were the solution, allowing people to meet casually during breaks, sleep over and meet again the next day, providing an opportunity for those with “out-of-control agendas” to get it out of their systems, and generally to allow people to “concert together,” as Tocqueville had put it, and “have a go at the ‘mutual awakening.’”

Much of Carol Bly’s insights in dealing with differences of opinion here offer lessons for the Minnesota sesquicentennial and its aftermath. There may be some who would condemn the work that Angela Waziyatawin has done over this sesquicentennial year, making use of all the evasions of Minnesota-Nice-speak. Her opposition to the idea of “celebrating” events that were tied to the goal of wiping out Native American communities in Minnesota, may have been viewed as evidence that Waziyatawin is taking things personally and believing it is all about her. Many would prefer to see her go away and stop complaining.

For example, it is interesting to note that the reports I’ve read so far about the open house at the VA Hospital on February 23, have said very little about Waziyatawin’s role at the event. A new article in the Southside Pride, does not mention that, at this open house she got up on a chair and spoke to those assembled at some length, followed by speeches of her supporters and other Dakota people. The response to what she said, it may appear, is silence. (Of course there are some who will point out that MinnesotaHistory.net has not yet said anything about the event in any detail either. That is a reasonable criticism. Why doesn’t somebody send me an account? I’ve been too busy to write it myself.)

One can certainly disagree with Waziyatawin’s manner of raising the issues that she raises or disagree about the solutions that she is seeking, but one should never make the mistake of believing that these are not serious issues and that after 150 years of silence they not should be ones of continuing discussion. Minnesota’s history matters because it continues to have an effect on people today. The evils of the past as well as the good have helped make Minnesota what it is now. Acknowledging the past is an important step to take.

Carol Bly wrote that it was worthwhile for a community to get together and discuss how we might praise those we admire, even if we disagreed on who to praise and how to praise them. She added: “We could do some condemnations too. I like a fight.” I’m with her there, especially about history. Let’s talk about our history here in Minnesota. Let’s get it all out. No one gets to tell anyone else to shut up. Let’s agree, let’s disagree, let’s agree to disagree and disagree to agree, but let’s keep talking. After 150 years, it’s time to end the denial.