In case anyone has not yet noticed, there is a massive pdf document now online containing summaries of all the “substantive” comments received by the National Park Service/Department of Interior relating to the draft Environmental Impact Statement released in the summer of 2006 concerning the fate of the Bureau of Mines-Twin Cities Campus property.

The comment period for the draft EIS continued until late November 2006. At its conclusion, officials in the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA) promised to put the public comments online. Over the months since then repeated questions about that were answered with statements to the effect that they were waiting for approval from higher-ups in the Interior Department. As stated here before, local officials were more than willing to let you go into their office in St. Paul and have you look at the documents but were apparently never able to put them online.

Over two years later, sometime in February or early March 2009, the massive comment summary was put online. It is possible that the report was available somewhere on the MNRRA website prior to then, but there was no link to it at its current location on February 17, 2009, according to a cached Google version of the page printed out on February 23, the day of the Coldwater/Bureau of Mines open house.

The Adobe Acrobat document is dated January 8, 2007, which was less than two months after the conclusion of the draft EIS comment period. It does not reproduce the actual submissions from members of the public. Rather, it summarizes them in very particular categories each of which is given a numbered code. The report contains 180 pages including summaries of comments from 619 individuals or groups.  It is clear that these summaries were compiled for the use of the Park Service. After each comment there is space for a response, but the responses are not there. Undoubtedly there will be responses from the National Park Service or the Interior Department when the final version of the EIS is released later this year. By law there must be a response to each “substantive comment.”

As stated in this document, “substantive comments” are defined as comments that question the accuracy of the information in the EIS, the adequacy of the EIS, or provide evidence of a need to revise the proposal. Comments from each individual are not given in full but are taken apart and summarized in relation to each coded category established by the Park Service, or the contractor who did the work. The names of the individuals making the comments are included at the end of each comment, unless the person asked to remain anonymous. The file is searchable, so it is possible to track the comments made by each commenter.

Here’s a link to the Adobe Acrobat file containing the report.

Someday the fact of there being two classes of Dakota people in Minnesota, the very, very rich and all the others, may finally be addressed. But, even if the income inequality among Dakota is not remedied, the conclusions drawn by many non-Indians about who is Dakota and who is not based on wealth and other arbitrary factors must be discussed. Those who draw such conclusions should at least acknowledge the process through which the inequalities came about and respect those who were not in the right place at the right time. 

Among those who exemplify the inequalities among the Minnesota Dakota are the members of the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community. The Mendota Dakota are a non-federally recognized community consisting of a number of families of Dakota descent, mostly from the town of Mendota, which is a small town in the midst of the metropolis, across the mouth of the Minnesota River from Fort Snelling. 

Many of them are descended from Angelique Renville, who was a member of Little Crow’s Kaposia band of Dakota prior to 1862 and was Little Crow’s cousin. Angelique Renville married Hypolite Dupuis, who was the bookkeeper for Henry H. Sibley. Because of this connection, Angelique Renville, along with other of her relatives, was not exiled from Minnesota with the other Dakota when they were sent on steamboats from Fort Snelling in the spring of 1863. The missionary John P. Williamson wrote in May 1863 that when he accompanied the Dakota who left Fort Snelling on May 5, about 200 Dakota were left behind, some of whom became scouts and soldiers working with Sibley. He added: “Among those we left behind at Fort Snelling were all the Renvilles including the Widow, Paul, Simon, Kawanke, and all the Campbells.”

Daughters, sons, and later descendants of Dupuis and Renville married into other families, often French or Dakota or even Ojibwe mixed blood and most continued to live at Mendota into the 20^th century. They also had relatives on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska and there were reports of visiting back and forth. And when Dakota families moved back to Minnesota over the decades, the Mendota Dakota were there to greet them and offer them a place to stay. 

When a Special Inspector of the Department of Interior, James McLaughlin, was assigned in 1899 to do a census of the Mdewakanton Dakotas in Minnesota, he noted that there was some difficulty in determining which Dakota were Mdewakantons and which were other groups, because of intermarriage and other factors. Some who resided in one place opposed the enrollment of those in other places. McLaughlin took special note of Angelique Renville and her family, stating that there was no question that she was Mdewakanton, having been part of the band from birth. “I was well acquainted with said Angelique Dupuis (Nee Renville) for several years prior to her death [in 1890] and knew all of her family, hence my making this statement to show the absurdity of the protests of the Indians to the enrollment of her descendants as Medwakantons.” (McLaughlin’s census roll is available online.) 

My introduction to the Mendota Dakota came about during the struggle over Highway 55, when the Minnesota Department of Transportation and other agencies pushed through the construction of the highway with very little environmental or historical or cultural review. The Mendota Dakota were among the groups who put their bodies on the line to try to stop or mitigate the construction. Some of the story of what happened, along with some Mendota history is found in Mary Losure’s book Our Way or the Highway. The protests of 1998 to 2000 seemed to have very little effect on the route of the highway but various groups including the Mendota Dakota were able to get through the state capitol in St. Paul a law protecting Coldwater Spring.

 The leader of the community at that time was Bob Brown, a descendant of Angelique Renville through the extended Leclaire family. Like many he was tied to Mendota but had lived in other parts of the Twin Cities because that’s where the jobs were. Bob’s grandfather Albert Leclaire had grown up in Mendota. His grandmother Lillian Felix—one of whose nieces married Amos Crooks at Prior Lake—had attended Carlisle Indian School. In the 1920s and 1930s Albert Leclaire and family members, including Bob’s uncle Russell Leclaire, lived and farmed at  Prior Lake on a land assignment from the Department of Interior—on the 1886 Mdewakanton Sioux lands that would later become the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. His land certificate certified that he was a member of the May 20, 1886 Mdewakantons. Albert Leclaire died as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident on the reservation in 1942. Refused treatment at local Shakopeee hospital he was transported all the way to the agency in Pipestone where he died after a few weeks. 

Russell Leclaire recalled that over the years after his father’s death he was on good terms with the children of Amos Crooks who were first cousins once removed. Russell used to go back on visits to Prior Lake. At one point Norman Crooks said to him that he ought to move back because they were going to start a bingo hall and things might get better on the reservation. Russell later said that he did not want to give up the life he had built in the cities and that there were too many bad memories of living there as a child. It should also be mentioned that one reason Russell Leclaire and his father had never became members of the Prior Lake community when they lived there in the 1930s was that the federal government did not allow the community to be organized under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act until 1969. 

Later on when the Prior Lake Sioux, now calling themselves the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, began to have more success, Bob Brown and some of the other people at Mendota sought membership in the community but, like many they were turned away. In effect membership there was like a game of musical chairs. If you were sitting there when the music stopped playing you were a member. Otherwise, forget it. There are many other odd anomalies resulting from the delay in the organization at Prior Lake. For example the Amos Crooks family, including Norman Crooks, were living in Long Beach, California for a good part of the 1930s and had the Prior Lake community been organized then, they would not have been members of it. 

The Mendota families tried again and again at Shakopee. Finally someone in the offices there said sarcastically, “Why don’t you form your own community?” This is what they did. Of course the Mendota Dakota were already a close-knit community, people who stayed together, went to church together, celebrated together, people who might go away from Mendota to look for jobs and opportunity, but who always came back. So forming their own community simply meant creating a formal organization, a 501 (c) (3). 

At this point the Mendota Dakota began to look into getting federal recognition, without knowing exactly how difficult this would be. They began doing extensive genealogy and historical research, amassing a great deal of supporting information. But getting federal recognition for an Indian community is an impossibly difficult and cumbersome process that a few experts in the field say requires at least a million dollars to start with. This is to pay for the research, the lawyers, the genealogists, to gather and present information about a community to meet a set of arbitrary standards that a few recognized groups would be unable to meet today if they had to prove their legitimacy.

The late 1990s were a frustrating time for the Mendota Dakota, because the more they worked the farther away the goal seemed to get. But then Bob Brown and the other Mendota Dakota decided that they would focus on being the people that they wanted the federal government to recognize them as being: a Dakota community that cared about the cultural heritage of being Dakota. Bob, his sisters Bev and Linda, his dynamic wife Linda, and other many other members of the Mendota Dakota began to take responsibility for the cultural heritage of Bdote, the sacred area around the mouth of the Minnesota River. It was an important time to get active because of all the development pressures on the Bdote area that few other groups seemed to be fighting.

The Highway 55 struggle and the protection of Coldwater Spring were part of it. But even though the highway was built, there were other jobs to do. When word got out that a development was proposed for Pilot Knob, known to the Dakota as Oheyawahi, the Mendota Dakota drew together a coalition of people, supporters or preservation, environmentalists, and Highway 55 opponents, and historians and anthropologists like Alan Woolworth and me. They set out to educate people, engaging in the political process as various proposals made their way through the Mendota Heights City Council. In the end, through the help of public and private funding, the city was able to obtain title to the development land, preserving it as public open space.

This was a long arduous process, with many people contributing on the way. The Mendota Dakota did not do it all, but they inspired many others to make it happen. A year ago, I heard Mayor of Mendota Heights John Huber say that his own conviction that Pilot Knob should be saved from development was inspired by a speech given by Michael Scott, who succeeded his uncle Bob Brown as chairman of the community after Bob’s death in 2003. At a public meeting in St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mendota, Michael spoke eloquently about the necessity of protecting Dakota burial places. Over the years Michael’s cousin Jim Anderson has often worked to help coalesce the force necessary to continue the Mendota Dakota legacy of looking after Bdote. Curt LeClaire, who is now the chair, and Bob’s sister Sharon Lennartson, and many others carry on to do fulfill the community’s role at Bdote.

Over the years the Mendota Dakota have quarreled internally. They have had missteps along the way. They have been ignored and sometimes ostracized by government agencies in shameful ways, including by the Minnesota Historical Society. But they have kept on going. Several years ago I went to a meeting at the office of the Mendota Dakota on how to mobilize and educate people on the issue of the Treaty of 1805 and the rights the Dakota signers reserved in it for their people. I can imagine few other places on Indian reservations or in universities where I could have gone to discuss the treaty in as much detail as we did that day in Mendota.

A Dakota woman from another reservation was there to give advice. There was a discussion of how to present the issue to the public, to make people understand that it was a binding obligation of the U.S. government and still had meaning today. Someone made a suggestion, I’m not sure exactly what it was. The woman responded “No don’t say that. Just say: ‘I’m just a person who is trying to do the right thing.’”

It was a beautiful thing to say, especially because that is the way the Mendota Dakota have been as long as I’ve known them. The greatest lesson I have learned from the Mendota Dakota is that one should never wait for approval or validation from others before setting out to do something important. Instead, be who you are or want to be, regardless of what others say about you.

Someday, perhaps, the disparities between Dakota groups in Minnesota will be addressed. Perhaps the Mendota Dakota will benefit. In the meantime I keep remembering what Henry David Thoreau said: “If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

A lot of the interesting discussions going on these days about what should happen to the Coldwater/Bureau of Mines property are taking place in widely-distributed, semi-public emails. To insure that the discussion gets wider airing and to make sure that it gets into the record, we are going to be putting some of these discussion threads online. The following discussion took place about the online petition asking that the property be returned to the Dakota people:

We the undersigned demand the transfer of the former Bureau of Mines properties, including the historic Coldwater Spring, to Dakota communities.

We also demand an environmental restoration of the site by the Federal government before the transfer to Dakota communities. As the Federal government via the Bureau of Mines is responsible for the current state of the land surrounding the spring, it is their responsibility to restore the site to its original, pristine condition at Federal expense. 

A clean-up and restoration of the site is needed. However, a full restoration of the site means the restoration of Dakota rights and title to the land. Coldwater Spring must be returned to the people of the Dakota Nation, who are the rightful care takers and protectors of that land.

What follows is a discussion of the advisability of signing the petition. It is not clear if the first and second writers intended the emails to be public, so we are not including those people’s real names.

Email from Jane Doe to David Jones, prior to March 12, 2009

Others may want to read the history of the preservation efforts of Coldwater Springs  on-line before they sign on to the petition [supporting transfer of the Bureau of Mines property to the Dakota]. This spring is sacred to many more tribes than the Dakota Bands. It was  a place, very similar to the early history of the Pipestone Quarry, where all nations held it sacred. The earliest artifacts from Coldwater are from almost 9,000 years ago. If anyone wants to read about other preservation efforts go to http://www.preservecampcoldwater.org/index.htm, and then they can decide whether they want to sign the petition. Thanks for the opportunity for growth in our understanding. Jane Doe

Email from David Jones to Waziyatawin and Chris Mato Nunpa, March 12, 2009

Greetings, I’m passing along another viewpoint of  [organization] member Jane Doe re: the sacred site of Coldwater Springs. . . . The arena of Peace and Justice lives with many diverging viewpoints nonetheless, it’s intertwined roots that share deep connections.  Thank you both Chris and Jane for raising this issue.  David Jones [member of the organization]

Email of Chris Mato Nunpa to David Jones, March 13, 2009

Hi David,

Two things that I think everybody, including Jane Doe, should know about the stuggle for Coldwater Spring:

1.)  The Bdewakantunwan (“Dwellers By Mystic Lake”) origin story places the site of Dakota genesis at Bdote, confluence, junction, mouth, etc. or “Where One Stream Joins Another.”  In this case, it refers to where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi River.  This is regarded as Maka Cokaya Kin, “the Center of the Earth.”  This site marks the origin of the Dakota People, from the very beginning, whenever that might be. 

Our origin story, for those of us who subscribe to the genesis story, is similar to those who (most of the Christians who are U.S. Euro-Americans) say they believe the Jewish origin story involving Adam & Eve, and the Garden of Eden, wherever that may be located.  In other words, it just as SACRED to us as their Adam & Eve story is to them.

2.)  The Treaty of 1805 was the first treaty (of several) made between the Dakota Oyate (People or Nation) and the U.S.  This involved and involves 155,000+ acres on which most of St. Paul and much of Minneapolis set.  For whatever reason, the U.S. recognized the Dakota as the carekeepers/protectors (or owners) of this land, which includes many sacred sites, including Coldwater Spring, and thus, made a treaty with the Dakota People.  So, by the U.S.’s own law, a treaty which is the “Supreme Law of the Land,” according to article 6 of their sacred document (the U.S. Constitution), the land, including Coldwater Spring, belongs to the Dakota Nation.Another fact, we, the Dakota People, have not been paid for this land.

One more thing I wish to say –  I am somewhat tired of those U.S. Euro-Americans, who read books written by white men, who listen to white men, who received their education from white men, etc. making pronouncements about not only Dakota matters but also about Indigenous Peoples, in general, and then make these pronouncements and assertions about Dakota and/or Indigenous matters without consulting or talking/meeting with Dakota/Indigenous Peoples.  Jane Doe is an example, in my perspective, of a U.S. Euro-American exercising  her “white privilege”, which I call “white supremacy”.  She makes statements/assertions which demean, disparage, and diminish Dakota/Indigenous concerns and struggles.  Jane Doe, a colonizer representative, like most of the wasicu whom I have encountered, in my 68 “winters’ on Ina Maka, or “Mother Earth,” and in my 35 years in white academia, think they know better about Dakota/Indigenous subjects than do the Dakota.  It is arrogance!

David, I am forwarding what I am writing to others (e.g. Jim Anderson, who is our leader, to Dr. Waziyata Win, another activist in the struggle, et. al.) who are involved in the struggle to get Coldwater Spring returned to the Dakota People so that they can identify those U.S. Euro-Americans who are allies and those who are enemies. Thank you, Chris Mato Nunpa, Ph.D. Dakota, Wahpetunwan (“Dwellers In the Leaves”), Pezihuta Zizi Otunwe, “Yellow Medicine Community” (In BIA terms, the Upper Sioux Community) near Granite Falls, MN

Email of Waziyatawin to David Jones and others, March 13, 2009

[Note: although the email is addressed to David Jones it addresses comments not by David Jones, but by Jane Doe.]

Dear David, 

Coldwater Spring was successfully protected and cared for by Dakota people for thousands of years (we certainly don’t need you to tell us about “artifacts” from 9,000 years ago. While a variety of Indigenous Peoples may hold the site as sacred (both in historic and contemporary times), Dakota people are the only people who can claim the site, along with the entire Bdote area, as our place of genesis.  This is a profound relationship that is deeper, apparently, than you are capable of imagining.

If you deny Dakota primacy to the site, under the guise of equal rights or equal access, you have declared yourself just another colonizer.  Indigenous Peoples have seen the likes of you many times before.  In fact, the equal rights/equal access argument is the same one that has been used in previous eras in struggles over fishing rights.  When our Anishinaabe relatives were asserting their fishing rights in Wisconsin and Minnesota in recent decades, for example, the same white racists calling for equality and protection of the lands, waters, and fish, were also espousing hate speech such as “Save a walleye, kill an Indian.”  Your rhetoric is nothing new and we recognize it for what it is.  It is another colonizer attempt to maintain colonial control over an Indigenous sacred site.

Colonizers should not have equal claim or equal access to that site.  It is a characteristic of white privilege (and an American colonizer identity) to believe that you are entitled to anything you want.  It is settler society (of which you are part) that has already devastated that land base.  You have no moral positioning to lay claim to a Dakota sacred spring.  Indigenous Peoples possess the only moral claims to Indigenous sites, and among Indigenous Peoples at this particular site, there is no question that Dakota people should be given primacy to care for our ancient spring once again.

Please pass this message along to other colonialist thinkers belonging to your organization.

Waziyatawin

Email of Chris Mato Nunpa to Waziyatawin and others, March 13, 2009

Micunksi (My Daughter),

Wicoie waste ehe, ake.  “You have spoken good words, again.”

Way to go, Daughter!

Niyate (“Your Father”)

According to the National Park Service, Mississippi National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA), in St. Paul, there is no Dakota name for the place the Dakota call Mni Sni or Mni Owe Sni. This is one of many things the National Park Service does not know about Coldwater Spring, or at least does not know that it knows it or would like everyone to believe that it does not know it. As stated below, since the Department of Interior has decided that the Bureau of Mines (BOM) property should not go to any Dakota band, but should remain in federal hands, one has to wonder whether or not ignoring the Dakota name for Coldwater Spring was not a kind of cooking of the books to reach a pre-determined result.

The Dakota name of Coldwater Spring was one of a number of things the Park Service was informed about in 2006, through a number of comments submitted to the Park Service about the draft EIS released in August of that year. The Park Service promised after the end of the comment period to place all these comments in digital form on the internet, but that never happened, reportedly because some higher-ups somewhere decided that it was unwise for the individual members of the public to know what other people knew. You had to be on a need to know basis about what was known and what was not known. If you went into the MNRRA office they would let you know that you could look at the comments that had been submitted and even make copies of them, but unless you knew that you wouldn’t be able to find it out so you would never know. 

I submitted about 30 pages of comments myself, trying to correct some mistakes and fill in some gaps in what the Park Service knew about Coldwater. One of the documents I submitted was an affidavit which I had written in the court case when Chris Mato Nunpa, Jim Anderson, and Susu Jeffrey were fined for trying to enter the Bureau of Mines site without a permit, at a time when a permit was required. Mato Nunpa and Anderson, who are both Dakota, had  held up the Treaty of 1805 pointing to its pass-and-repass provision which reserved rights to the Dakota on the Fort Snelling military reservation created by the treaty. My affidavit, which I am putting online for the first time goes into many of the historical issues about the meaning of Coldwater Spring for the Dakota and for other groups like the Ojibwe. 

Also in 2006 I submitted another statement about the “The Cultural and Historical Importance of Coldwater Spring and Surrounding Area,”  which went into the various questions raised by the research the Park Service had assembled for the EIS and responded to some of the statements made in these documents and in the odd  conclusions the Park Service had drawn from them. Among other things I wrote about the question of a name for Coldwater Spring. Here’s what I said:

A major point in the TCP analysis is the assertion that Coldwater Spring does not have a Dakota name and that therefore the traditional cultural importance of the spring for the Dakota is suspect:

If the spring were so important, why doesn’t it have a specific name, like other Dakota sites in the area do?  Granted, the Dakota could have adopted the name Coldwater for the spring name, or Coldwater Spring could have been their original name for it, but we have no evidence of this.

In fact it should be noted that there is at least in recent years a Dakota name for Coldwater Spring, Mni Sni, which does in fact mean roughly “cold water.” It is recorded on a map of Dakota cultural sites issued by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and the 106 Group, and is included in the Ethnographic Study (Figure 10).

Were they informed of this fact, Park Service officials might suggest that the name is too recently published to provide evidence of the traditional cultural importance of the spring to the Dakota. But this argument presumes that if a Dakota name for Coldwater Spring was not recorded by non-Indians early enough in non-Indian history, that a name did not exist.

Either way, however, the example of Boiling Springs or Maka Yusota is instructive. The name Maka Yusota can be translated roughly as “roiling earth.” The nomination of the site for the National Register [written by Scott Anfinson, now State Archaeologist who was then with the Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office] contains written documentation for the Dakota name of this site going back only to 1982, a fact which was not fatal to the nomination of the site to the Register.

Further, Park Service officials appear to assume that having a name for something is a key cultural fact among the Dakota. No cultural evidence is presented on this point, which suggests that the objection is based not on cultural evidence at all but rather on the ethnocentric idea that having a name for a place is a key fact among all peoples.

Finally a key point that must be made is that the fact that other cultural evidence about Coldwater—apparently ignored by Park Service officials—shows that the spring derives some of its significance from being part of or connected to a larger area, specifically the place called Taku Wakan Tipi, the dwelling place of Taku Wakan, also known as Unktehi, or more precisely, a particular Unktehi. This point is discussed in detail in the attached Affidavit.

There is a lot more in the two documents that I submitted to the Park Service in 2006, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. The more research that is done on Coldwater and the surrounding area, the more we will know about the importance of the spring for the Dakota people.

One more thing: At some point someone is going to mention the fact that, in 2001, after working with Dean Lindberg, Bob Mosedale, and Dave Fudally to put together an exhibit on the history of Coldwater which appeared in Senator Paul Wellstone’s office and later Fort Snelling State Park, I submitted a proposal to the Park Service to do the historical research on the Bureau of Mine property that would eventually become part of the EIS. My proposal involved working with a team of researchers including former Minnesota Historical Society director Russell Fridley to do a thorough study of the Native and non-Native history of the Bureau of Mines property. The Park Service chose a proposal from someone else who offered to do the job a lot cheaper. In my opinion the Park Service got what it paid for. Granted historians, like everyone else, make mistakes and no one is perfect, but the historical report seems like something that many graduate students could have done over a long weekend. Later on when I pointed this out to one Park Service employee he said that it didn’t really matter. As I put it in my comments on the EIS (in which I showed my sour grapes about not getting the contract to do the research by giving the Park Service a lot of information for free):

Why the Park Service did not hold the author of the Historical Study to the same standards of evidence it apparently feels that the authors of the Ethnographic Study [the report on the TCP status of Coldwater that was rejected by the Park Service] did not meet, is unclear. During the course of the DEIS comment period I had occasion to pose this question to a MNRRA official who stated to me: “Yes, it is not a good report, but the question is: If it were any better would it make any difference?” The question suggests other questions: How does one know what difference adequate information will make until one has that information? Since when, in cultural resource studies, is one required to know in advance what one is going to find prior to doing any research? What excuses should be made for a historical study that does not make use of key information available in public archives and libraries?

Ultimately, when confronted with an agency that assembles historical documentation that is inadequate, the question is whether or not the agency was really concerned about getting adequate information in the first place. Since the Department of Interior has since decided that the BOM property should not go to any Dakota tribe, but should remain in federal hands, one has to wonder whether or not the rejection earlier of any finding about the importance of the site to the Dakota was not a kind of cooking of the books to reach a pre-determined result. People will have to read their documents and my documents and other people’s documents and make up their own minds.