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 apart is the historical consensus that led to the fort’s reconstruction in the 1960s. The problems with Fort Snelling are conceptual and philosophical ones. Spending more money on construction cannot solve those problems.
That is the real challenge for the new director of the Minnesota Historical Society.
Reconstruction of the commissary at Fort Snelling in 1974. Minnesota Historical Society photograph
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 because the Strib has imposed a new innovative way to make money from its readers, through a logarithm aka logrolling rythm created by those humanitarians at Format Dynamics (what a stupendously, crypto-fatalistically tendentious company name!) by forcing them to print out the advertising it sells. And who can blame Mystical Lake for insisting that its ads be lined up with stories to tie into its majorly important source of income? Hey, check it out! You can get the March/ April package, even though it is already April. Mystical Lake even has time travel packages! Whoah! Can I go back to 1976? That was a great year. If I went back think of the things I could tell myself, or maybe my father or my grandfather (depending on how old I allegedly am).
Shakopee’s Mystical Lake–or maybe Mystical Lake’s Shakopee–spreads its pervasively internet-like web of influence everywhere through ads and through the liquid money it gives to tribes throughout the entire universe. They even give money to needy Klingon tribes! Shakopee is real generous, but the only tribal people who have never benefited from Mystical Lake’s money are the descendants of people who were once part of the Shakopee Band of Dakota–you know, the one that really existed, back in the day.
That’s right. There was a Dakota chief named Shakopee and he had a village, back in the day. But that was before all the Dakota people were rounded up and driven out of eastern Minnesota to the Upper Minnesota River Valley and before 1862 and before the Dakota were rounded up again and driven out of Minnesota entirely and before the U.S. government kidnapped the chiefs Shakopee and Medicine Bottle in Canada and brought them back to Fort Snelling and hanged them right outside the walls of Fort Snelling. WTF? How come they didn’t re-enact the hanging of Shakopee in 2008 when Minnesota celebrated the Ginormetennial of the state of Minnesota? That would have been something, a fabulous way to tell the true history. Jane Leonard, chair (table?) of the Ginormetennial of Minnesota was really asleep on that one!
Shakpe or Shakopee, the chief kidnapped in Canada and hauled back to Minnesota, to be hanged just outside outside the walls of Historic Fort Snelling (viewed in the background of this image from the Minnesota Historical Society website) in one of the may corrupt and stupid chapters in the sorry, disgusting history of Minnesota. Opinion Alert! Opinion Alert!
Okay. Let’s get serious about this. What most of “you people”–all you wasichoos and mokes and haoles–do not seem to get is that the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community was made up in 1968–literally made up–of many people who never had any connection to Shakopee’s village of days gone by. In other words, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community does not exist! It is an oxymoron, kind of like a Republican with compassion or a Democrat with real money. Some of Shakopee’s members, it has been said, are not even Dakotas! (Okay, maybe I can’t prove that myself and even if the Shakpemopolitans are not Dakotas, but they are probably Siouan.) Where did the “Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community” come from? That’s a complicated story for another day. Go find a historian to tell you. Believe me, it’s complicated!
Why am I telling you this? Hey, I just thought you ought to know. Why should you listen to me? I don’t know cause I’m just a mystically unlabelled sextupally elusive person of indefinably vague characteristics who thought you ought to know. But then you probably won’t believe me because you only believe what comes from reliable sources, like Fox news or the Stribune or MPR or KARE or other media outlets that carry Mystical Lake commercials. Anyway, I’m just saying. Take it for what its worth. Enough said. For now. . . .
Hey wait a minute! You’re not going to put a warning line on this at the bottom are you? That’s cold. What’s so wrong with what I said! It’s just Shakopee, c’mon. Your talking like I said something bad about the Pope or Oprah, or maybe the Popra, or even Nina Archabal. Say did you hear that lady is going to retire, OMG, I can’t believe it. You should put something about that on your site. . . . . Okay, fine, I gotta go too.
NOTICE: The opinions of Daniel Shagobince and the other commentators on this site are their own and do not represent those of www.MinnesotaHistory.net
