Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota

Minnesota is a Dakota place. The Dakota people named it and left their marks in the landscape and in its history. Yet the relationship of the Dakota people to their traditional lands in Minnesota is little understood by Minnesotans today. Many history books describe the Dakota as a fierce, warlike people who lived in Minnesota prior to the arrival of whites, then disappeared. Others tell the story of the 1862 Dakota–U.S. War as though those events were the only ones of significance in Dakota history.

Among the Dakota people, the importance of this place to their history and identity is well known. It is part of the oral tradition and knowledge of the people. In the written record of European encounters with Dakota people that go back three hundred years, explorers and missionaries described the Dakota, this region, and places in it, though perhaps sometimes in incomplete and garbled form. Even from these sources, the enduring eloquence of Dakota people about their connection to the land can be heard.

In an account from around 1720, an unknown Frenchman recorded the Dakota belief that the first of their people came from the ground on the prairie between the mouth of the Minnesota River and the Falls of St. Anthony. In April 1754 Dakota chiefs gathered with a French diplomat, Joseph Marin, at a fort along the Mississippi River to complain about incursions by Ojibwe into their territory. One of the chiefs laid before Marin a map of the region and said,

No one could be unaware that from the mouth of the Wisconsin to Leech Lake, these territories belong to us. On all the points and in the little rivers we have had villages. One can still see the marks of our bones which are still there, which are the remains from the Cristinaux [Cree] and the Sauteux [Ojibwe] having killed us. But they never can drive us away. These are territories that we hold from no one except the Master of Life who gave them to us. And although we have been at war against all the nations, we never abandoned them.¹

Such statements about the Dakota’s connection to this region continued, reported by many writers, whether French, British, or American. William H. Keating, a geologist who came to the Minnesota area on an exploratory expedition in 1823, observed, “The Dacotas have no tradition of having ever emigrated, from any other place, to the spot upon which they now reside; they believe that they were created by the Supreme Being on the lands which they at present occupy.” A writer in the early 1850s, probably one of the white missionaries among the Dakota, reported that “One great natural fact which perhaps ought to be recognized and recorded at the start, is this, viz: That the mouth of the Minnesota river (Watpa Minisota [Mni Sota Wakpa]) lies immediately over the center of the earth and under the centre of the heavens.” The writer of that statement may have been the missionary Stephen R. Riggs, who later stated, “The Mdewakantonwan think that the mouth of the Minnesota River is precisely over the center of the earth and that they occupy the gate that opens into the western world.”²

The Dakota connection was not only to the entire region of Minnesota but also to specific places, rivers, lakes, rocks, landforms, and village sites, all imbued with meaning by generations of experience and knowledge. At treaty negotiations at Prairie du Chien in 1825, Dakota leaders were asked to describe their territory so that federal officials could differentiate the lands of various nations. Dakota chiefs gave eloquent accounts of where they lived and where they belonged. A Waḣpetuŋwaŋ leader known as “the Little” stated, “I am of the prairie. I claim the land up the River Corbeau [Crow River] to its source & from there to Otter Tail Lake. I can yet show the marks of my lodges there and they will remain as long as the world lasts.” Tataŋka Nażiŋ, Standing Buffalo, a Sisituŋwaŋ leader from Lake Traverse and Lac qui Parle, stated that his lands commenced at Ottertail Lake and ran north to Pine Lake and the Pine River, which emptied into the Red River.³

Wanataŋ, the Ihaŋktuŋwaŋ leader from Lake Traverse, said, “I am from the plains and it is of that part of our Country of which I speak. My line commences where Thick Wood River empties into Red River thence down Red River to Turtle River—up Turtle River to its source, thence south of the Devils Lake to the Missouri at the Gros Ventre Village.” C̣aŋ Sagye, a Waḣpekute leader whose territory lay in present-day south-central Minnesota and northern Iowa, stated, “I will now point out the boundary of the land where I was born. It commences at the raccoon fork of the Des Moines River at the mouth of the Raccoon River, thence up to a small lake, the source of Bear River & thence following Bear River to its entrance into the Missouri a little below Council Bluffs (supposed to be Bowyer’s [Boyer] river).”⁴

Even in the nineteenth century, as forces they could not control took their lands from them, Dakota people did not fail to speak of the importance of their homelands. At the Traverse des Sioux treaty negotiations in 1851, government officials put great pressure on Dakota leaders to be quick about signing a treaty in which they would give up all their lands west of the Mississippi River in return for a reservation much smaller than where most of the Dakota had ever lived. Government commissioners believed the question was “a simple one”: whether the Dakota would sell all their lands and get in return what would “make them comfortable for many years” or whether they would starve in the midst of a wide country “destitute almost of game.” Iṡtaḣba, Sleepy Eye, the elder statesman in the region of Traverse des Sioux, rose to make a few observations: “Your coming and asking me for my country makes me sad; and your saying I am not able to do any thing with my country makes me still more sad.”⁵

A few weeks later at the 1851 Mendota treaty negotiation, Wakute spoke of his fears about the treaty and whether, however good the treaty might be, it would be changed after it was signed, just as other treaties had been changed. After signing a treaty in 1837, he said, Dakota leaders found the provisions were “very different from what they had been told and all were shamed.” He then said of the reservation that had been picked for them by government officials, “I was not brought up in a prairie country but among woods and I would like to go to a tract of land called Pine Island which is a good place for Indians. I want you to write this in the treaty.” Pine Island, located on the Zumbro River, had been a wintering place for Dakota from Wakute’s band for generations. Perhaps at this moment of decision he felt a lingering hope that he could return to that place where he might be left alone by the forces of white colonization and settlement.⁶

Even after they were exiled in 1863, following the Dakota–U.S. War, the Dakota continued to speak about their homelands, in stories told by exiles and by the Dakota who returned to those places they had been forced to leave. Explaining, in 1864, the contributing causes of the events of 1862, Tataŋka Nażiŋ, Standing Buffalo, namesake of the earlier Sisituŋwaŋ leader from Lake Traverse, stated, “I loved my lands, it was on them that I had been raised and fed, it was the land of my fathers.” In the years following, Dakota people went back to places they valued, among them the places where their ancestors had been buried for generations. Anthropologist Ella Deloria wrote about her conversations with Minnesota Dakota in the 1930s: “Dakota felt pulled to the region where their dead were put to rest. A survivor of the 1862 Minnesota Uprising reported in her interview the following: ‘We were driven out of Minnesota wholesale, though the majority of our people were innocent. But we could not stay away so we managed to find our way back, because our makapahas were here.’ The term means earth-hills and is the Santee idiom for graves.”⁷

And today Dakota people continue to tell, in many ways and in many places, the stories of their enduring connection to their lands in Minnesota.

The relationship of a people to the lands where they live is crucial for understanding their history and culture. How people use and name the features in their landscapes—and the way this creates their common history—is a topic of great interest in the fields of history, anthropology, folklore, linguistics, and geography. The philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote that a people’s sense of place and time is contained in places, the places they inhabit and use. He wrote that “space and time come together in place. Indeed they arise from the experience of the place itself.” Folklorist Keith C. Ryden has noted that a place “is much more than a point in space…A sense of place results gradually and unconsciously from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its physical properties, accruing a history within its confines.”⁸

History comes from stories, accounts, anecdotes, legends, traditions, and folktales. No matter who gives these accounts, or whether they are written or not, they come with the perspective of the teller and the teller’s culture, position, and situation. Some are “master stories,” stories that express the important values of a people. And some of those master stories are dominant ones, given priority because of the tellers’ status. The Dakota connection to this region goes back beyond human memory and written history, but Europeans did not know of the Dakota people until the mid-1600s. Since then, French, British, and American observers have created a written history of the Dakota from a European and white perspective. They tell of the Dakota living in the present-day state of Minnesota and in areas of what is now Canada and in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas, including the Mississippi and Minnesota river regions they would continue to inhabit in the nineteenth century.

Rare during the last three hundred years have been histories written to communicate the Dakota point of view about their homelands. Even rarer were histories that communicated the Dakota point of view about the white history of the Dakota people. The white versions of history demonstrate the specific personality of those who wrote and the sometimes haphazard nature of their relationships with the Dakota. While war between the Dakota and other peoples was often described in great detail, the names of Dakota groups, where they lived, and their culture were given random treatment. White visitors often came to Dakota country on brief visits, without seeing the Dakota use of the land from one season to the next and without understanding the rich seasonal patterns that nourished their lives. One account from a single season or year does not provide a full record of the patterns in Dakota use of the region and its resources. Similarly, European visitors had little knowledge of the cultural links between Dakota places or the layers of meaning of each Dakota place. Occasionally they learned of Dakota stories connected to places, but they had little inkling of what those stories actually meant. Missionaries gave small credence to Dakota beliefs, offering biased accounts of seasonal ceremonies. Together these histories—and their shortcomings—show the precarious nature of any solid conclusions one might draw from this information, especially without the traditional history and knowledge of the Dakota themselves.

In writing about Dakota people, non-Dakota historians have often looked for information about particular themes, such as when the Dakota people reached the locations where they lived in the nineteenth century and how they got there. This interest may derive in part from neighboring Ojibwe traditional accounts, such as those recorded in William Warren’s History of the Ojibway People, which describe the Ojibwe claim that they forced the Dakota to the Mississippi Valley from the Mille Lacs area at some point in the eighteenth century—a claim about which there are differing Dakota points of view. Another topic of investigation has been the subsistence strategies of Dakota people in the past and whether they planted crops such as corn. Dakota oral tradition and the early written records about the Dakota can answer some of these questions. Contrary to historians’ assertions, for example, Dakota traditions tell of growing corn at Mille Lacs and at Spirit Lake in what is now Iowa. But there are also questions that arise from the oral tradition itself and the themes that have been and are important to Dakota people in the past and today, such as the significance of traditional cultural places. It is important to guide research by the concerns and understandings of Dakota people themselves.

Europeans in the Minnesota region were not mere observers. They came as traders, government representatives, and missionaries, with goals of changing Dakota people’s lives. The consequence was that by their interaction they affected the patterns of Dakota people in the use of the land. As shown in the accounts of Pierre Le Sueur, the French presence on the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers in the 1600s drew the attention of Dakota who lived farther north. Missionaries and government agents encouraged Dakota people to spend more time growing crops and less time hunting and gathering. It is often difficult from such early accounts to obtain a full and complete view of the patterns of Dakota land use.

The histories of the nineteenth-century treaties signed by Dakota leaders which set the stage for the forced removal of the Dakota in 1863 are yet another example of the pitfalls of a narrowly European perspective on Dakota history. These histories generally are told from the incomplete perspective of government negotiators. Yet the Dakota people and the government agents who negotiated and signed the treaties had radically different points of view about their meaning. Instead of being a straightforward account of two peoples coming together to negotiate, the narratives reflect a clash of points of view and of the stories that the different signers had about land and culture. For example, the land transferred in these treaties is usually referred to in legal terminology as cessions. However, this term privileges the non-indigenous side of the negotiating table. Instead, because of the way Dakota wishes were often ignored in such treaties, it might be more accurate to call them seizures. To make legal or political assertions about the meaning of such treaties today—without examining a fuller history of how these treaties came to be—is as precarious as the cultural conclusions many draw only from written historical accounts.

The dominance of a non-Dakota master story about the Dakota people continues to pose challenges today as Dakota people seek to reclaim the legacy of their history and their places. Many Dakota burial sites and sacred and cultural sites in Minnesota have been damaged, built upon, and impacted in assorted ways by farming, development, and suburbanization. Even in the case of public lands, Dakota assertions about the importance of such places to their history and culture are often treated with skepticism by public agencies given the duty to protect these sites. Widespread ignorance about the Dakota’s role in Minnesota and the impact of their exile from Minnesota means that many public agencies and the wider public must be educated before such sites can be protected properly.

The answer to many of the problems presented by Dakota history as it has been written in the past is to try to achieve a more complete account, one that gives full appreciation to the Dakota oral tradition but also makes a concerted effort to read between the lines of written records to search for Dakota points of view and Dakota meanings. This effort also requires a close reading of place and landscape within Minnesota to understand the nature of this place as the Dakota homeland. This approach is especially necessary for nonverbal sources of information, such as archaeological sites, burial mounds, and petroglyphs. Dakota history is often encoded in such places, which bring alive the stories sometimes ignored by historians who call them legends and leave them out of written history.

Oral tradition, written sources, information coded in the landscape—all these pieces of information can be seen as complementary, creating a resonant history in which there are multiple voices, including the eloquent voices of Dakota people past and present. Surprising as it may seem, the written records of British, French, and American visitors to Dakota country contain within them clues to and pieces of a parallel but largely unwritten narrative, documenting the long cultural tradition of the Dakota in the region of Minnesota. In the place names detailed by early French explorers are the accounts of a people who knew these locations well. French records demonstrate that Mni Sota Makoce was a Dakota place when the French first arrived, and despite all that has happened in the last 150 years, it is still a Dakota place today.

To fully explore and renew the theme of the Dakota people and their relationship to their homelands in Minnesota requires much more than the efforts of one person, one perspective, or one project. Many voices are required. This book is the product of a four-year collaboration among people of many backgrounds to study the history and the land of the Dakota people in Minnesota. Each person, whether Dakota or of European ancestry, brought a different perspective to this work, but our goal was the same: to study the heritage of the Dakota people and to make all Minnesotans aware that Minnesota was and is the homeland of the Dakota.

In 2007 a group of Dakota people met to form the Two Rivers Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit entity with a mission to research alternative approaches for the recovery of historic Dakota lands and stories and to advocate for Dakota involvement in the development of places with Dakota connections, such as the Fort Snelling area. In the fall of 2007, Syd Beane and Sheldon Wolfchild, acting as representatives of Two Rivers CDC, met with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF) to seek funding for research relating to the recovery of historic Dakota lands. ILTF representatives invited Two Rivers CDC representatives to submit a grant request for this purpose. With the help of Bruce White, Two Rivers wrote and submitted a proposal to ILTF in October 2007.

This proposal to research Dakota land history in Minnesota before 1862 was funded by ILTF starting in the spring of 2008, through Two Rivers’ fiscal sponsor, the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI), with Syd Beane acting as project director and Gwen Westerman and Bruce White as research co-chairs. Other research participants included Katherine Beane, Erin Griffin, Thomas Shaw, Howard Vogel, and Glenn Wasicuna. Over the next year and a half, work involving oral history interviews and archival research continued. Project participants met regularly in St. Paul, Mankato, and on the shores of Lake Pepin to discuss the work and its broader meanings.

As the grant came to a close in 2009, project participants submitted an application to the Minnesota Historical Society to complete the research and interviews and to produce a book manuscript with anticipated publication in 2012, the 150th anniversary of the events of 1862. A major goal of the proposal was to produce a book with a much richer perspective on Dakota history before 1862 than has previously existed. The Minnesota Historical Society made a generous award to the project through Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund in January 2010. With this grant, project participants renewed their research with fresh energy and by the end of June 2011 had completed a draft manuscript. This manuscript was further revised and submitted to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, which accepted it for publication. Over the following months, work continued to expand and hone the narrative.

Working carefully with fluent first-language Dakota speakers, we chose to use the contemporary Dakota orthography developed at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s under the guidance of Waḣpetonwiŋ, Carolynn Schommer. We have also updated, when possible, the spellings of Dakota names and words to correct the centuries of phonetic misspellings and presumptions about meanings propagated in other sources. Where multiple historic spellings occur and require clarification, we have provided explanations in the endnotes and hope they will generate more discussion. Our title, Mni Sota Makoce, uses the Dakota adjective sota with a regular “s,” meaning “clear” or “sky-colored,” so that it translates as “land where the waters are so clear they reflect the clouds.” Just one of the forms of the name, it was also chosen so readers would be able to pronounce it correctly.

The present form of this book is the product of many people, not just the project participants. We are grateful to all those who contributed to and influenced this work over the last five years, especially the many Dakota people who generously shared their stories of the land and of our people. Glenn Wasicuna not only served as our cultural and language advisor but also helped us ground our efforts in a spiritual way that opened our eyes and our hearts. In particular we want to thank the funding agencies—the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the fiscal agent NACDI—for their generous support of this work. We are also grateful to the Minnesota Historical Society Press and its warm, helpful, and highly competent and patient editor Shannon Pennefeather for seeing the merit in what we wanted to do and helping to make it happen.