When we ask what defines us most as Indian people, I expect that many of us would say our connection to the land.
The September 2008 issue of the National Museum of the American Indian newsletter describes their Indigenous Geography website, a multi-lingual website providing images, videos, education plans for grades 4-12 for thematic exploration of live in six indigenous communities. Explore the website at http://www.indigenousgeography.si.edu/home.asp?lang=eng.
The themes of place/seasons/family/community/ritual were in my mind this past week as I headed home to northern Minnesota, following waterways in the land of the Dakota, Lakota, and Anishinabe. What a blessing to be home during harvest season.
This blog entry this week is a travelogue of images and captions of this short trip. I’ve linked to some related content to sources that might help you explore the history of these locations and topics.
From Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I headed east along a former military road, stopping along the way to read historical signs. One of the striking contemporary public artworks in Mankato is located in Reconciliation Park near the Minnesota River bank. This is a carved bison commemorating the loss of 38 Native people hanged publicly in December 1862 as a result of the Dakota conflict. For more information about the conflict, see www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/dakota/dakota.html. Check out the Minnesota Historical Society site for further references, www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/94dakota.html.
From Mankato, I drove north, along the Minnesota River, to St. Peter where I stopped at the Treaty Site History Center, recalling the location of the signing of the 1851Traverse de Sioux Treaty, between the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of Dakota and the U.S. government. This site was known by the Dakota as Oiyuwege, the place of crossing the river.
From St. Peter, I followed the modern road routes into Minnesota-St. Paul and lunch with a former student, Greg Argo, now a librarian at Concordia, and a quick stop and chat with faculty associated with the Master of Library and Information Science Program at the College of St. Catherine. Their program’s rich curriculum also offers school library media certification and archives and library leadership certificates. The evening found me home, in Carlton, Minnesota. Old highway 210 leads from Carlton to Jay Cooke State Park. At the east end of the park is Fond du Lac, the site of an Ojibwe village that Daniel Greysolon Sier Duluth visited in 1679. By 1817, there was also an Astor American Fur Company trading post at this site where the first treaty between the Ojibwe and the U.S. was signed in 1826.
Other local stops included a drive past the Frank Lloyd Wright designed gas station in Cloquet. The gas station is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary earlier this summer and the Carlton County Historical Society still has commemorative items for sale. The Fond du Lac Tribal & Community College, founded in 1987, is on the southern border of Cloquet and offers American Indian Studies courses including a lab on harvesting manoomin, wild rice, Anishinaabe language coursework, and an ethno-astronomy class titled Native Skywatchers.
(Jay Cooke State Park. left)
The University of Minnesota-Duluth campus features a new sculpture near the library. Wild Ricing Moon, near which grows a small patch of wildrice.
(Wigwam on FDLTCC campus, top left; Wild Ricing Moon, bottom left)
I stopped by the Northern Lights independent bookstore in Duluth and picked up a few books to help sustain the northlands imagery, including:
Hedin, Robert, ed. Where One Voice Ends Another Begins: 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2007. [See the contributions by Native poets including Heid Erdrich.]
Erdrich, Louise. Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling in the Land of My Ancestors. Washington: National Geographic Directions, 2003.
Nitaawichige: Selected Poetry and Prose by Four Anishinaabe Writers. Duluth, MN: Poetry Harbor, [n.d.] [Jim Northrup, Denise Sweet, Marcie R. Rendon, and Linda LeGarde Grover]
(Northern Lights Book Store, top left; Flandreau Indian High School, bottom left))
Finally, I made two important stops as I returned to South Dakota. First was a quick stop at Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota. The site includes a trail through grass prairie to active pits where Native people quarry the stone. I came away with a small T-shaped calumet and some sacred sage. From Pipestone, I headed still west to Flandreau Indian School. My maternal grandfather, Joe LaFreniere, attended this school during the influenza outbreak of 1918. I flew west to Denver and southeast to Austin, leaving the leaf color and harvest fields of my homeland in Minnesota.
This travel calls to mind a number of questions:
1. How do we commemorate our history and the histories of our Native communities?
2. How do modern roadways follow traditional travel routes?
3. How do Native people still observe native foodways?
4. How were products—including pipestone—traded and used across time?
5. What do we know about the history and current existence of Indian boarding schools?
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