Genesis and Genocide: The Dakota Effort to Reclaim Fort Snelling

By Timothy A. Schuler

Prelude: ‘Take Down the Fort’ (2010)

“The conqueror in its insolence cannot

hear the ancient heartbeat of the prairie.”

– Gabrielle Wynde Tateyuskanskan

“The perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting.

Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense.”

– Judith Lewis Herman

Draped over a banister in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol, the banner read: “Take Down the Fort.” Nearby, in similar red and black letters: “Site of Dakota Genocide.”^[1] It was a characteristically frigid day in February 2010, and a group of Dakota protestors had shown up to the Minnesota Historical Society’s annual “Rally for History,” a recurring bit of legislative pageantry in which the nonprofit organization, which manages 26 historic sites throughout the state, submits its funding request to the Minnesota state legislature and promotes the importance of local history. Led by scholar and community organizer Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, a member of the Pezihutazizi Oyate, or Upper Sioux Community—one of four recognized Dakota tribes in the state of Minnesota—the Dakota were protesting the state’s plan to revitalize a state historic site and National Historic Landmark called Fort Snelling.

Perched on a bluff above the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers in what is now an unincorporated area of Minnesota, Fort Snelling is a former US military outpost that was occupied nearly continuously from 1819 until 1946 and is now operated as a historical museum. The fort is also the site of years of state-sponsored violence against the Dakota people, most notably during the winter of 1862-1863, when following six weeks of armed conflict, nearly 1,700 Dakota elders, women, and children were captured and marched from the Lower Sioux community near Morton, Minnesota, to the fort and held by US soldiers in a concentration camp there. That journey—a multiday, 150-mile journey on which the Dakota suffered physical and emotional abuse from soldiers and white settlers—represents the beginning of the Dakota’s forced removal from their ancestral homeland.^[2]

For most of its history, visitors to Fort Snelling didn’t learn about this aspect of the site’s past. They were invited to “take tea with Mrs. Snelling,” the wife of fort commander Josiah Snelling, or watch as historical reenactors paraded about the fort grounds. “The Minnesota Historical Society has consistently refused to tell the truth about [its] history,” Waziyatawin (who typically goes only by her Dakota name) argued that day in the capitol rotunda. At the time a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Waziyatawin and her fellow protestors had shown up to support their own campaign: to remove the fort. For years, Dakota activists had argued that reenactments celebrating the fort’s early military history were inappropriate for a place associated with genocidal violence, particularly when that same place holds deep spiritual significance for the Dakota. The confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers is known to some Dakota tribes as Bdote, a word that describes the joining of two water bodies, as well as Maka Cokaya Kin, or the center of the earth, which according to oral tradition is the site at which they first emerged on Earth.^[3]

For the Dakota, MNHS’s pointed avoidance of any mention of either their spiritual connection to the place or the harms perpetrated against them in Fort Snelling’s exhibits and interpretation constituted an erasure of the fort’s role in their exile. It mirrored a broader silence within Minnesota society. “Until 2002, there was no public recognition of these removals either to memorialize the suffering of the Dakota or to recognize the treacherous means by which White hegemony was achieved,” Waziyatawin wrote in the introduction to In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century, which documents the effort to retrace the route taken by the 1,700 Dakota men, women, and children on their forced march to Fort Snelling. “If memorials are commissioned and built among a community with shared and admired values that are expected to continue into the future, the glaring absence of memorials to Dakota suffering makes it eminently clear that Minnesota’s citizens and planners assumed a future without a Dakota presence.”^[4]

Fifteen years after the protests at the Minnesota State Capitol, Fort Snelling still stands. It has not, as the protestors that day hoped, disappeared from the landscape. But notably, neither have the Dakota. In the intervening years, incremental progress has been made toward broadening the story of Fort Snelling and more accurately representing the events that took place there. Initiated in 2017, the design and construction of a new visitor center became a vehicle for increased engagement and collaboration between MNHS and the Dakota community and for long-awaited truth-telling about the site’s history. Over a period of roughly two years, a group of approximately 25 Dakota individuals, formalized as the Dakota Community Council (DCC), weighed in on the future of Fort Snelling, working with MNHS and other groups to craft exhibition narratives, conceptualize new public artworks, and guide the reclamation of the fort’s grounds from that of a military-era landscape to one that is representative of the Dakota’s deep connection to Minnesota and the area surrounding the confluence. New signage uses the Dakota language to educate visitors about culturally important plants, such as red willow, and calls out the role that Fort Snelling played in the internment and eventual removal of the Dakota people.

And yet members of the DCC say some of their recommendations were not heeded, with some of the more controversial elements removed from the final plan and the language of the interpretation watered down to appeal to white and other non-Native visitors. As one member of the design team put it, the partnership “didn’t go far enough.”

The following case study explores the unprecedented and politically fraught process by which Dakota community members were invited into partnership with MNHS to actively shape public memory as it pertains to Fort Snelling. It documents the tensions that predated and, in many cases, persisted through the process, and critically examines the resulting reimagined visitor experience. The work ultimately provides lessons for how designers and planners interested in co-design and community power-building can engage in such work ethically and equitably, amplifying local voices and knowledge systems while aligning planning goals with longstanding community activism.

A note on structure: Acknowledging the Dakota’s timeless connection to Bdote, the deep wounds associated with Fort Snelling and the nonlinear ways in which the fort’s presence is experienced by the Dakota, as well as their timeless connection to Bdote, the case study situates the project and its timeline in a much longer and recurrent history. As Cindy McCleary, an architect with Leo A Daly, says at one point, “[History’s] paths are not linear. They're constellations. They collide and crash, and they conflict. And every now and then they unify and move in parallel for a while, and then they divide again.” Readers will see this truth reflected in the landscape and interpretation at Fort Snelling, and, hopefully, in the larger historical narrative into which the project is situated.

1. ‘Everything Has a Spirit’ (Time immemorial - 1863)

The twin river valleys that meet below Fort Snelling formed roughly 12,000 years ago, with the retreat of the glacial ice sheets and the formation of the Glacial River Warren, a massive fluvial complex that gave way to the Minnesota River. The glacial meltwater carved ravines through the bedrock, forming winding channels flanked on either side by steep bluffs. As the climate warmed and the ice sheets shrunk, the landscape—and what populated it—changed. Flora and fauna that Minnesotans would recognize today followed the glaciers northward, forming a mosaic of prairie and woodlands that supported wildlife and the region’s earliest peoples.

Figure A view of Fort Snelling from the northwest, as depicted by Army illustrator Seth Eastman between 1846 and 1848. [Source: Minnesota Historical Society]

Archaeological evidence suggests that human societies have called the area around the confluence home for at least 10,000 years, aligning with the end of the Pleistocene, or Ice Age. In their creation story, elders of the Bdewakantunwan Dakota, one of four tribes that make up the Dakota Oyate, or Dakota Nation, describe the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers as their people’s place of origin. “We have recognized Bdote as the center of the earth and of all things, and historical accounts tell of it as a meeting place where massive gatherings of lodges took place annually,” Gwen Westerman, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate, writes in Mni Sota Makoce: Land of the Dakota.^[5]

Since time immemorial, the Dakota worldview has recognized Mitakuye owasin, the relatedness of all things—plants, animals, rivers, people. “Everything has a spirit,” explained Gabrielle Wynde Tateyuskanskan, also a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota Oyate. “The way it was explained to me when I was a child was that if we had the discernment to see the spirits, when we looked around, it would be like a bus station—so busy—because there's so much life.”^[6]

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Dakota were part of an extensive trade network, including with the neighboring Ojibwe. Following the arrival of French traders, who claimed the Dakota’s ancestral lands for their country (though there is no evidence that the Dakota acknowledged France’s claims on their lands), interactions with wasicu, or white settlers, still were often peaceful. For more than a hundred years beginning in the late 1600s, the Dakota and other Plains tribes maintained their autonomy amid European encroachment, even as the introduction of novel diseases had disastrous effects on Native populations, fraying tribes’ social and cultural ties to the land and forcing ever-greater reliance on European goods.^[7]

This changed with the Louisiana Purchase. With the 1803 agreement, the nascent United States gained control of 530 million acres of Native-occupied lands, an area that spanned from New Orleans to Saskatchewan and as far west as Idaho. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson sent 26-year-old US Army lieutenant Zebulon Pike on an expedition to locate the headwaters of the Mississippi River. On that expedition, Pike identified the site of Fort Snelling as a strategic military location and negotiated a treaty with the Dakota to acquire roughly 100,000 acres of land centered on the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers for use by the US Army.^[8] It is unclear whether the Dakota, for whom the notion of private property was a foreign one, considered the agreement a sale of the lands in question or simply permission to use them. And though Pike initially estimated the value of the acquired lands at $200,000 ($5.5 million in today’s dollars), Congress ratified the treaty with an inserted amount of $2,000—one one-hundredth of the “fair” price.^[9][10]

In 1819, US soldiers arrived at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers to begin construction on what would become Fort Snelling.^[11] Over the next 40 years, relations between the Dakota and the US disintegrated, as the federal government negotiated more treaties, then repeatedly—and systematically—refused to uphold them.^[12] The two nations’ relationship reached a nadir in 1862. That August, the Indian Agent for the Lower Sioux community refused to distribute an already late shipment of food from the Agency’s storehouse, despite extreme levels of poverty and hunger among the Dakota. During the tense exchange, a local store owner reportedly said, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass.”^[13] Days later, four Dakota men attacked a white farmstead, killing at least five people.^[14] Six weeks of violent conflict followed, ending with the surrender of some 2,000 Dakota. Despite being a war between sovereign nations, with human lives taken on both sides, the captured Dakota were tried as criminals, with a five-member tribunal sentencing 300 Dakota participants to death.^[15] President Abraham Lincoln eventually commuted the sentences of more than 200 of the prisoners, but the 38 Dakota men who were hanged in Mankato on December 26, 1862, still represent the largest mass execution in US history.

Many of the remaining Dakota—roughly 1,700 people, mostly elders, women, and children—were rounded up and force-marched from the Lower Sioux community, known today as Cansayapi, to Fort Snelling. In multiple towns along the way, white settlers attacked the caravan with bats and knives and stones. The prisoners—many of whom were bound—were pulled from the wagons and beaten until their bodies resembled “raw beefsteak,” in the words of George Crooks, who experienced the events as a six-year-old boy.^[16] In the town of New Ulm, boiling water was dumped on one of the wagons, burning the bodies of elders and children.

When the prisoner caravan reached Fort Snelling, the Dakota were held for the duration of the winter in a large concentration camp hastily constructed on the banks of the Minnesota River.^[17] Exposed to the elements and subsisting on bread and crackers, as many as 300 people died of disease or malnourishment.

Following the conflict, which today is referred to as the US-Dakota War, Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, publicly called for the Dakota to “be exterminated, or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”^[18] In 1863, at Ramsey’s behest, Congress passed a law annulling all existing treaties between the Dakota and the US, and another law that mandated the removal of the Dakota from the state of Minnesota. The Dakota were rounded up and put on riverboats bound for Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. At least 200 more Dakota died on the voyage or shortly after arriving at the reservation.

In the span of a few months, thousands of years of place-based knowledge and kinship ties were severed. The Dakota had lost their homeland.

2. ‘We Remember All Those Who Walked’ (2002-2016)

Following the expulsion of the Dakota and the resolution of the Civil War, the final decades of the 19th century marked a period of expansion for Fort Snelling.^[19] New barracks, stables, gardens, a commissary, a hospital, and more were constructed between 1878 and 1890.^[20] The fort remained operational throughout both World War I and World War II, before being decommissioned in 1946. In 1956, Fort Snelling came under threat when the Minnesota Highway Department proposed rerouting a state highway through a section of the Fort Snelling property. As in many other cities during the post-war period, a grassroots effort helped save the historic site. The roadway was eventually routed through a tunnel running beneath the property, and the experience catalyzed a campaign to not just protect Fort Snelling but to reconstruct it to its 1820s appearance. In 1960, Fort Snelling was designated as a National Historic Landmark.^[21]

Over the years, the fact that today’s Fort Snelling is largely a replica has been used as one rationale for its removal.^[22] The United States repeatedly divested from the original fort structure, first selling it to a private citizen in 1857, then over the next 70 years using the buildings as material stockpiles for expansion efforts elsewhere. Without intervention in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the fort would have succumbed to post-war growth and modernization efforts within the Twin Cities. For Dakota scholars like Waziyatawin, the conscious choice to reconstruct Fort Snelling can be read as an investment in the longstanding narrative of White supremacy and the continued justification for the invasion and conquest of Dakota lands.

In 1983, an underground visitor center was built just west of the remaining barracks buildings, marking a new chapter in the fort’s history as an educational and interpretive site. This was, with minor exceptions, the Fort Snelling that architect Cindy McCleary encountered when her firm, Leo A Daly, was hired by MNHS to assess the condition of the historic site. The visitor center had begun to leak, there was insufficient exhibition and teaching space, and financially, the site was struggling. “The [only] thing they were doing on that site at the time was historical reenactments,” McCleary recalled.^[23] “Each year they'd hire 200 or 300 historical actors, they’d dress them up in period dress, and they would replay life within the historic fort itself—the diamond. And you would pay $12 to come see this.”

The architects determined that the underground visitor center had reached the end of its useful lifespan. In 2014, MNHS hired Leo A Daly for initial planning and pre-design for a new visitor facility.^[24] During that process, MNHS historians shared the many additional, and often overlooked, histories associated with Fort Snelling, such as that of Dred and Harriet Scott, an enslaved Black couple who in the 1830s were brought to Fort Snelling and held there, despite slavery being illegal in the territory. (The lawsuit Dred Scott would eventually bring against his owner resulted in one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions in US history, in which the justices ruled that Black Americans—whether enslaved or free—were not citizens and therefore had no standing in the country’s justice system.) Other lost histories included Fort Snelling as the site of the Military Intelligence Service Language School and as a laboratory for the Department of Veterans Affairs developing cutting-edge prosthetics.

And then, of course, there were the Dakota, for whom this place was a site of both genesis and genocide. A series of events in the early 2010s had prompted MNHS to reconsider the way it told the story of Fort Snelling with regard to the state’s Indigenous people. Kevin Maijala, the senior vice president of education and interpretation at MNHS, pointed specifically to a series of internal conversations that took place around the 150th anniversary of the US-Dakota War in 2012. “The anniversary was very fraught,” Maijala said. “It's a genocidal war. It has been very difficult to have a broader [conversation] about that.”^[25]

Just two years earlier, the Take Down the Fort campaign had put a public spotlight on the atrocities associated with Fort Snelling, not just the concentration camp that was housed there, but also the execution in 1865 of two Dakota leaders. Six months after the showdown in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol, the same group occupied Fort Snelling for several hours before being threatened with arrest.^[26]

The Take Down the Fort campaign was not an isolated protest movement but the culmination of more than a decade of Dakota activism and memorialization. As early as 1987, Amos Owen, a Dakota leader from the Prairie Island community, installed a carved pipestone marker at the site of the concentration camp. Located within Fort Snelling State Park, which encompasses much of the land immediately below Fort Snelling, the memorial has been added onto over the years and remains a place where Dakota come to remember their ancestors, tying small red prayer ties to the twigs and branches of the surrounding trees.^[27] In 2002, a group of Dakota women, including Waziyatawin, organized a commemorative march from the Lower Sioux Community to Fort Snelling in order to remember and publicly honor the Dakota who were force-marched to the fort 140 years earlier. Manipi Hena Owas’in Wicunkiksuyapi, they called the walk, or “We Remember All Those Who Walked.”^[28]

The march culminated at Fort Snelling and the pipestone marker.^[29] As Waziyatawin would later write, this public demonstration of grief and commemoration was a way to “take hold of the past” and begin the “process of reclamation.”^[30] Commemorative marches continued to take place every other year until the sesquicentennial of the US-Dakota War in 2012. In 2006, the tribal council of the Upper Sioux Community, located near Granite Falls, Minnesota, passed a resolution demanding that Fort Snelling be torn down and the land returned to the Dakota people.^[31]

Following the sesquicentennial, as conversations about what to do with Fort Snelling unfolded, McCleary said that MNHS seemed to adopt an overarching philosophy that viewed history as something that “happens at the crossroads.”^[32] MNHS’s executive director at the time, Steve Elliot, seemed to believe that the unresolved history of places like Fort Snelling is what made them compelling. “History wants us to create this nice, linear path: This happened, and then that, then this and then that. It's not really like that,” McCleary said. “The [paths] are not linear. They're constellations. They collide and crash, and they conflict. And every now and then they unify and move in parallel for a while, and then they divide again.”

In 2015, Quinn Evans Architects was hired by MNHS to compile a cultural landscape report (CLR) for Fort Snelling. Led by landscape architect Brenda Williams, the CLR would inform the design of a new visitor center and the rehabilitation of the grounds and help ensure that the plans did not negatively impact “contributing resources”—architectural and landscape details that contribute to the site’s historical significance. Over roughly 12 months, Williams and her team documented nearly 200 years of landscape change at Fort Snelling, mapping the appearance and disappearance of buildings and circulation routes and providing recommendations for the property’s long-term care. The team consulted with a wide variety of stakeholder groups, including all four bands of the Dakota who have a presence in Minnesota, as well as the Ojibwe, the Chippewa, and the Iowa.^[33]

Within days of finalizing the CLR, Williams and her team were made aware of the resolution calling for the removal of the fort.^[34] The Upper Sioux Community had recently appointed a new tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, and she was to be Williams’ new point of contact. It was Waziyatawin.

“She reviewed [the CLR], and, like, exploded,” Williams recalled. Williams was mortified that no one had brought the resolution to her attention. “I was like, what the fuck? How do I not know about this?” Although the CLR was past due, Williams told MNHS that her team couldn’t finish the CLR until she sat down with Waziyatawin one-on-one to talk about the implications of the resolution. “I said to the organization, ‘I’ve had this response, she's a new THPO, she wasn't at the table with us, and I can't give you this document until I've talked to her,’” Williams said. Their conversation made clear to Williams that Fort Snelling was a more intensely contested site than the design team initially understood.

Quinn Evans made substantial revisions to its report. Rather than recommend specific landscape treatments, the CLR proposed a design framework that was flexible in order to respond to tribal perspectives.^[35] Specifically, the CLR recommended that MNHS establish a memorandum of agreement between itself, associated tribes, the state archaeologist, and others, and to use that MOU to establish trust and lines of communication between all parties.^[36] In whatever small way they could, Williams said, she and her team were pounding the table, saying, “‘The tribes have to be at the table.’ It kind of felt like we did this whole CLR, and the only thing of value in it was that statement.”

3. ‘Not an Advisory Committee’ (2015 - 2017)

While Quinn Evans was reaching the conclusion that Native involvement was paramount to any future development on the Fort Snelling site, MNHS’s new director of Native American Initiatives was making the same argument internally. Kate Beane, who is Mdewakanton and Wahpetonwan Dakota and a citizen of Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota Nation, had joined the Minnesota Historical Society as a fellow in 2014.^[37] Beane had grown up in Flandreau, South Dakota, part of a family of community organizers. Her father, a filmmaker, author, and activist, had long been critical of MNHS, and particularly in the years leading up to the sesquicentennial of the US-Dakota War he was “pressuring the historic society to do better,” she said. In 2016, Beane was hired as an outreach manager for MNHS’s newly created Department of Native American Initiatives.

The department had been formed on the recommendation of MNHS’s Indian Advisory Committee, an outside body created in 1989 with representation from each of Minnesota’s 11 recognized tribes. The committee, however, was struggling to exert any real influence on MNHS’s actions, Beane said. Sitting in on IAC meetings, she “started seeing the ways in which, when anything with Fort Snelling came up, anything with burial mounds, anything that was really delicate, members of the IAC would not respond,” Beane said. “[That] nonresponse was being taken by the institution as agreement, [but my take was], no, they're not okay with this.” When Beane approached IAC members to better understand their position, she said she was told, “We've been saying the same thing for years. We're not being heard.” The goal of the Native American Initiatives department was to better support Native voices and to inform how MNHS partnered with tribes.

It was around this time that Fort Snelling’s revitalization was kicking off. Beane’s initial sense was that she wanted nothing to do with it. A relative of Beane’s had died in the concentration camp at Fort Snelling, and the site held such traumatic memories that she couldn’t imagine engaging with it. “It's a difficult place,” she said. “As a Dakota person, when you go to that area, the air feels thick. It's physically hard to be there.”

Other Dakota community members have described similar experiences. “One of the reasons people didn’t come [to Fort Snelling] is that they’d say—legitimately so—that they got a bad feeling. It made them feel unsafe,” explained Iyekiyapiwiƞ Darlene St. Clair, Mdewakaƞtuƞwaƞ Dakota, a citizen of the Lower Sioux Indian Community and an Indigenous research professor at the University of Minnesota.^[38] More broadly, for many Dakota, MNHS represents more than a century of theft and colonization. Until recently, the historical society still held human remains and artifacts taken from Indigenous burial sites. The institutions is also viewed as an active participant in the cultural genocide of Indigenous people: one of the society’s founders was Alexander Ramsey, the Minnesota governor who had presided over the Dakota’s removal. As a result, many Native people “didn't want to work with the institution,” Beane said. “And if it had anything to do with Fort Snelling, they definitely didn't want anything to do with the institution.”

As the Fort Snelling planning went on, Beane grew increasingly uncomfortable with not being involved. Every Friday afternoon, Beane said, she sat at her desk, trying to work, while the MNHS team leading the revitalization effort met in a nearby conference room. “I knew they were making decisions about Fort Snelling. And I was like, we're not there. And so finally I said, Okay, I'll join that team.” According to Beane, at one of her first meetings she raised concerns about the project’s proposed timeline, which had placed community feedback at the tail end of the project. “I was like, Why is community engagement at the end? This should be starting with community engagement,” Beane recalled saying. “There should be no decisions before you go to Dakota people.” With the support of MNHS, Beane began organizing what would eventually become the Dakota Community Council. She made a list of Dakota elders, organizers, and scholars whom she thought might participate, and also asked her colleagues at MNHS for the names of other Dakota individuals with whom they had relationships.

“The thought was to have a group of people to support some of these decisions, to show that it's not just the lone Dakota person that works there, but that this is coming from a community,” Beane said. “I didn't know what it was going to be. And I said, It’s okay that we don't know what it's going to be, because this needs to be in partnership with the community.” To that end, she proposed that at least some of the engagement meetings be held at tribal communities, rather than in the Twin Cities, and that MNHS staff be present for those conversations.

The focus on the Dakota diaspora was already an acknowledgement of—and corrective to—the harms perpetrated in conjunction with Fort Snelling: The fort had been built on lands acquired through the 1805 treaty, which had been negotiated specifically with Dakota tribes, and it was the Dakota, not the Anishinaabe or any other tribe, who had been interned at the concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Tribal representation at MNHS also historically had been limited to only those Dakota tribes with a formal presence in the state of Minnesota, ignoring the geographic realities of the Dakota’s expulsion.^[39] As the scholar Mary Beth Faimon has written, in the case of groups like the Dakota, “community must be defined not in terms of geography, but in terms of kinship and relatives.”^[40] Beane and her colleagues compiled a list of roughly 50 names. She sent emails to each person, inviting them to an initial gathering at Fort Snelling.^[41]

The first meeting was held on January 6, 2017.^[42] The majority of the invitees showed up. Beane and her colleagues made a presentation, explaining the purpose and timeline of the Fort Snelling revitalization project, then turned the meeting over to the design team. Maura Rockcastle, a founding principal at TEN x TEN Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, which was brought on to lead the landscape design for Fort Snelling in 2016, recalled sharing the firm’s general approach to landscapes and presenting a series of maps and photographs of the existing conditions at Fort Snelling. She said the team also tried to pose questions to the group, to elicit a discussion of design priorities, but that the tension in the room was palpable. “There was still so much distrust between MNHS and the DCC that I don't think we got anywhere that we had hoped to in that meeting,” she said. “We had to quickly recalibrate our expectations for those conversations.”^[43]

The terms for any future conversations were set at that first meeting. Along with several others, Beane’s father, Sydney Beane, had “shown up with a copy of the 1805 treaty, and one of the first things [he] said is, ‘We never gave up this land. We’re not going to be an advisory committee,’” Beane recalled. For the Dakota to participate in the revitalization of Fort Snelling, they argued, they needed to be equal partners. “We were asserting a needed power in decision-making and some authority, and as the source of that authority, we pointed to the 1805 treaty,” said St. Clair, the UM Indigenous studies professor, who also attended that first meeting. Over the next five months, tribal representatives and MNHS staff developed a memorandum of understanding that would govern the partnership between the historical society and the DCC, which was to be consulted on matters related to any MNHS property within the 1805 Treaty Area.

The purpose of the MOU, or Wi’wahokichiyapi, as the document was known to the Dakota, was threefold: First, “to establish between the DCC and the MNHS an agreement of consultation, and collaboration;” second, “to implement a process for determining accessibility, land use, and educational interpretation as it relates to the Dakota for Historic Fort Snelling and the boundaries as defined in the Treaty with the Sioux Nation of Indians (1805);” and third, “to educate and make explicit that this is Dakota homeland with culturally competent historical accounts, Dakota language and signage, religious and cultural accessibility, and other considerations as determined by the DCC and MNHS with attention to cultural issues of importance in the implementation process.”^[44]

Quinn Evans’ Williams, who joined the design team following the completion of the CLR, said that the relationship was very clearly defined, including what would happen when the parties didn’t agree. If MNHS ignored the DCC’s guidance, for instance, the partnership could be dissolved, or the two parties might enter mediation, the specifics of which were also outlined in the MOU. For those involved, it felt like a historic moment. The DCC represented the first time in the MNHS history that any outside group, much less an Indigenous one, had been elevated to such a position. “It was a new kind of alliance,” Rockcastle said, “As a design team, we had to listen to the [DCC] as a client group, which was a shift.”

4. ‘Subliminal History’ (2017)

Despite the progress that the DCC represented, the sentiment that the only appropriate action at Fort Snelling was to tear it down still permeated parts of the Dakota community, and a faction of tribal members refused to participate in the revitalization effort as a form of protest. One of these tribal members was Samantha Odegard, who took over as the THPO for the Upper Sioux Community when Waziyatawin vacated the role in 2017. For Odegard, working to “improve” the visitor experience at Fort Snelling was a nonstarter. As a site of Dakota genocide, she couldn’t conscionably support its rehabilitation; to do so would have felt like a betrayal of Waziyatawin and oppositional to the wishes of her community, as formalized in the resolution from 2006.^[45] History also told her that, despite its claims, MNHS may not honor its commitments. “The historical society has a horrible reputation with a lot of Dakota people, especially in Minnesota,” she said. “While I fully agree with all Dakota people having a say in our homeland, [MNHS] has a long history of intentionally skipping over Minnesota Dakota tribes in favor of people who maybe didn't know how fucked up things were.”

Those who did join the DCC still brought with them their own relationship to MNHS and, in many cases, their own reasons for skepticism. Franky Jackson (Sissetunwan Dakota) is a historian and the compliance officer for the Prairie Island Dakota community. Jackson has been a member of MNHS’s Indian Advisory Committee since 2013 and involved in repatriation efforts—the returning of human remains, grave goods, and other artifacts to their rightful owners—with MNHS for even longer^[46]. The work requires, at times, a necessarily antagonistic stance toward the historical society, he said. “I've had a running fight with this institution to get cultural material out of there,” he said. Jackson recently organized a boycot of the IAC, refusing to participate in meetings until a rope that was used to hang one of the 38 men executed in Mankato following the US-Dakota War was returned to this tribe. In May 2024, after an 11-year process that Jackson described as a “drag-down fight,” the rope was finally returned.^[47] Though Jackson agreed to join the DCC, he said he never wanted to lose sight of those larger battles. “Working on this little planning project and allowing us to have some say in your little landscape design is fine, but we have bigger fish to fry,” he said.

For St. Clair, the decision to join the DCC was accompanied by a somewhat subversive motive: she saw the revitalization project as a potential catalyst for the slow-motion obliteration of the original fort structure, also known as the “diamond.” “My idea was, how do we take back this space from the diamond, and how do we do it by using plants?” she said. “I had this vision of the plants creeping up along the wall, taking it over.”

After a series of initial meetings, the DCC organized itself into subcommittees, which, according to Rockcastle, helped facilitate more intimate conversations. The subcommittees were grouped around four primary themes: Research and Education, Language, Partnership, and Ecology. The ecology group consisted of five women: St. Clair, Tateyuskanskan, Yvonne Wynde (Tateyuskanskan’s mother), Cheyanne St. John, and Diane Wilson. It went by the name Ina Maka, which in the Dakota language means Mother Earth. Though each subcommittee played an influential role in the project, participants say that the Ina Maka group exerted an outsized influence on the direction of the revitalization effort, as it was in the fort’s outdoor areas that the Dakota could begin to tell a story that was bigger than the traumas endured over the course of the 19th century.

There is much to say about the structure and approach of the DCC. One of the most important recommendations Kate Beane made, according to Cindy McCleary, is that the conversations between the design team and the Dakota, whether via the DCC or other entities, needed to take place in Dakota spaces. “One of the points of these meetings is that they couldn't all be at the institution,” Beane said. “We had to go out into the community. We'd go out into communities, and they'd have community dinners.” It is also important to note that descendants were representing only their families; they weren’t the formal representatives of their tribes. “This wasn't a nation-to-nation consultation,” Beane said. “That's separate. And part of my job was making sure the institution knew the difference.” She also worked to set up a model that was sustainable. “I would sit in on the first meetings. I would help them put things off on the right foot, and then I would step back,” she said.

“By focusing on the land, and doing the healing work through plants, it realigns us to that pre-contact history—the history before the history that this fort represents,” said Wilson, a Mdewakanton Dakota descendant and enrolled member of the Rosebud Reservation, whose historical memoir Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past recounts her experience participating in the Dakota commemorative marches. For her, the revitalization of Fort Snelling offered a “tremendous opportunity to be part of renewing the land back to a place of health.”^[48]

Signaling what this place was prior to the construction of Fort Snelling—all of the plant and animal communities that thrived along the Mississippi—was paramount, Tateyuskanskan said. “This whole landscape was full of life, and relating that is a really important concept for Dakota people.” The history of the confluence “isn't just conflict between American settlers and Dakota people. There’s an older backstory, a human story on the landscape that already was in existence.”

As a Dakota person, to immerse oneself in a landscape of plant and animal relatives, “that's subliminal history,” Wilson added. “That’s the land speaking to your body.”

The Ina Maka subcommittee may also have been influential because of who was part of it. The group’s membership included a number of respected Dakota elders and educators. Wynde, who was 85 at the time of the DCC’s formation, served on President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Presidential Scholars and has been a lifelong advocate for the teaching of Dakota language, history, and culture, helping write critical legislation to open up federal funding for tribal community colleges.^[49] Tateyuskanskan was—with Waziyatawin—one of the organizers of the first Dakota commemorative march. In other words, the women were far from ignorant about the harms associated with Fort Snelling. Nevertheless, they saw an opportunity to use the revitalization project, and specifically the reimagining of the grounds, as a way to reestablish a connection to Bdote, to draw a line from Dakota creation stories and traditional society through to the present and to rekindle relationships with the native plant and animal communities that, from their perspective, rightfully should never have been displaced. As Tateyuskanskan put it, “All these plants, all these animals, they’re a nation. And as a nation, they have the right to existence.”

5. ‘How to Heal a Place’ (2017 - 2019)

While the full DCC met monthly, the members of Ina Maka began meeting with the design team on a weekly basis. Some members, like Tateyuskanskan and her mother, came from as far away as Sisseton, South Dakota, a three-and-a-half hour drive each way. With travel costs reimbursed and meals provided by MNHS, participants spent all morning and afternoon working through various aspects of the design. “We would come the night before, stay all day, and then leave in the evening,” Tateyuskanskan said. “It was just, like, work, work, work.”

Led by TEN x TEN, meetings with the Ina Maka generally dealt with a specific topic, which the landscape architects communicated to the group ahead of time. “[The members] would do a ton of homework and come prepared, and that just made every minute feel so productive,” Williams recalled. What those meetings looked like evolved over the course of the design process. Showing maps and plans proved less effective than 3D models and physical mock-ups that allowed the group to evaluate “materiality, scale, [and] graphic legibility in situ,” Rockcastle said. Site walks also allowed the team to geolocate the site plans using GIS, creating more visceral connections for the participants and allowing the group to “map out a sequence of experience.” When participants weren’t able to meet on site, the team relied on MIRO to review ideas virtually.

A key question for the Ina Maka was whether the arrival experience could be oriented in such a way that a visitor first caught a glimpse not of the fort but of the Mississippi River—known to the Dakota as HaHa Wakpa (literally “curling river”) and itself considered a relative—as a way of establishing the landscape’s primacy. Other priorities included reclaiming as much of the site from concrete as possible; creating spaces for outdoor education and truth-telling, particularly around the 1805 treaty and the US-Dakota War; and prefacing any experience of the buildings with an understanding of the site, first and foremost, as Dakota homeland.^[50]

One of the more difficult days was designing an outdoor wokiksuye, or place of remembrance, for the two Dakota leaders who were hanged at Fort Snelling in 1865. After the Dakota surrendered in 1862, two men named Sakpedan and Wakan Ozanzan helped hundreds of Dakota women, children, and elders—those who had escaped capture—flee to Canada. Sakpedan (whose name translates to Little Six) and Wakan Ozanzan (Sacred Light) were eventually captured, drugged, and imprisoned at Fort Snelling, where they were tried in a military court. They were executed on November 11, 1865.^[51] MNHS already had done extensive research using archival imagery to approximate the place of the hanging, and DCC members had expressed their desire to create a memorial or wokiksuye to Sakpedan and Wakan Ozanzan there. “We went together to that site, and we stood with the photographs, and we talked about how to heal that place, how to make it a safe place to come and pay respect, and to honor the memory of these men,” Rockcastle recalled.

The design team ultimately recommended shifting the memorial space a few hundred feet west, away from the diamond, to avoid a Minnesota Department of Transportation easement that followed the route of the tunnel running below the fort. “We didn't want to build this thing, and then in five years have MnDOT come through and be like, ‘Well, it's ours so we're gonna do whatever we want,” recalled Marais Bjornberg, the director of capital planning at MNHS, who at the time was managing the Fort Snelling project.^[52] Together, the members of Ina Maka and the design team imagined a memorial space that consisted of seating blocks of cut limestone arranged around a central fire slab that could be used to make prayers or offerings. The participants formed a circle with their bodies, stepping forward or back to settle on a size that felt right to everyone present.

To shield the wokiksuye from the presence of the fort, the group came up with the idea of a raised berm that would encircle it and be planted with species that the Dakota consider protector plants: sage and red willow and sweetgrass—“things that they can all see and smell and recognize right away,” Rockcastle said.^[53] The idea, Rockcastle explained, was that the wokiksuye and other sensitive areas would be “wrapped in layers of those plants, almost like a hug or a blanket,” a protective bulwark against an otherwise oppressive landscape.

6. ‘Presencing the River’ (2017 - 2019)

This kind of collaborative, relationally informed, site-based design process extended to nearly every aspect of the landscape plan. Over the course of eighteen meetings, plus eight meetings with the full DCC, the landscape architects worked with the Ina Maka to finalize the landscape concept and to design several more interpretative landscape features. The first was a bronze inlay of the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, set into the concrete of a new welcome plaza between the new parking lot and the fort buildings. From there, a prominent path guides visitors to a new river overlook, where interpretive panels along a wide lean bar educate visitors about the natural and cultural history of the river valley and highlight themes of interconnectedness.

The second was an artwork interpreting the far-reaching effects of the initial 1805 treaty, which deprived the Dakota of their lands around Bdote. Together, the women collaborated on the design of a permanent outdoor artwork and exhibit that serves as a commentary on the United States’ refusal to uphold the treaty’s terms. “There was a conversation that the treaty, and treaties in general, needed to be one of the first stories told here,” Rockcastle said. Set just off of the main path and arranged in a broken circle, the final artwork consists of a fence-like structure made up of stark, black pickets that each bear a letter from a portion of the treaty: “The United States promise on their part to permit the Sioux to pass, repass, hunt or make other uses of the said districts, as they have formerly done, without any other exception, but those specified in article first.” While selected words are mounted to wood slats and easily legible, other words are affixed only to the black steel pickets and so fade and become obscured depending on the angle of the viewer. The line in question “was a statement within the treaty that everybody sort of knew by heart,” Rockcastle said, “and was referred to as the piece that was not upheld.” As at the wokiksuye, the treaty exhibit is surrounded by protector plants, to create a sense of safety and welcome for Dakota visitors.

As the group’s ideas coalesced into constructable features, and as other members of the DCC weighed in on the main exhibit of the new visitor center, Rockcastle says the design team realized that they weren’t just dealing with the landscape. “We needed space for these stories, and those are different,” she said. “So we wrote and we got additional scope to do interpretation together.” Under the new contract, the members of Ina Maka were named as consultants and compensated for their work developing interpretive narratives and concepts for visual art. The group met another eleven times to hash out the language and location of the outdoor interpretative elements.

Outside of the custom features, the landscape architects were instructed to erase as much of the “Western influence” on the site as possible and to restore the grounds to something closer to what the Dakota might recognize as endemic to their homeland. “We were really intentional about changing the landscape by removing the turf grass and cement structures and replacing it with the plants that are of this place,” St. Clair explained. “We spent lots of time talking about what plants wanted to live with other plant relatives.” The Ina Maka requested that the landscape prioritize natural materials, and so seating is predominantly limestone boulders or blocks and rough wood benches, while secondary paths made from crushed gravel weave naturalistically through the landscape of restored prairie and oak savanna. “We tried our best to erase some of the more orthogonal, militaristic lines that were inscribed on the site,” Rockcastle said. “Presencing the river as you moved along was [also] really important.” The final circulation is designed so that at three different points, visitors are brought to the edge of the bluff and treated to expansive views of the Mississippi River as it flows toward the confluence.

The intersections of these circulation routes themselves were symbolic of the idea that the fort’s many histories would continue to collide. As McCleary put it, “You can walk the Native path, and that’s going to literally cross with the veteran path.”

7. ‘Those Who Are Afraid of Change’ (2019)

In February 2019, with the Fort Snelling design process in its final leg, Kate Beane took the stage at a TEDx event at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center to talk about the power of place names. “This land is full of beautiful Dakota names,” she told the audience. “But…there are some places where the names were changed in order to assert power over us, to claim the land, and to disconnect us from our ancestral homelands, to sever our ties.”^[54] From the outset of the Fort Snelling revitalization project, a concern of the DCC’s had been the inclusion of Dakota words in the visitor experience, including in the name of the historic site itself.^[55] For Dakota people, place names can contain a wealth of cultural information and often have deep meaning, in contrast with Western societies that tend to name places after famous pe^[56]ople. As Wilson puts it in her memoir Spirit Car, “...white men did not understand the power that comes from naming something, from calling forth its essence and giving it a name, so that this child, or this river, or this moon can be known properly.”^[57]

After multiple discussions between MNHS and the DCC, the historical society decided to install new signage that referred to the fort complex as “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote.” “It's saying, ‘Fort Snelling at the confluence of two rivers,’” Tateyuskanskan explained. “It’s just a geographical term. We weren’t trying to have all Americans say, ‘This is Maka Cokaya Kin.’ We weren’t going anywhere near there.” New, temporary signage was installed in 2017. If MNHS and its tribal partners thought that the alteration was immaterial enough to avoid controversy, however, they were wrong. The signs quickly attracted the attention of Minnesotans who saw the signs as an effort to “rewrite,” “revise,” or “erase” history.^[58] For members of the DCC—some of whom testified in front of the legislature about the importance of the name—the debate was as painful as it was laughable. “The thought that [the name] would change had people freaking out, and saying things that are very ironic for a Dakota person to hear, like, ‘They're trying to erase us,’’’ St. Clair said.

As the controversy grew, MNHS went to Facebook to defend its decision: “MNHS has not changed the name of Historic Fort Snelling, but…we added the words ‘at Bdote’ to signage to signify the location of the site and to add broader historical context to the multiple complex stories shared there.” As the head of the Department of Native American Initiatives and an outspoken advocate for preserving and reinstating Dakota places, Beane too argued in favor of adding “at Bdote,” saying that it was a necessary corrective to more than a century of erasure. “In order to come home, we have to be able to have a voice—and we're speaking up, and we're becoming educated, and we're becoming more involved in the public spaces in which we live,” she told Minnesota Public Radio. “And so there is going to be pushback on that, I imagine, from those who are afraid of change.”

The pushback came most powerfully—and most consequentially—from Republican lawmakers in the Minnesota state legislature. In 2018, not long after the new signs were erected, MNHS submitted a $30 million funding request from the legislature for the implementation of its revitalization plans for Fort Snelling. Lawmakers approved just half that amount. It is unclear how much of a role the controversy played in the legislators’ decision. “It was never stated directly,” MNHS’s Kevin Maijala said, ‘but some of the conversations that were held in committee certainly indicated that the chair of that committee was concerned about our direction and interpretation.” In 2019, Republican state senator Scott Newman led an effort to slash MNHS’s overall budget, proposing a cut of $4 million (18 percent of the society’s annual operating budget) in retaliation for what he called “revisionist history.”^[59] (The spending bill with the cuts passed in the Senate but failed in the Democratically controlled House.)

For members of the DCC, the threats to MNHS’s budget suggested that the legislature’s earlier decision to approve just $15 million for Fort Snelling was a pointed message. “I [felt] that the funding consideration had to do with how much Dakota language was being included, and I can't understand that,” Tateyuskanskan said. “There’s [Dakota] place names all over Minnesota. Why is this a sore spot?”

St. Clair has an answer: “Historic Fort Snelling belongs to white people,” she said at one point. Other culturally significant Dakota sites that have been renamed—such as Lake Calhoun, whose name was changed in 2017 to Bde Maka Ska, or St. Anthony Falls, which in 2024 officially became known as Owámniyomni—do not hold the symbolic power of Fort Snelling. From its initial reconstruction in the 1960s, Fort Snelling has been a key site in the shaping of public memory and the preservation of a dominant—i.e. white settler—historical narrative, a narrative that supports the state’s settlement by Euro-Americans and the expulsion of its Indigenous people.^[60]

The historical society’s effort to include the phrase “at Bdote” on signs at Fort Snelling culminated in a series of public listening sessions, hosted by MNHS in communities around the state. Following the listening sessions, and the threats to the organization’s budget, the board of MNHS decided against pursuing a formal name change. The signs came down. “That was really heartbreaking,” Wilson said. “To not have the name shift was a huge disappointment.”

8. ‘They’re Not Here’ (2019-2022)

The historical society’s reversal cast a dark and all-too-recognizable shadow over the process governing Fort Snelling’s revitalization. Participants were forced to question whether the organization would actually put its weight behind Dakota initiatives. “How do you feel valued at the same time that you're fighting these losing battles?” said Jackson, the tribal historian who helped repatriate the hanging rope. “As revolutionary as [the DCC] felt, it was kind of short-lived, because even as we were cooperating, and having these planning meetings, and meticulously working our way through all of these different themes, we weren’t making any headway on the big, big issues.”

Following the state’s appropriation of just $15 million for the revitalization, a value-engineering exercise pushed several desired elements, such as the renovation of the former prosthetics lab into a community space and demonstration kitchen, to future phases. Other important elements, however, including the treaty artwork, the wokiksuye, and the prairie restoration were retained. Construction commenced in 2020 and was completed in the spring of 2022. But as the plants went in and the interpretative signage was installed, certain changes revealed themselves—changes that DCC members didn’t recall approving. In some cases, carefully vetted language had been rewritten; in others, such as the wokiksuye, the Dakota language was missing altogether. The sign next to the memorial read simply, “A Place to Remember.” There was no mention of the hanging.

“We wanted the Dakota word, wokiksuye, which means ‘to remember,’ but they didn't want to use that,” Tateyuskanskan said. For her, the changes were part of a much longer history of half measures and broken promises. “[This] has happened to so many tribal communities over and over. That's what was hard here. It was like, here we go again. You want to have our voice out there, but then you say, ‘But we don't want you to say that.’”

A grand opening for Fort Snelling’s new visitor center and landscape was held on May 28, 2022. The event featured words by the Reverend Fern Cloud, a Dakota artist and pastor, as well as Amber Annis, who had succeeded Kate Beane as head of the Department of Native American Initiatives.^[61] Again, however, members of the design team were dismayed: besides Cloud, not a single member of the DCC was present. After two years of intensive collaboration and statements about the importance of community partners, it was as if the group didn’t exist.

“They did have a person who was able to stand up and speak to the Dakota presence on the site, but it wasn't a person I’d ever met before,” Rockcastle said.

According to Tateyuskanskan, the DCC never received an invitation to attend the opening, much less to participate in it. Instead, they were invited to take part in a separate, smaller pre-opening event. She can’t say for sure, but she suspects that after the controversy with the name change and the threats to the organization’s funding, MNHS may have wanted to distance itself from the DCC and how involved its members were.

For Rockcastle, the DCC’s absence spoke volumes about the historical society’s commitment to the relationships that had been built and revealed the limitations of the partnership agreement that had been established between MNHS and the DCC. Ultimately, she said, the project failed “to meet the larger ambition” of redrawing the balance of power between the Dakota and MNHS. At the opening event, she recalled thinking, “If this was going to work the way that it needed to work, these people would be here supporting this. The whole point was to rebuild those connections, and they're not here.”

9. ‘It Didn’t Go Far Enough’ (2022 - 2025)

As Fort Snelling exemplifies, history is not static. Nor is it neutral. The narratives that we celebrate in public—whether in schools or at historic sites like Fort Snelling—become the scaffolding upon which society is erected. They provide us with foundational ideas about who we are. They give meaning to our lives. This is why history has sat and continues to sit at the center of so many recent political debates. Whose history gets to be told in public, and for what purpose, is at the core of both the national movement to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces and the backlash to it. It is similarly at the core of the current Trump administration’s efforts—under the spurious label “DEI”—to erase the contributions of Black, Indigenous, gay, lesbian, trans, female, and other non-white individuals to American society, and to “restore truth and sanity to American history” by potentially re-erecting Confederate monuments.

The revitalization of Fort Snelling coincided with the beginning of a period of intense national debate around the purpose of monuments and memorials, spurred in part by the 2015 mass shooting by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump in 2016. Between 2015 and 2021, close to 150 Confederate monuments were removed from the public spaces of American cities, in an acknowledgment of the ways in which emblems of past injustices serve to reinforce social hierarchies and hegemonic narratives. “When they added ‘at Bdote’ to the sign at Fort Snelling, the way the backlash occurred may have been the closest thing to a precursor to what's happening across our country right now,” Williams said recently. However, the origins of Fort Snelling’s reclamation can also be traced to more distant periods of history. How should we evaluate its success in this context? What lessons, if any, can be gleaned from the Minnesota Historical Society’s approach to working with descendant groups, including the Dakota Community Council, in broadening the history that is interpreted on-site? And what sort of lasting impact did the project have on participants and ongoing conversations around the legacy of colonialism and its relationship to public memory?

The design process undertaken for the revitalization raises important questions not only about how to build equitable relationships with members of a marginalized community, but also about how to maintain them over time. It prompts us to ask, who, ultimately, is accountable to whom? The co-design process developed for Fort Snelling did not succeed in all its objectives, while other community prerogatives, such as the removal of the fort, were never entertained. Understanding where the process worked—for instance, in bringing historically oppositional groups together for honest conversations—where it faltered, and why, can be instructive for both designers and community groups, especially tribal entities, engaging in similar work.

Among the Dakota community members who spoke for the purposes of this case study, there is broad agreement that the actions taken by MNHS to convene and work alongside the DCC represent a significant step forward for an organization that, for much of its history, has been overtly hostile to Indigenous forms of knowledge and scholarship. Even Samantha Odegard, the tribal historic preservation officer who declined to participate in the revitalization, offered that she might be more willing to engage with MNHS today. “I'd spend more time considering it,” she said. “I’d probably still say no, but I would take a few moments [to think about it].” Participants generally painted a portrait of an institution that had undergone a period of self-reflection and whose senior leadership, at the time at least, had committed itself to rethinking the historical society’s relationship to the communities whose histories it held in trust. At Fort Snelling, that commitment manifested internally in MNHS’s decision to create the Department of Native American Initiatives, and externally in its community-based approach to planning, design, and interpretation at the historic site. The presence of Kate Beane and the formalization of the NAI further provided sustained pressure to rethink conventional approaches to community engagement and relationship-building.^[62]

It is also true, however, that this institutional introspection followed decades of Native activism, changes to federal policy—including 1990’s Native American Graves and Repatriation Act—and a public’s shifting relationship to the past. In Minnesota, public efforts to memorialize events in the Dakota’s history, including the commemorative marches of the 2000s, fixed these events in the collective consciousness. The Tear Down the Fort Campaign took these efforts one step further, classifying Fort Snelling as a site of genocide and demanding the fort’s removal. Books such as Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press) and other academic works had also begun to recontextualize the US-Dakota War, challenging received narratives of Indigenous aggression and attempting to reckon with atrocities that had long been sidelined, excused, or outright ignored in public histories of Minnesota’s settlement.

Though collective actions such as the campaign to tear down the fort were unsuccessful in their purported aims, they played an important role in helping create the conditions for MNHS’s increased engagement with Dakota people and for the inclusion of narratives at Fort Snelling that previously had been omitted.^[63] If one of Waziyatawin’s critiques of MNHS’s handling of Fort Snelling was that the truth about what took place there was either suppressed or selectively told, then the revitalization project succeeded not only in making these histories explicit but foregrounding the Dakota’s long-standing relationship to the place now occupied by the fort.

Even as the creation of the DCC was legitimately innovative in the context of MNHS, however, the partnership ultimately failed in delivering outcomes that could be unreservedly embraced by tribal participants. Among other things, the arrangement failed to acknowledge that institutions like MNHS and sites like Fort Snelling are constantly evolving. Despite being created to guide decisions on any MNHS property that falls on Dakota treaty land, it remains unclear when, how often, or for what types of decisions the DCC is convened. The women of Ina Maka could recall only one or two times in the years since the revitalization that the DCC had gathered. Members of the design team, some of whom have remained engaged with MNHS on other projects, shared similar perceptions; they felt that the DCC had all but “evaporated” since the work at Fort Snelling had been completed.

Despite a detailed MOU governing the partnership, there was, and remains, an unequal balance of power between MNHS and the DCC, with the historical society able to decide how and when and on what topics it engages the tribal group. As evidenced by the last-minute changes to interpretative signage, it was the historical society, not the tribes, that retained final decision-making authority for improvements at Fort Snelling.

“It started as this really great model, and it did ultimately direct what got built,” Rockcastle said. “Everybody I have talked to continues to say that good work happened; good relationships were built. However, it didn't go far enough.”

Postlude: ‘Ripple Effects’ (2025 -)

The assertion that “good relationships were built” is a consistent sentiment among participants at Fort Snelling. The connections—both between individuals and organizations—that were forged at Fort Snelling have been critical to subsequent and ongoing Indigenous reclamation or reinterpretation projects throughout the Twin Cities. “The work that was done inside those planning rooms has extended to other projects,” said Jackson. “The things that were happening [at Fort Snelling] had a ripple effect.”

He pointed to Mni Owe Sni, formerly known as Coldwater Spring, a 27-acre sacred site less than a mile from Fort Snelling that is also tied to Dakota creation stories. For centuries a place of diplomacy for Minnesota’s native peoples, in 2006, an effort to get Mni Owe Sni designated as a Traditional Cultural Property—a historic site whose eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places rests on its association with the cultural practices or beliefs of a living community—failed when the National Park Service chose not to support its nomination. Tribal representatives, including Jackson, continued to push for the site’s recognition as a TCP, and in 2023, the nomination was accepted. NPS is now in talks with the tribes and MNHS—which owns an adjacent parcel—about a joint management agreement, giving the Dakota a significant amount of control over what happens at the site. According to Jackson, it was through the Fort Snelling process that MNHS and the National Park Service began to understand the lands around the Dakota’s connection to the confluence, and that mutual trust between all three entities was built. “The process allowed us to value one another,” he said. “Now we're seeing the good work, camaraderie, and trust built [during] the DCC time period extend into some of the greater work that's being done.”

The landscape architects, too, say that the Fort Snelling design process informed subsequent projects at Indigenous sites in and around the Twin Cities. Since 2019, an increasing number of public RFPs ask for tribal engagement strategies resembling those MNHS developed with TEN x TEN and Quinn Evans for Fort Snelling. At the same time, the designers have taken the lessons learned at Fort Snelling and applied them to subsequent work.

For a cultural landscape study of Indian Mounds Regional Park, a 111-acre linear green space located along the Mississippi River that preserves some of the last remaining Native burial mounds in the state, the City of St. Paul requested that Indigenous communities be included in a fairly typical engagement process. In their response, TEN x TEN and Quinn Evans pushed the city to consider an alternative approach. Informed by the way the DCC was occasionally sidelined by MNHS, the landscape architects proposed that a small group of tribal members, including Franky Jackson and Samantha Odegard, be hired as part of the design team, allowing TEN x TEN and Quinn Evans to ensure that their input on design decisions was honored. Additionally, echoing Kate Beane’s push to take engagement meetings to the places tribal members lived, the landscape architects advocated for an initial round of meetings to be held at tribal communities. “We said, before we do anything else, [the city] is going to meet people where they live,” Williams said. “That was going to tell us what the process needed to be,” Rockcastle added.

The study culminated in a messaging strategy that encourages appropriate behavior by non-Native visitors and help reestablish spiritual and cultural connections between Dakota and the park. From Williams’ perspective, Fort Snelling gave “both Dakota people and people who own or manage land a different ability to visualize how they might be involved in the work,” she said. “With Indian Mounds, after being at the table for Fort Snelling, the Dakota were more active in asking to be at the table. And that is affecting how these different agencies and organizations are considering bringing them to the table. So it has had an effect.” Indian Mounds has since succeeded where Fort Snelling stalled: this past May, the St. Paul Parks and Recreation Commission voted to approve a proposed name change, from Indian Mounds Regional Park to Wic̣aḣapi, the Dakota word for cemetery.

More broadly, the debates occasioned by the revitalization of Fort Snelling and the proposed name change seem to have catalyzed a shift in public consciousness around the spiritual significance of the confluence and the need for tribal leadership in stewarding historic sites within the area. Around the time that the Fort Snelling revitalization effort was concluding, a local nonprofit focused on daylighting St. Paul’s Phalen Creek and stewarding a historic site called Carver’s Cave hired Maggie Lorenz, who is of Dakota and Ojibwe descent, to lead the organization. Acknowledging the deep ties the Dakota have to Carver’s Cave—a sacred site known as Wakaŋ Tipi that is associated with the burial mounds at Wic̣aḣapi—the organization changed its name from Lower Phalen Creek Project to Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi and instituted a requirement that a majority of its board members be of Native descent. As of this year, the cave site is known officially as Wakaŋ Tipi and the area containing both the cave and burial mounds as Imnížaska.

If Fort Snelling was a catalyst for greater representation for Indigenous people within Minnesota, and for the reclamation of Indigenous place names within the Twin Cities, the women of Ina Maka say not to discount the ripple effects that might still come from the cultural connections reestablished at the fort itself. They view the transformation of the landscape as a symbol of positive change, which for young people is also a message of hope. The native plants and memorial spaces installed as part of the revitalization project, St. Clair said, “have tied us to the Bdote Mnisota, even if Minnesota is reluctant to hear it. We have made that connection.” For her, the subversive message imbued in the present-day landscape, with restored connections to the river and flourishing communities of plant relatives, is that “the land and our caring for it is stronger than the fort,” she said. “It’s more abiding.”

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Darlene St. Clair, Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan, Yvonne Wynde, and Diane Wilson for sharing their language and culture, and for bringing me into the processes and ways of knowing that informed this project. Thank you to Brenda Williams and Maura Rockcastle, whose honesty and critical reflection were foundational to this case study, and to Kate Beane, whose openness and generosity were a gift. A special thanks to all the tribe members who spoke to me for this case study, including Cheyanne St. John, Franky Jackson, Samantha Odegard, and Amber Annis. Thank you to Kevin Maijala, for the many hours he spent fielding questions and digging up archival data, as well as to Marais Bjornberg and Nancy Cass at MNHS. Finally, thank you to Noemi Ho, who translated some very shoddy sketches into a beautiful set of diagrams, but who more importantly brought every bit of her curiosity and passion for environmental justice to our collaboration.

Suggested Citation:

APA (7th ed.)

Schuler, T. A. (2025). Case studies in design. PennPraxis, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

MLA (9th ed.)

Schuler, Timothy A. Case Studies in Design. PennPraxis, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 2025.

1. Footage of the protest can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n197uAy1-80↑

2. Many of the details describing the Dakota’s experience of the events of 1862 and 1863, including oral historical accounts come from Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, editor, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century (Living Justice Press, 2006) and Diane Wilson, Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past (Borealis Books, 2006), as well as the Minnesota Historical Society’s Web page for Historic Fort Snelling: mnhs.org/fortsnelling. ↑

3. The Dakota’s connection to Bdote similarly comes from multiple sources, including firsthand ethnographic research and interviews and the Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report (Quinn Evans Architects, 2017. ↑

4. Waziyatawin, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, 4. ↑

5. Gwen Westerman and Bruce White, Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 15. ↑

6. In-person interview, Gabrielle Wynde Tateyuskanskan, November 11, 2024. ↑

7. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (Riverhead Books, 2019), 45. ↑

8. The validity of that treaty has been disputed. The agreement was signed by representatives of just two of the seven council fires, raising questions about whether the remaining tribes actually supported the treaty or had agreed to its terms. ↑

9. Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (Living Justice Press, 2008), p30-31. Waziyatawin notes that even after Congress’s “unconscionable” actions, it took the United States 15 years to provide payment. ↑

10. Still, the 1805 treaty didn’t immediately spell doom for the Indigenous people of Minnesota. Indeed, for some tribes, this period was marked by productive exchanges of knowledge and goods. Writing of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, which took place between 1804 and 1806, David Treuer, an Ojibwe author and historian from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, notes: “They covered thousands of miles of territory, traversed mountains, battled weather and starvation and uncertainty, and, rather startlingly, engaged in no bloodshed or strife with the dozens of tribes they met along the way. Nor did the tribes seem keen on fighting [them]. They wanted to bring the Americans into their spheres of knowledge, too, because in one way or another they knew the Americans were a future with which they would most certainly have to contend.” Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, 89. ↑

11. ↑

12. Defrauding the continent’s Native peoples was an explicit part of the US government’s strategy. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to Wiliam Henry Harrison, then the territorial governor of Indiana, of his plans to force the assimilation of Indigenous tribes. First, the US needed to separate the people from the land. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands,” Jefferson wrote, “which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.... In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens or the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.” A full copy of Jefferson’s letter is accessible via the Indiana Historical Bureau at https://www.in.gov/history/for-educators/download-issues-of-the-indiana-historian/lewis-and-clark-indiana-connections/extending-americas-reach/president-jeffersons-letter-to-william-henry-harrison/↑

13. Wilson, Spirit Car, 14. ↑

14. Wilson, Spirit Car, 15. ↑

15. The most thorough and accessible account of the hanging is found via the website hosted by MNHS and dedicated to the US-Dakota War of 1862 (though the number of man on the tribunal is listed elsewhere): https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/aftermath/trials-hanging↑

16. These details, and those that follow, come from Waziyatawin, In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, p43-66. ↑

17. Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report, 2–50-54. Some scholars have claimed that the camp at Fort Snelling is better described as a “transport camp” and that the barricades and armed guards were necessary for the protection of the Dakota against a violent settler populace. The many attacks that occurred en route support the conclusion that the Dakota were indeed targets of vigilantism, but it does not explain the violence committed by the soldiers themselves, nor the accounts of rape or bodily mutilation committed by US soldiers inside the camp. ↑

18. A copy of Ramsey’s message can be accessed at https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/multimedia/message-governor-ramsey-legislature-minnesota-delivered-extra-session-september-9↑

19. The details of the fort’s expansion are explored in Chapter 2 of the Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report. One of the many historical quirks revealed by the CLR is that for all its supposed strategic importance, the US changed its mind about the utility of Fort Snelling several times throughout its history. Less than 30 years after its construction, government officials sold the fort to an early real estate speculator named Franklin Steele, who planned to develop the fort’s lands into a new city. The land sale was eventually deemed illegal by a Congressional investigation, and yet Steele remained in possession of the property until the outbreak of the Civil War, during which time he “donated” the land back to the government in exchange for a contract outfitting the fort. Fort Snelling was recommissioned as a training post in 1861, just months before the outbreak of the US-Dakota War. ↑

20. The same period saw the development of the Upper Post, a much larger collection of military facilities northwest of the original “diamond” that briefly became the headquarters of the Department of the Dakota, a division overseeing all military actions in Minnesota and the Montana and Dakota territories. Throughout the 20th century, the old fort was regularly pillaged for building materials, even as Minnesota residents became increasingly interested in preserving its history. In 1938, for instance, one of Fort Snelling’s original towers was converted into a museum, managed by the Minnesota Historical Society. ↑

21. The Minnesota state legislature approved funds for the reconstruction in 1964, with work completed over the next roughly 10 years. Around this same time, ownership of the historic fort site and the surrounding area, including below the fort along the river, was transferred from the federal government to the State of Minnesota. ↑

22. Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like?, 98. ↑

23. Phone interview, Cindy McCleary, March 24, 2025. ↑

24. Email correspondence, Kevin Maijala, Senior Vice President, Education & Interpretation, MNHS, March 17, 2025. ↑

25. Phone interview, Kevin Maijala, November 1, 2024. ↑

26. A Facebook profile for a group called Take Down the Fort! preserves some of the group’s actions and promotional materials, including a link to footage of the occupation that was uploaded to YouTube. https://www.facebook.com/p/Take-Down-The-Fort-100079295990326/↑

27. A brief description of the pipestone marker is included in the Historical Marker Database: https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=227845 Contemporary observations about the continued use and character of the memorial were made by the author during a site visit in November 2024. ↑

28. George Blue Bird, “Wicozani Wakan Ota Akupi,” In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, 98. Tracing as best they could the route taken by the prisoners in November 1862, the marchers carried with them wooden stakes decorated with red prayer flags and the names of two Dakota ancestors who made the journey. One prayer flag was placed along the roadside every mile for 150 miles. “One of the elders would read the names out loud in Dakota and then translate them into English, and we would all offer prayers and tobacco [offerings] after the stake was pounded into the ground,” Diane Wilson, a Mdewakanton Dakota descendant, recalled in a 2006 essay about the march. ↑

29. The marchers laid a sage wreath upon the pipestone marker, and songs, spiritual dances, and a communal meal of traditional Dakota foods like wild rice, corn soup with buffalo, wozapi (fruit pudding) followed. These details come from Waziyatawin, “A Journey of Healing and Awakening,” In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, 115. ↑

30. Waziyatawin, “A Journey of Healing and Awakening,” In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, 116. ↑

31. The resolution was mentioned by several interviewees, including Brenda Williams of Quinn Evans Architects and Samantha Odegard of the Pezihutazizi Oyate or Upper Sioux Community. ↑

32. Phone interview, McCleary, March 24, 2025. ↑

33. Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report. ↑

34. This statement and the following recollections of Williams’ and Waziyatawin’s conversations come from a phone interview with Brenda Williams, June 14, 2024. ↑

35. Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report, 5-1. ↑

36. Historic Fort Snelling Cultural Landscape Report, 5-18. ↑

37. Kate Beane’s recollections of her time as a fellow with MNHS, and later the director of Native American Initiatives, come from a Zoom interview, February 6, 2025. ↑

38. In-person interview, Iyekiyapiwiƞ Darlene St. Clair, November 11, 2024. ↑

39. Dakota refugees settled in communities in Canada, North and South Dakota, and Nebraska. ↑

40. Mary Beth Faimon, “Ties That Bind,” In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, 91. With regard to Fort Snelling, Kate Beane said she found that individuals who lived outside of Minnesota were, in some cases, more willing to engage with Fort Snelling: “They had a different relationship with the space,” she said. “They didn't have to drive by it everyday.” ↑

41. In some cases, Beane followed up with a hard copy of the invitation. ↑

42. Email correspondence, Kevin Maijala, March 17, 2025. ↑

43. Phone interview, Maura Rockcastle, June 17, 2024. ↑

44. The purpose and timeline for the development of the Wi’wahokichiyapi were shared by Kevin Maijala via email, March 17, 2025. The full contents were not made public. Quinn Evans’ Williams, who joined the design team after completing the CLR, said that the relationship was very clearly defined, including what would happen if the parties didn’t agree. If MNHS ignored the DCC’s guidance, for instance, the partnership could be dissolved, or the two parties might enter mediation, the specifics of which were also outlined in the MOU. ↑

45. Phone interview, Samantha Odegard, November 13, 2024. ↑

46. Phone interview, Franky Jackson, March 17, 2025. ↑

47. Hannah Yang, “Minnesota Historical Society will repatriate the ‘Mankato Hanging Rope’ to the Prairie Island Indian Community,” MPRNews, May 28, 2024 https://www.mprnews.org/story/2024/05/28/minnesota-historical-society-mankato-hanging-rope-prairie-island-community↑

48. In-person interview, Diane Wilson, November 11, 2024. ↑

49. The detail about Wynde serving on President Carter’s presidential commission on education was relayed to me by her daughter, Tateyuskanskan, on November 11, 2024. ↑

50. These details come from multiple conversations with members of both the design team and the Ina Maka subcommittee. ↑

51. This history was shared in-person at Fort Snelling by members of the Ina Make subcommittee but is also part of MNHS’s historical interpretation of the US-Dakota War: https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/us-dakota-war↑

52. In-person interview, Marais Bjornberg, November 12, 2024. ↑

53. In-person interview, Yvonne Wynde, November 11, 2024. Red willow bark is traditionally mixed with tobacco to make cansasa, which is used for smudging and other ceremonies. ↑

54. Kate Beane, “The Lasting Legacy of Place Names,” TEDxMinneapolis Salon, February 2019 https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_beane_the_lasting_legacy_of_place_names↑

55. One tribe member argued that naming Fort Snelling was a form of repair: “You erase us by taking away our burial mounds, you take away everything culturally on the landscape, you erect this fort—at least allow us to name this place.” ↑

56. ↑

57. Wilson, Spirit Car, 17. ↑

58. A newspaper columnist accused MNHS of ignoring statutory requirements, which state that only the Minnesota legislature can change the name of a historic site. A reader countered that “at” was a preposition and therefore the new signs did not constitute a change to the name “Fort Snelling” at all. At one point, the signs were vandalized, obscuring the words “at Bdote.” ↑

59. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/fort-snelling-name-change-sparks-budget-cut-threat/89-686b0a6e-4560-4468-9daf-20a76e0db0fe↑

60. This is clear in white Minnesotans’ repeated description of Fort Snelling—a 19th century military installation that for decades was picked over for salvage—as the “state’s most valuable historical asset.” As Grace Clark observed in a 2020 article for the Macalester College journal Tapestries, “For many white Minnesotans, especially those whose families have been here for several generations, Fort Snelling is the epitome of the Twin Cities.” ↑

61. Email correspondence, Kevin Maijala, March 17, 2025. ↑

62. The presence of Kate Beane and the formalization of the NAI further provided sustained pressure to rethink conventional approaches to community engagement and relationship-building. ↑

63. For the most part, the individuals who joined the DCC did so with an understanding that certain options—namely the removal of the fort—were not on the table, and chose to participate anyway, though some did so with the hope that incremental changes may someday lead to larger transformations in the future and many may have preferred that the fort be demolished. As Kate Beane put it, “If tearing down the fort was a possibility, I'd be the first person there with a hammer.” ↑