HISTORIC FORT SNELLING

AT BDOTE

Minneapolis, Minnesota

12 acres, 2017-2022

Dakota elders tell of the creation of humans occurring in our homeland of Mni Sota Makoce (Land Where the Waters Reflect the Clouds), but specifically at the place called Maka Cokaya Kin, or the Center of the Earth. This place is at Bdote, which means the joining or juncture of two bodies of water and in this instance refers to the area where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi River. The Dakota have ancient and sacred relations with the Bdote landscape.
Historic Fort Snelling is a short distance to either Minneapolis/St. Paul downtown core and it adjoins two park systems - Fort Snelling State Park and Minnehaha Regional Park. Perched on the bluffs above the rivers, the site offers powerful visual connections to the rivers and provides an opportunity to convey the deep history of the site through tactile connections with the landscape.

Cultural connections to this place hold great importance to communities who were not engaged in decisions about the site’s use and treatment over the past century. Collaboration incorporated listening to and co-designing with the people whose passionate connections to this place provide the basis of its significance.
Essential to the revitalization project was extensive collaboration through partnership with the Dakota Community Council (the DCC, a representative entity of multiple nations with ties to this land), the Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs), the Minnesota Historical Society (client), community participants, and an Exhibit Advisory Committee. The DCC requested acknowledgements of the site as Dakota Homeland, of the site’s traumatic and complicated history, and of Indigenous knowledge, particularly in the way plants, landscape, treaties, and water are presented to visitors.

As a symbol of colonialism and destruction for Native culture, it is essential for this landscape to become a space where Dakota and other Native peoples can feel like they belong. Prior to this project, commemoration and interpretation focused on stories of westward expansion and military history. The design team worked with the Ina Maka subcommittee, DCC, and Indigenous artists to incorporate Dakota language, knowledge, and worldviews into the narratives, images, experience, and dynamic prairie landscape, now providing informed, honest, empathic, and respectful accounts of a difficult past while offering spaces for reflection and healing.