In 2011, Dakota artist Mona Smith set out to change that with the Bdote Memory Map, which includes a spoken glossary of Dakota terms, resources for educators and videos of Dakota people sharing their knowledge of the Bdote.

Many Dakota people consider the Bdote their place of origin. For centuries, women traveled to give birth at the confluence on an island called Wita Tanka (Great Island). In English, Wita Tanka has been named Pike Island after Zebulon Pike, who negotiated the 1805 Treaty and signed it here. That treaty ceded 100,000 acres of Dakota land, including the Bdote, where the U.S. government built Fort Snelling. It was signed by only two of the seven Dakota leaders present.

In November 1862, in the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War, over 1,600 elders, women and children were forcibly removed by the U.S. Army from their homeland, marched 150 miles northeast and imprisoned in a concentration camp at the Bdote. Hundreds died over the winter. Their families buried them inside the teepees where they were held, the only unfrozen ground. That spring, the U.S. government boarded the survivors into steamships and sent them into exile at the Crow Creek reservation in present-day South Dakota.

In 2011, I was developing K-12 curriculum in the Office of Equity in St. Paul Public Schools. I was asked to create a field trip based on the Bdote Memory Map. In collaboration with local Dakota educators and the Minnesota Humanities Center, I developed the Bdote Learning Experience, which is now a required unit in St. Paul’s fifth-grade social studies curriculum. Teachers learn directly from Dakota educators by taking the Bdote field trip, then lead their students on Bdote trips. Since 2011, over 20,000 St. Paul students have been taught to understand Minnesota history from a Dakota perspective. The Minnesota Humanities Center began offering Learning From Place: Bdote, its own public version of the Bdote field trip in 2013. Since then, over 2,700 people have taken one of these trips.

What follows is a conversation with three trip leaders, each of whom brings their personal connection with Dakota history and culture to the trips.

Ramona Kitto Stately is Dakota, from the Santee Dakota nation, who have lived in exile since 1863. Ramona is one of the project’s original collaborators and has led over a hundred Bdote trips. Her great-great-grandmother, Pazahiyayewin, gave birth at the Bdote in 1860. Two years later she was imprisoned there in the concentration camp before being exiled. From 2002 to 2016, Ramona helped organize the biennial Dakota Commemorative March, a 150-mile, six-day walk that retraced the forced march of 1862 in order to bring healing to Dakota communities. 

Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan (Tara Perron) is a Lower Sioux Dakota and White Earth Ojibwe artist and educator. She comes from a lineage of women whose understanding of Minnesota was built foraging plant medicines. Her great-great-grandmother was the medicine woman for Dakota Chief Little Crow’s band, and ran the first ferry service across the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls. 

Marlena Myles is an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota tribe in North Dakota. A self-taught artist, she often combines elements of traditional mapmaking with current technology. Her augmented reality installations throughout the Twin Cities metro area reveal the significance of different locations in Dakota history and culture. Her Dakota Land Maps remap portions of Minnesota with traditional Dakota place names.

Mapping involves stepping back and looking at place from different perspectives. How does that bigger lens contribute to your own understanding of place?

Ramona Kitto Stately: When we use traditional knowledge, we understand that the land is a relative, not a resource. We’re not limited to five senses, and we use the idea of communicating through energy. The land tells us a story, both visually and through this energy of communication. By standing on the land, we can learn its history and stories through what our relatives tell us.

The Dakota have been in Minnesota for thousands of years, and our observations reveal a different way of knowing place than white narratives written by white men who had no connection to place. In Minnesota, the invisibility of the Dakota began with the removal of the people, and with them the oral histories, the language and the connections to place, through systematic land theft and genocide. One way to erase history is by removing Indigenous people and creating a new story, a new history of place. 

Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan: My family has land where we forage in Ely, Minnesota. We talk about where to [forage] based on how things looks and the plants we know. It’s like, “When you go past the wild blueberries, you take a right.” That’s how we remember things. Thankfully the wild blueberries are still at the same spot. But, over hundreds of years, plant locations change. When I talk to my great aunties about foraging along the same path my grandmother foraged, it’s hard for them to explain where to go. The medicines aren’t here anymore, or they’re not in the same place, so we have to go by heart memory. 

I am invested in our plant nation and uplifting the voice of the plant medicines. I’m fighting for the right to harvest on our traditional homelands, which is now illegal under Minnesota law. Uplifting traditional medicines and teaching the ways to the young ones are important to me. What does that look like for us as Dakota, and for Native people in general, to be able to forage and harvest on our own lands?

Marlena Myles: The work I create teaches people about the Dakota’s significance to the land. I’ve created a series of Dakota land maps that include the historic and present-day names of places. I also use modern technology, such as augmented reality, to show how our stories and understandings of the world are embedded within the land itself. We didn’t have a written language prior to the arrival of Europeans, so geography stores our history and our knowledge, and all the different ways that we see ourselves as Dakota people. Modern technology can help people see the world through Dakota eyes.

I grew up in South Minneapolis in a place called Little Earth. I didn’t see many places around that showed it was Dakota homeland. When I created these maps, I felt like it was important to include modern places in Dakota, because anything can be seen from a Dakota perspective. Every now and then someone will make a comment like, “I didn’t know they had light rail back in the day.” They only see Native people as being “back in the day.” I’m like, “Yeah, we still live today, so why should we talk about ourselves as only in the past?” It’s important to merge the past and present, because for Dakota people, the past and present and the future are always with us.

What are some of the complexities of the concept of mapping?

RKS: When we place a map on top of somewhere, it doesn’t challenge us to dig deeper or understand place. A map causes us to think in one or two dimensions, rather than include more holistic ways of knowing, like our star knowledge and connection to our burial mounds. What does the name Indian Mounds Park tell us? Dakota people know that something powerful, something very sacred, lives in this place. Non-Native people who make the maps don’t understand that third dimension. 

MM: As Dakota people we see all things as interconnected. A lot of the places on earth have names that relate to the plants that grow there to [indicate] areas where people would harvest. Some of the plant knowledge that Tara’s ancestors taught her helps guide us through the seasons, what we should be harvesting, what ceremonies to have and when to tell stories. 

Our creation story on Earth at Bdote, where the Mississippi River meets the Minnesota River, that’s also connected and told to us by the stars. We believe what’s above is reflected below, a system of thought called kapemni. The Mississippi and Minnesota rivers are reflected above as a spirit road, which is the Milky Way. That’s the road we travel when we come into this world, and it’s the road we leave to return to our ancestors. We have the Big Dipper, which we call the Oceti Ŝakowiŋ constellation. The Oceti Ŝakowiŋ is also the name for Dakota/Lakota people—the seven bands. The stars will always remind us how to be good relatives, how to take care of the next generations and how to honor our ancestors.

How is mapping related to renaming?

RKS: One of the things that a [non-Native] map does is erase Indigenous people’s history. So, when we look at our sacred sites, our place of creation—which we call Bdote—on a map it’s called Fort Snelling. That makes it more difficult for us, as people who have been exiled for 160 years, to go back and say, “What do each of these places mean?” Bdote reminds us in our DNA, our soul memory, that this is a place of power. It reminds us of our traditional lifeways, our ways of knowing. Right next to Bdote we have the island Wita Tanka, known as Pike Island. That name erases the fact that this is a birthing island, a place of such power that we brought life into this world at that place. The plants and other relatives remind us of [that place’s power], because of the medicines that grow there. 

TW: When I think about mapping, I think about how our Dakota language brings life to the space that we’re talking about. When you rename something after a white man, it’s like a statement of ownership. To me it feels prideful and egotistical. All renaming was very purposeful and methodical, and it did exactly what it was intended to do. It erased the memories of the life that was there prior. 

MM: Joseph Nicollet traveled through Minnesota in the 1830s and created maps of this whole area. He was friends with Dakota and Ojibwe people, as well as my great-grandfather, Chief Waanatan. Nicollet’s map is the only map created by a European that includes Native names. He understood that it was important to document the ways we talk to the land and how we talk about the land.  He felt honored to give my ancestors a copy of the map when he completed it because he felt like it belonged with Dakota people. Maps of Minnesota created after that time period were all based on his map. A lot of the mapping I do comes from Nicollet’s map that he created with Dakota people. 

People might think renaming Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska, which the Minneapolis Park Board voted unanimously to do in 2017, is a modern way of thinking. But even in the 1850s there was a push to keep Dakota names for places. Some people wanted to rename the Minnesota River the St. Peter River, and some old maps show that. Naming things after the first white person to see it erases Native history. We might think that the times we live in are very special to us, but it’s important for people to realize that renaming or keeping the Indigenous names is not a modern phenomenon. That’s the reason why the Minnesota River still has its original name.

Does mapping ever benefit Native people?

MM: Not all mapmaking has been bad for Native people. We have the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Land Trust because the reservations were plotted out, and we know who owns which land. To this day, my mom gets papers every month that show all our ancestors who originally owned the land, and which of their descendants are still related to us through that land.

TW: I also see that side of it. On my Ojibwe side, after my dad’s passing, we were given names of Ojibwe ancestors that we’d never seen in writing because the government bought one of my great-grandmother’s family lands. We were given a narrative, a story about our history, because the government kept maps. 

MM: Maps can erase Native people, and they’re used as a system of colonialism. But there’s also complexity embedded within those systems that still have a Dakota perspective, [such as the perspective on] creating friendships. That’s how the first maps that Nicollet made were created. And creating kinship—that’s why the land still connects families on reservations to this day.

How are Dakota history and culture being shared throughout generations?

RKS: Oppressed people have a healing journey, and part of that is being able to tell our own story, to learn our language and not be punished [like we were] within boarding schools.

We have generations of healing that I see happening. I see my father, who doesn’t speak Dakota, even though he was born and raised in Santee by parents who spoke fluent Dakota and who made sure that he didn’t go to boarding school. He was also raised by a Dakota-speaking grandfather who was born in 1859 at Wita Tanka, and he was always proud of his Dakota ancestry and history. He was also a rule follower, because that was the way to stay in line—you don’t want to rock the boat. He comes from this generation of rule following, even though he wanted the truth to come out. In his lifetime, he made sure that our family knew our history, which was beneficial to the next generation [because we were able] to do things like the Dakota Commemorative March. 

In 1972 we had the passage of Indian Education and, in 2023, the Minnesota Indigenous Education for All Act. We have the right to learn our history in the public school system and now we’ve got the right to ensure that every person living in Minnesota learns this history. That’s huge, you know? 

Through the generations, you see a little more freedom. Marlena uses technology to tell this story in a new way. Tara tells this traditional story about medicine in a way that’s so visual and energetic that it touches your heart and your soul, and you don’t forget it. I love to listen to the younger generations because they dream bigger. There’s less constraints and more freedom and ability to exercise that power as Dakota people, or as Indigenous people, to tell our stories. 

TW: My grandmother, Haza Inyankewin—whose English name was Betsy St. Clair—was born in the fall of 1802. [Tanaǧidaŋ uses the term grandmother for all great-grandmothers in her lineage.] I hear stories about her canoe ferry service, about how she might have hidden her canoe near a big rock, so she knew where it was if she put it underwater or if she put a whole bunch of plants over it. When my aunties carried seeds in their skirts during the forced march of 1862, that was another way of mapping, right?

I love teaching young kids that a map can be kept in your heart through storytelling. [I say,] “Here’s the United States, and it’s a whole bunch of divisions. If you look at it on a map, it kind of looks like dead space, like a whole bunch of lines. But when you draw Turtle Island as a turtle, each piece means a lot. It’s a whole turtle. It shows that there’s life.”

For my own kids, who are now teenagers, when I tell them stories about my dad, who is no longer here, it’s one thing to tell it in my home. It’s another thing to take them down to the ring of cottonwood trees where he prayed to his mom when she left. Now I go there to pray to my dad, and they can go there to pray for me. The cottonwoods have been here and will be here. 

MM: The Dakota land maps I’ve created are in lots of different schools. At Art-A-Whirl [a local art festival] this year, a little boy who was not Native came up to the table and got super excited when he saw the map. He was like, “This is in my geography class!” He was pointing out every Dakota place that he really liked and was speaking the names in such an excited way. Sharing this knowledge with the younger generations ensures that the Dakota language will be spoken in the next generations, that these places will have their significance renewed. Seeing this non-Native little boy, his excitement, showed me things will be different in the future. Changing your mindset about maps or Native people changes your mindset about living as a human being on this interconnected planet. Scientists are wondering if the Earth itself is a living organism. Native people have always had that way of thinking, but scientists are acting like they’re having this big breakthrough. They’re learning from Indigenous people. I think it’s a way that people are starting to decolonize themselves and heal from colonial narratives, by changing the way they treat Native people and acknowledging Native history. That’s the first step in opening your mindset to being more interconnected as a human being.

Additional Resources 

• Learning From Place: Bdote, is an immersive, day-long walking tour of Bdote sites, led by Dakota educators and open to the public. Visit the Minnesota Humanities Center to find and register for upcoming tours.
• Ramona Kitto Stately authored a children’s book based on her great-great-grandmother’s life, Pazahiyayewin’s Story of Bdote. She is also project director for We Are Still Here Minnesota. 
• Tanaǧidaŋ Winyan owns Blue Hummingbird Woman, an Indigenous heart medicine gift shop in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• Marlena Myles’s documentary, Realms of Resilience, is freely available on Twin Cities PBS.

Sherry Kempf

Sherry Kempf is a writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Minnesota Poetry Calendar, ArtWord Quarterly, The Font, Minnesota Parent and River Teeth. She lives in Minneapolis with her family, and is currently seeking representation for her novel, June in Alaska.