The Prairie Island Indian Community has identified for many years the place the our bodies of its Dakota ancestors are buried: inside A.P. Anderson Park in Red Wing.
Thanks to a recent settlement with the town of Red Wing, the burial mounds in that park west of downtown on Highway 61 are on their method to being restored.
The metropolis of Red Wing shuttered a canine park inside A.P. Anderson final week as a part of a plan to reclaim the land for Dakota use. City officers are additionally within the technique of tearing down old playground tools constructed within the Sixties over an space the place mounds are suspected following state pointers.
Red Wing Mayor Mike Wilson mentioned the undertaking is a pure extension of the work accomplished over the previous yr to show the neighborhood about its Dakota roots.
“It’s been a really academic yr,” Wilson mentioned.
It’s step one in a imaginative and prescient to make it a part of an academic space for the neighborhood. Prairie Island officers envision a inexperienced area and probably reconstructing the burial mounds, although revamping the park is probably going years away.
“That’s the dialog we are able to have when there’s tribal voices on the desk,” Franky Jackson of Prairie Island’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office mentioned.
The undertaking is a long time within the making. The mounds had been first recorded in 1885 by T.H. Lewis, the primary archaeologist to systematically survey historic websites in Minnesota. Lewis surveyed greater than 12,000 mounds all through the state within the Eighties and Eighteen Nineties.
There was once about 3,000 mounds within the Red Wing space, however almost all of them have been misplaced over the years as the town was constructed over them. But the mounds that stay date again a whole bunch of years, some as old as 2,000 years, based on Jackson.
Area Dakota have urged Red Wing for many years to protect the burial mounds at A.P. Anderson Park. There was some work accomplished within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties to map out Dakota cemeteries, however the metropolis did not take motion at the moment.
The metropolis and Prairie Island did not come collectively on historic tasks within the space till 2019 when the town moved to ban graffiti on He Mni Can (pronounced heh-meh-NEE-cha), a bluff alongside the Mississippi River.
Known to residents as Barn Bluff, the realm is taken into account sacred Dakota floor. Since then, Red Wing and Prairie Island have partnered to acknowledge He Mni Can. The teams signed a memorandum of understanding in 2022 to protect extra historic and culturally vital spots in the neighborhood, together with the burial floor at A.P. Anderson.
Michelle Leise, a neighborhood liaison for the town of Red Wing, mentioned the town has failed prior to now to respect Dakota land however the renewed relationship is bringing advantages to either side.
“This is a distinct time, and so we simply take a look at this in a different way than earlier than,” she mentioned. “I am unable to actually converse to the previous however I do know the work that we have accomplished over the previous 5 years.”
City officers knew the playground tools obstructed a few of the burial mounds within the space, however they solely realized in regards to the canine park points in August. The metropolis has put up a brief canine park close by and plans to put in a substitute park a while subsequent yr.
For Jackson, the burial mound undertaking means a brand new alternative for space Dakota to find out about their very own historical past.
“We all have a better accountability to be higher stewards,” Jackson mentioned.
