The Prairie Island Indian Community has recognized 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 solution 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 gear constructed within the Nineteen Sixties over an space the place mounds are suspected following state tips.
Red Wing Mayor Mike Wilson mentioned the venture is a pure extension of the work executed 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 doubtlessly 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 venture is many years within the making. The mounds have 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 tons of of years, some as old as 2,000 years, in keeping with Jackson.
Area Dakota have urged Red Wing for many years to protect the burial mounds at A.P. Anderson Park. There was some work executed within the Eighties and 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 world 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 important spots locally, 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 previously to respect Dakota land however the renewed relationship is bringing advantages to each side.
“This is a distinct time, and so we simply take a look at this in another way than earlier than,” she mentioned. “I can not actually converse to the previous however I do know the work that we have executed over the previous 5 years.”
City officers knew the playground gear obstructed among 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 short lived canine park close by and plans to put in a substitute park a while subsequent yr.
For Jackson, the burial mound venture means a brand new alternative for space Dakota to study their very own historical past.
“We all have a larger accountability to be higher stewards,” Jackson mentioned.
