A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. — Genesis 2: 10-14
‘The Place Where Clear Water Reflects the Clouds’
An interpretive marker sits next to the brick pavilion near the burial mounds at Indian Mounds Regional Park in St. Paul. In Dakota and English, the marker describes the philosophical foundations of the Dakota Oyate, the first people of Minnesota. It shows an hourglass, a representation of the world above and the world below, reflecting each other. “As above, so below.” The phrase from which we derive our home state, Mni Sota Makoce, isn’t merely a one-way reflection of “clouds-in-water.” Looking up at the night sky (before light pollution was a thing), people saw a river reflected in it: the Mni Sota Wakpa, the Minnesota River. Missionaries working among the Dakota in the 1850s were told that “the mouth of the Mni Sota Wakpa lies immediately over the center of the earth and under the center of the heavens” (Westerman and White, Mni Sota Makoce, Minnesota Historical Society Press, p. 4). Erin Griffin, a professor of American Indian studies at South Dakota State University, states “We are told that we were brought here to this land from the stars to the place where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet. This place known as Bdote is our place of genesis.”
The Genesis story told by the three Abrahamic faiths is of a mythical garden where the first humans were placed, where God and people lived together — until the people disobeyed God’s rules, and were expelled. Eden, as I’ve understood it, isn’t a real place but merely an allegory for the alienation between the human race and its Creator. But in that passage from Genesis, the reference to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers jumps out at me, as real as the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia, the birthplace of Western Civilization.
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers still exist in modern-day Iraq, but there is no Garden of Eden awaiting our return. Between the Highway 55 bridge and the Interstate 35E bridge near St. Paul, however, the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers converge. At that spot, at the tip of Pike Island, a sandy spit of land attracts boaters, who often beach their boats and carouse there. This is the place, at the mouth of the Minnesota River, that Dakota people believe to be the center of the universe.
And you can get there by bike. Well, most of the way, anyway.
To (Two) Place(s) Often Visited
One of my favorite recreational rides from where I live in St. Paul is to make a loop around Fort Snelling, to Minnehaha Falls and return home via the Sam Morgan Regional Trail. But these sacred spaces in the vicinity of the Fort are compelling in and of themselves, and so I planned a trip with friends from St. Clement’s Episcopal Church to explore some of them. On a Sunday morning in October, we headed to Harriet Island Regional Park, across the river from downtown St. Paul. The bike trail that traverses the dike separating the park from the West Side follows the Mississippi River to the southwest, through Lilydale Park and along the pristine, spring-fed Pickerel Lake. We picked up the Big Rivers Regional Trail where it crosses Water Road. The trail boasts a smooth surface, a gentle uphill climb, and spectacular views of the river along the white sandstone bluffs of Lilydale and Mendota Heights.
Where the trail crosses Highway 13, we entered historic Mendota, a tiny town that lays claim to being Minnesota’s oldest city. Henry Sibley, Minnesota’s first territorial governor, lived here, as did Jean-Baptiste Faribault and others — people associated with the fur trade of the early 19th century. Their houses are maintained as historic sites, close to the river and out of sight of the bike trail. We could have continued on, under Highway 55, but we headed instead across highways and county roads to Oheyawahi, the “place often visited.”
In the early 1800s, riverboat pilots paid careful attention to landforms to navigate. When they approached the fork in the Mississippi, they would have seen a hill with a protuberance on the left, across St. Peter’s River (now called the Minnesota River) from the fort. “Pilot Knob Hill” became a navigational landmark to European Americans, when it had long been a gateway to the spirit world to Native peoples.
Seth Eastman, an officer and an artist stationed at Fort Snelling, made several renderings of Pilot Knob Hill. Some of them depict burials in progress. Burial scaffolds hold the bodies of Dakota people closer to the sky, to be closer to that “thin place” in the hourglass, the “Spirit Road,” or Milky Way. Family members would return in sufficient time to inter their loved one’s remains in the earth. In death, Dakota people, originally of the “Star nation,” return home.
Since the treaties of Traverse de Sioux and Mendota in 1851, and subsequent abrogation of those same treaties following the Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people lost all claim to the land they held sacred. Today, a portion of Pilot Knob has been designated as a preservation site, but only within the past 20 years. It is being restored as an oak savannah, and portions of the site are maintained for ceremonial purposes. But the balance of the hill, 125 acres, is dominated by Acacia Park Cemetery. The Masonic Order of the Twin Cities purchased the land in the mid-1920s with plans to establish a cemetery for its members and their families. The cemetery removed the top 20 feet of the hill’s “knob” for “landscaping purposes.”
It’s hard to miss the irony of a cemetery being built on top of an Indian burial site. But that theme is repeated in all of these sites: The same geographic features that attracted one group of people to them also draw the ones who came after. And so, for both peoples, a cemetery on a hill brings us closer to the Heavens.
A Place of Life and Death
On our way back down the hill from Oheyawahi, my friends and I stopped to take in the grounds of the Church of St. Peter. The spire of the Catholic church, dating to 1858, is recognizable from miles around. Jim Bear Jacobs, creator of Healing Minnesota Stories, a guided tour through many of these same sacred Dakota sites, points out that the church spire rises above the bluff across the Minnesota Valley from Fort Snelling. Bdote, the center of the Dakota universe, is flanked by a church steeple and a military installation, two symbols of white, Christian conquest. Jacobs’ tour, however, begins on the grounds of St. Peter’s, where the Mendota band of Mdewakanton host an annual powwow in September.
The band has ongoing access to the grounds. We found sage planted here and there near the edge of the bluffs, perhaps used for ceremonial smudging. Nearby, a stand of bur oak trees is planted in the formation of a medicine wheel.
These particular trees are significant relics of a protest on the grounds of another sacred site we will get to shortly.
The pedestrian access to Sibley Memorial Bridge has recently reopened after work was completed to resurface the path and replace the deteriorating railing. There is more of a buffer between the driving and pedestrian lane than existed before, so it feels a bit safer traversing the mile-long bridge. Entrance to the bridge is right by the powwow grounds, so our group forged ahead on this blustery day with 40 mph wind gusts.
The drive between the entrance to Historic Fort Snelling and that of Fort Snelling State Park involves a series of twists and turns, two highways, an exit ramp and about five miles distance by car. The biking distance between them is just a fork in the trail and a very steep hill. Our group high-fived one another upon successfully crossing the bridge without being blown off it and plunged down the hill to the entrance to Pike Island.
Numerous accounts tell the story of Dakota women traveling to Bdote from any of the many villages along the river in their last stages of pregnancy, hoping to deliver their children in the same place where they believed human life on earth began. Some accounts say that women would choose to come to Wakan Tipi, the cave complex beneath Indian Mounds Park, where a sandy beach lies adjacent to an underground lake. Others describe people seeking an island in the river, such as Witi Wanagi, or “Spirit Island,” which has since been destroyed for boat navigation. Yet another account of childbirth takes place at Nicollet Island. Bdote, as it turns out, is not a geographic island point such as the one to which we’re headed. It is an expansive term that describes the entire stretch of river through the Twin Cities.
But of course, the banks of the Minnesota River near Pike Island, at the foot of Fort Snelling, also played host to a concentration camp, to which U.S. military regiments forced Dakota women, children and elderly to march in mid-November 1862 at the conclusion of the U.S.-Dakota War. Over 1,700 people were crowded into an area of two to four acres. Hundreds of detainees died from disease over the winter of 1863. Survivors of the internment camp, along with warriors who had been spared execution at the mass hanging in Mankato, were sent into exile in the spring of 1863.
Access to Pike Island is restricted to foot traffic, and so we secured our bikes to walk its foot trails. The loop around the island is 3.7 miles, with “rungs” connecting the loop in two places. As we walked, our conversation drifted to national trends toward isolationism and nationalism. With an election looming, our group lamented that institutions with which we are associated — the church and the state — are increasingly using the language of “in-group” and “out-group.” Liberties associated with those who “belong” are denied to those who don’t. But the Dakota have a phrase that permeates their worldview: “We are all relatives.” Dakota culture has a very expansive view of relationships, extending beyond human connections to the natural world, and even to the world itself. We pulled a page from our own prayer book and said a prayer for the human family, before moving on.
From the trail on the Minnesota River side of Pike Island (“Witi Tanka,” or Big Island, in Dakota), the spire of St. Peter’s church winked down at us, a symbol of both conquest and reconciliation.
A Conduit for a Water Spirit
The newly refurbished Minnehaha Trail begins at the base of the cliff, immediately below Fort Snelling. Like the Big Rivers Trail, it takes us all the way up the bluff along a gradual incline. This time the river views are more sylvan in nature, with foot trails branching out here and there through woods, and up and down ravines. The popular Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park is down there, where little islands, streams and a pebble beach beckon canines and their humans.
A wayfinding sign points to Coldwater Spring. We scrambled up a footpath through tall grasses and found a stream that flows from an algae-covered reservoir. At the other side of this small holding pond is a deteriorating stone “spring house.” Sure enough, a spring gushes forth from inside the well.
A source of fresh water is important for everything living nearby, and the proximity of this particular spring to Fort Snelling was key. Soldiers camped here during the Fort’s construction, and once it was built, a well tapped into the same aquifer. Soldiers stationed here didn’t suffer from water bourne illnesses like dysentery as their counterparts did in other military installations, according to Hamp Smith, author of Confluence, the History of Fort Snelling and a member of St. Clement’s, when we chatted just before our ride that Sunday morning. That wouldn’t hold true today. A sign at the spout warns of E. coli contamination. In a built-up city like this one, we tend to corrupt what Nature gives us.
Coldwater Spring, or Mni Owe Sni, is significant to Dakota people in other ways. It is said to be a home to the water spirit, Unktehi. Variously depicted as a serpent or a monster, Unktehi brings both blessings and catastrophe to humans who depend on life-giving waters, or who suffer calamity from floods, capsizing waves or contamination. The water spirit is associated with underground springs, such as those that feed the cave complex at Wakan Tipi, as well as the sometimes treacherous waterfall we know as St. Anthony Falls, but was formerly known as Owamniomni. The spring at Mni Owe Sni is thought to be a conduit to the Minnesota River, such that Unktehi may travel between them.
This location is important in more modern protest movements. When the Highway 55 expansion in the late 1990s threatened a stand of trees near the grounds here, a number of activists occupied the site. Four bur oak trees, known as “grandfather trees,” stood in the way of the highway. They were ultimately destroyed, but not before arborist Dan “the Oak Man” Kaiser took cuttings from the trees and had them grafted onto saplings. Those saplings were replanted on the grounds of the historic St. Peter church, mentioned earlier, and stand today as an enduring symbol of the protest movement for Indigenous rights.
Place Names That Missed the Mark
My friends and I continued on to the end of the trail at Minnehaha Falls, where we checked to make sure the waterfall was still flowing, which it was. Of all the sacred places we visited, this does not exactly count as one of them. The sculptural reference to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” is certainly meaningful to many people, but less so to Indigenous folk, from what I understand.
Longfellow composed his poem shortly after the City of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1855. A native New Englander, Longfellow never set foot in Minnesota, and wrote “Song of Hiawatha” strictly from his imagination. While the poem makes reference to specific places, it betrays overtones of Manifest Destiny that many find problematic today. Still, the place itself draws people together in a beautiful setting. On this particular day, with fall colors at their peak, we ended our 25-mile loop with sun-kissed tree tops and a pinch-me-perfect rainbow, a far cry from the punishing wind gusts we experienced high above the river valley earlier in the day.
Giving Thanks
At this time of year, we traditionally list our blessings and offer thanks. Many of the blessings we may enumerate — home, hearth, and happiness — came at the expense of others who inhabited this place before us. Not coincidentally, November is also the season to recognize Native American heritage.
In that spirit, I offer thanks for ongoing efforts to build bike-friendly infrastructure, such as we enjoyed on that beautiful October day. I am grateful for all of the efforts to decolonize my adoptive home state: from renaming local landmarks to their original names, to decentering European-American interests at historic sites, to retiring Minnesota’s racist state flag and seal. I am hopeful that two Dakota-focused interpretive centers will come to fruition soon: one in Minneapolis and its counterpart in St. Paul. And I hope that all of us who trace our origins to the confluence of rivers find some reflection in one another. It seems like such a small step, shifting my religious discipline to “love my neighbor” to greeting them “as a relative.” I believe it is a step worth taking.
All photos by Ed Steinhauer unless otherwise noted.