Genesis and Genocide: The Dakota Effort to Reclaim Fort Snelling

Timothy A. Schuler

SUMMARY

Can design be an expression of a nation’s sovereignty? Can it aid communities in the pursuit of justice? The revitalization of a Minnesota historic site known as Fort Snelling, a site associated with both the origins of the Dakota people and their exile, became a test of these questions.

Constructed in 1824 following a treaty with the Dakota, Fort Snelling is today operated by the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) as a state historic site. In 2014, the historical society began the process of reimagining the visitor experience and with its design team developed a community-based process for broadening the historical narratives that are told at Fort Snelling. For Dakota tribes, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers is known as Bdote Mnisota and is theplace at which their people first emerged on Earth. Located at the confluence, Fort Snelling is the site of a former concentration camp that housed Dakota prisoners from 1862 to 1863. It is a place both of spiritual significance and of deep traumas—traumas that until recently were not memorialized on-site.

To acknowledge and begin to interpret this complexity, MNHS helped facilitate the creation of the Dakota Community Council (DCC), a group of approximately 25 Dakota individuals that became formal partners in the revitalization effort, working with designers to craft exhibition narratives, conceptualize new public artworks, and guide the reclamation of the fort’s grounds from that of a military-era landscape to one that is representative of the Dakota’s deep connection to Bdote and Mni Sota at large.

Against a backdrop of intense debate around whose history gets to be told in public, and for what purpose, the creation of the DCC is significant, and raises important questions not only about how to build equitable relationships with members of marginalized communities, but also about how to maintain them over time. However, the co-design process did not succeed in all its objectives. Understanding where the process worked, where it faltered, and why, can be instructive for both designers and community groups engaging in similar work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Timothy Schuler 🡭, an award-winning writer and critic, examined the Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote 🡭, a collaboration between the Minnesota Historical Society, the Dakota community, and a design and cultural landscape preservation team led by TEN x TEN 🡭 that restored a Minnesota river confluence of deep Indigenous significance.

Schuler’s work focuses on the intersection of the built and natural environments. He is a contributing writer at Places Journal and an editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. His writing also regularly appears in Metropolis, Bloomberg CityLab, The Architect’s Newspaper, and FLUX Hawaiʻi, among other outlets.

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