Last month, Scott Anfinson, Minnesota’s state archaeologist, opened the first of four monthly lectures on Minneapolis history with some bad news: there is no prehistoric archaeology in the city.

“There has never been an archaeological dig of a prehistoric site in Minneapolis,” Anfinson said. “The rapid expansion of the city basically destroyed most of the archaeological sites here.”

While archaeological signs may be scarce, the speakers that shared the Downtown Central Library stage with Anfinson on July 22 proved that the words and culture of the area’s pre-settlement population are alive and evident.

The July event was the first of four scheduled to take place at the library through the end of October. The series, part of the city’s ongoing sesquicentennial celebration, will trace the history of Minneapolis from its prehistoric roots to the future of architecture. Local historians, writers and educators will serve as presenters during the series.

The remaining lectures are:
Aug. 19 — Building Minneapolis, 6–7 p.m. and Minneapolis: Late 19th and Early 20th Century Growth, 7:20–8:20 p.m.
Sept. 23 — Our People and Their Stories, 6–7 p.m. and New Stories from New Arrivals, 7:20–8:20 p.m.
Oct. 21 — Buildings and Their Tales, 6–7 p.m. and Architecture and the Future, 7:20–8:20 p.m.

Visit the Central Library website for more information about upcoming lectures or to hear recordings of the July 22 event.

Before ‘history’

Anfinson buzzed through a slide show outlining Minnesota’s last 14,000 geographic years, describing the placement of burial mound sites along waterways and lakeshores throughout what is considered “prehistoric” times — a period in which written records were not maintained.

The earliest prehistory, Anfinson said, is evidenced by a few projectiles found on the surface of the ground. Late prehistoric evidence exists from burial mound distributions, but archaeologists no longer excavate burial mounds and have not done so “for over 30 years in Minnesota,” he said.

The existence of plentiful burial mounds is evidence that people were moving into the metro area during the Woodland period, from about 500 BC to 1000 AD, Anfinson said. Key areas for the Dakota people were Lake Minnetonka, which had about 600 mounds located in groups; Lake Mille Lacs, which had mounds all around them (90 perecnt of which are now destroyed); and the Red Wing area. Villages existed along the Minnesota River and along the Mississippi River below Fort Snelling, with a few small villages on Minneapolis lakes.

Nowadays, Indian Mounds Park in St. Paul is the easiest place to see what is left of the burial mounds in the Twin Cities.

In 1650 the French fur traders arrived, Anfinson said, and that was the end of the prehistory period. At that time, the Dakota were located mostly north of the Twin Cities, and the Iowa were located mostly to the south, making the current metro area a zone between the two groups at the time of contact.

Anfinson left the audience with this cryptic caveat: “Beware the chamber of commerce approach to history,” he sad, citing stories of Indian princesses dying while going over waterfalls.

“You never hear about Indian princes,” said Anfinson.

Let’s talk

Linguist Arlo Omaha, with his measured melodic voice and primer on Lakota Dakota pronunciation, was like a change-up pitch after Anfinson’s information fastballs.

His first order of business was to teach the right way to say Iowa — with a short “i” sound instead of a long one, so that our southern geographic neighbor sounds like “Ee-yo-wuh.” Omaha then popped off lots of other linguistic tidbits.

A single word with a few syllables could have an extensive and elaborate meaning For instance, Lakota means “I am your true friend and I am willing to die for you.”

“It just goes on and on,” said Omaha.

Just like pronunciation, stories can be different, Omaha said. He has read much and concluded that storied history is inconsistent in the print media.

There are two “Cloudman” stories, Omaha said, adding that one of the Cloudmen is his great-uncle. “It’s not all the same,” he said.

Omaha then shared a bit of his personal story. He spent his first seven years of life as a native child before being sent to missionary school, where he was “grabbed by the ear by a nun and told not to speech my language anymore,” Omaha said. “My mouth was washed out with soap.”

The jingle dress

The period during the 19th and early 20th centuries were difficult years for the Ojibwe and other Indian people in Minnesota, explained Brenda Child, a history professor at the University of Minnesota. Poverty and health issues combined with aggressive, predatory land consolidation, allocation and relocation legislation and practices, and the withdrawal of the protective trust relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Then, around 1920, a remarkable tradition arose in Ojibwe culture: the jingle dress dance.

As Omaha intimated, story origin can be a varied thing, and the history of the jingle dance is no exception. In Child’s version, a young Ojibwe girl became very sick. Her father saw a vision on how to save her life and learned about the dress and dance through a dream. Dad made the dress (a cloth dress with rows of metal cones sewn across it) for his daughter. He asked the girl to dance just a few steps “in which one foot was never to leave the ground” while wearing the dress. His daughter started to feel better, got a little stronger and kept dancing. After her recovery, she continued to dance in the special dress her father made for her.

Nowadays the jingle dress dance is a fixture on the powwow circuit. The very act of dancing in the dress, Child said, constitutes a prayer for healing and is an example of hidden spirituality and ritual taking place in a public forum. It is a “creative approach to adversity, illness and poor health, with a foundation solidly rooted in traditional Ojibwe song and dance.” said Child. “Its introduction rallied a communal spirit among Ojibwe people and sustains Indian people of diverse tribal backgrounds today.”

Child explained that the appearance of the dress coincided with two things: the World War I Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and the 1921 “Dance Order” – the “last gasp of assimilation politics” before Roosevelt-era reforms (the so-called “Indian New Deal”) took place. The Dance Order order outlawed ritualistic dancing, including powwow dancing and the Sun Dance.

Child said there is little doubt women ignored the rule, as there are pictures of them wearing the dress in every decade since the 1920s.

“It was, in effect, anti-colonial,” Child said.

The new practice, considered an innovation consistent with Ojibwe traditions of song and dance, flourished under this ban on ritual dance. It spread through Minnesota out to the Dakotas, down into Iowa and eventually throughout North America.

In essence, women applied the jingle dance ritual “like a salve to fresh wounds,” Child said,

Urbanization over the last 50 years

The second hour started with a talk by W. Roger Buffalohead, who helped establish the University of Minnesota American Indian Studies department. He was its first director.

Buffalohead came to the Twin Cities in the spring of 1970 after a friend and colleague encouraged him to help develop the program. The fledgling department had to serve both the native and academic communities equally well. Teaching Ojibwe and Dakota languages as part of the curriculum was crucial, as the languages were on the verge of dying out due to assimilation strategies.

“The process (of assimilation) nearly did its job,” Buffalohead said. “We needed children speaking their language again.”

Historically speaking, relocation from the reservation to an urban center was initially voluntary, Buffalohead said. If you agreed to get some training, he explained, the BIA lent financial assistance for a time to help with basic needs, rent and insurance.

But relocated people found themselves in what were the beginnings of ghettos in these large urban areas. Once the assistance stopped and the Indians took a hard look around at their urban surroundings, they had trouble adjusting. There was a lot of movement back and forth between these large urban communities and the reservation by people lonely and needing community.

Economic justice, said Buffalohead, was one of the key things that had to occur if Indians were going to successfully adapt to an urban environment.

“Out of that [need] came the foundation of an activist movement that began to change the whole perception that native people had of themselves,” said Buffalohead. “This was the kernel of the activist movement.”

‘Recognize the Indian people’

When Buffalohead was done, Clyde Bellecourt, life-long Indian activist and co-founder of the American Indian Movement, made his way to the podium, his hair knotted in a long black and silver braid that trailed well down his back. Once there, he let loose with his version of Native American Urbanization.

If you did not know before hearing him speak, you knew when he was done that his anguish and outrage have no bottom, even after all of his 71 years, his successes, his Sun Dance powwows, and his cleansings. Still he burns inside.

Bellecourt told stories about his parents and their humiliation in the throes of relocation politics, and he recounted his own years spent in a reform school in Red Wing. He said the bars were his community center when he came to Minneapolis. He would sing “Rock of Ages” at the mission to score a bowl of macaroni soup and a PB&J sandwich.

Bellecourt became overwhelmed with anger as he talked about the cultural scourge that was the 1963 textbook “Minnesota: Star of the North,” and he took a swipe at Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak, whom Bellacourt said failed to mention the American Indian people in his Aquatennial speech this year at the annual Minneapolis celebration, which Bellecourt called an “all-white event.”

“I asked him a week ago, before I went to Sun Dance: ‘Say something! Talk about reconciliation. Say something!’ He told me, ‘I don’t know how to apologize to the Indian people.’”

“I’m not asking you to apologize,” Bellecourt told the mayor. “Just say something! Recognize the Indian people. Recognize the contributions that they have made. Recognize all the work that is being done today.”

Activist, scholar and author Laura Waterman Wittstock, who introduced both Buffalohead and Bellecourt, summed up the span of history covered at the lecture.

“When I was looking at the slides of what was called the prehistoric period, in our case, we’re still here,” Wittstock said. “And so we have this wonderful ability to not only have lived in the past [to be] but here in the present and able to talk to you about culture and things that have happened in the modern era.”

last revised: August 13, 2008

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