[Screenshot taken from Wakan Tipi: Dakota Sacred Land video produced by Hamline University’s Center for Global Environmental Education.] — [Screenshot taken from *Wakan Tipi: Dakota Sacred Land* video produced by Hamline University’s Center for Global Environmental Education.]

With this blog post we embark on the first of a two-part series dedicated to the Dakota sacred site that propels our work and mission forward. If you have followed Lower Phalen Creek Project, you have likely heard us refer to this site as Wakáŋ Tipi. This month, we begin to explore the complex history of this unique sacred site as we seek a deeper understanding of place and the Dakota language.

Although one cannot fully explain or hope to convey the totality of value and meaning of sanctity in a single blog post, our work is building on itself. Ultimately, Wakáŋ Tipi Center will be a repository for a vast collection of cultural history, knowledge, and traditions that will strengthen the Dakota Nation and educate non-Dakotas about the first peoples of Mni Sota. Over the years, we have described the importance of this place elsewhere on our website, yet much of that is based on documented historical records. Dakota history, on the contrary, is primarily oral. So this first of this two part series is taking a deeper dive into the history of this site by exploring the written records. For the second part of this series, we will interview and convey, with permission, the oral history of this site; stories and perspectives of Dakota elders and knowledge keepers as it relates to this place that we hold so dear.

The first European known to have visited this area was Jonathan Carver. In November of 1766, Jonathan Carver described a “great stone cave called by the Naudowessee¹ Waukon Teebee, or in English the house of the spirits.”² He described the cave in great detail, including the abundance of rock art, or petroglyphs, inside the cave’s entrance. He also noted that “appearances of lights shining at a distance and strange sounds” coming from inside the cave were, at least in part, why the Dakota deemed this place both mysterious and sacred. After staying with the Dakota over the winter of 1766-1767, Carver described his invitation to, and participation at, the annual council meeting of eight bands of the Dakota, which took place on May 1st, 1767 inside of the very same cave he had first encountered the previous November.³

[The interior of the cave, circa 1870. Photograph courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.]

Sorrowfully, Carver’s observations represent the only accounting of this site as it was before European colonization—upon the publishing of his writing in 1778, subsequent European visitors to the area referred to it as “Carver’s Cave.” In so doing, these authors ignored any acknowledgement of the cave’s standing in the Dakota universe.

It is indicative of the erasure of Indigenous Peoples in the United States that we do not find this site again referred to in the Dakota language until 1994—over two hundred years since Carver himself used Dakota name for the place. Paul C. Durand—a non-Native man from Minneapolis, who, drawing largely from field notes and maps produced by Joseph N. Nicollet in 1838 on a survey mission throughout the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers for the United States government, and with assistance from Dakota elders and knowledge keepers—notes the following in his book, Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux:

Wakan Tipi (1) sacred (2) habitation. Carver's Cave below Dayton’s Bluff, St. Paul. The common intersection of the roads of communication between the three original villages was precisely at this place. It was here the dead were brought, placing them on scaffolds then later burying them in the adjacent mounds. - Jos. N. Nicollet⁴

[Durand’s map of the Twin Cities area from his 1994 publication, Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux.] — [Durand’s map of the Twin Cities area from his 1994 publication, *Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux*.]

These observations are further corroborated in Mni Sota Makoce, a comprehensive anthology of Dakota life and lands. Authors Gwen Westerman (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) and Bruce White return us to Jonathan Carver's journals in describing the association between the sacred cave site and the adjacent burial mounds: “despite extensive travels, [the Dakota] always brought the bones of their dead to this location. In [Carver’s] journal he called it ‘the burying place of the Mottobautonway band’, a reference to the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ Dakota.”⁵

From the historical record we find multiple authors referring to the site as Wakáŋ Tipi; these publications also indicate the name of the site was relayed and recorded from Dakota peoples themselves. We also find records of the site’s significance to the people—a place for ceremony, annual councils, and as a final resting place. And we see multiple accounts tying the site to broader Dakota culture, being an “intersection point”, or hub of social and religious activity for the Dakota bands of Mni Sota.

However, even with these written records, so much more about this site is left unwritten. Dakota life—the culture, the language, the geography, and the people—could never be quantified and cataloged in academic records. Beginning with the Treaty of 1805, Dakota lands were acquired, bit by bit, through a series of coerced, improper, unofficial, and to-this-day-unratified treaties with the United States government. Even the agreements made between 1851 and 1858, supposedly guaranteeing permanent protection of Dakota lands along a 10-mile section of the Minnesota River, were nullified by 1862, when the United States proceeded to abandon all pretense of humanity by committing three genocidal acts in the span of one year: executing 38 Dakota warriors in what remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history; confining Dakota women and children to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling, deprived of food and resources, for a harsh Minnesota winter; and ultimately exiling the survivors from their homelands in Mni Sota altogether.

The trauma of this loss, and the century of genocidal policies that followed, including the establishment of reservations and boarding schools, remains in the blood memory, the DNA, of Dakota people to this day. The reclamation of the Dakota language, at one time illegal, is of critical importance to the continuity of Dakota culture today. The University of Minnesota’s Dakota Language program characterizes the situation this way:

Due to federal policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 19th and early 20th centuries that attempted to assimilate Dakota people into Euro-American ways of life, today there are only about five first-language speakers of Dakota who were born and raised in Minnesota Dakota communities. With only about 20 speakers from Dakota communities outside of the state, there are currently more second-language learners than first-language speakers of Dakota.⁶

The precarity of the Dakota language cannot be understated. As Carolynn I. Schommer writes in the foreword to Stephen Riggs’ A Dakota-English Dictionary, “The Dakota language and culture are one and the same. The language is the foundation of Dakota culture.”⁷ The language itself was first transcribed in written form by settler missionaries not for the purpose of language preservation but as part of a United States government policy, the Civilization Fund Act of 1819, of assimilating the Dakota into Christian, English-speaking colonial society. Valiant efforts to preserve the Dakota language were made by scholars like Ella C. Deloria, in direct contradiction of these policies, and various translation and dialect preservation projects continued into the twentieth century. It was not until the Native American Languages Act of 1990 that these efforts were formally and structurally supported.

Returning to the name of this sacred site, Wakáŋ Tipi, and in understanding the meaning of a name, we find certain complexities. For one, “Dakota language structure is much different from the English, and no literal translation can be made from either language into the other.”⁸ Further, the Dakota language has a different grammatical structure than English. In Dakota, for example, you have a Noun-Adjective structure, as opposed to the Adjective-Noun structure of English (ie: whereas in English you would say black dog, in Dakota you would say Suŋka Sapa (Suŋka = Dog, Sapa = Black). When applying this structure to this sacred site, to describe the cave as “dwelling place of the sacred,” (where Tipi = Dwelling and Wakáŋ = Something Sacred/Mysterious), there enters into the conversation some diversity in thought around the name of the site itself. Some Dakota speakers refer to the site as Tipi Wakáŋ, where Tipi is the noun and Wakan is the adjective, describing the dwelling place. Some Dakota speakers refer to the site as Wakáŋ Tipi, where the noun, in this case, or the subject that is most important in this place name, is actually that which is sacred, those sacred and mysterious beings, the word Wakáŋ. Tipi then, would be the lesser noun, a dwelling place, describing where these beings dwell.

This line of thought is also found in Durand’s Atlas of the Eastern Sioux, where Durand does include Tipi Wakáŋ in his atlas of place names, but not as a traditional place name. Tipi Wakáŋ, according to Durand, describes a “sacred house, a church.” He goes on to specify this is the place name used for the early mission house of Samuel Pond at Sakpe’s village.⁹

Durand’s notes signify a distinction, linguistically and culturally, in the identification of a sacred structure or building versus the description of a natural site identified to be a place where sacredness dwells. Another notable place name in Durand’s atlas is Taku Wakan Tipi, which could be translated as “Dwelling Place of Something Sacred” (Taku = Something). This site, according to Durand, is, “a small hill, over-looking the Fort Snelling prairie located between the VA Hospital and the Naval Air Station. It was called Morgan’s Hill in pioneer times.”¹⁰ This site, strikingly similar in name to Wakan Tipi, is no coincidence when you consider the stories associated with the two places. But what are those stories, histories, and miracles, that led the Dakota to refer to this site Wakáŋ Tipi? Certainly, there is more to know than what is documented in this historical record.

For the second part of this series, we will share, with permission, the stories that are appropriate to be told in this format, from Dakota elders and knowledge keepers, about this place. And we know that in the Dakota community, there are multiple perspectives and relationships to place, even multiple ways in which Dakota people refer to this site. We honor all of those relationships and histories, even when they may conflict. In a Dakota worldview, there is an understanding that there is not so much that is right or wrong, but more often there is just appropriate or inappropriate. We honor that different communities and even different families within the same community, may have different stories about one place, and they are all correct.

As we look to continue this exploration in our two-part series, it is important to remind ourselves just how difficult this process can be. Restoring the relationships and names for these places must be a thoughtful, careful, and deliberate process. Respecting the time that it takes for Dakota communities to be in conversation, and remembering that Indigenous Peoples were violently stripped of their language, ceremonies, and relationships to their grandmother earth. We must do this work while keeping in mind, as Carolynn Schommer reminds us, the unbreakable bond at the heart of it all: Dakota language is Dakota culture; the culture is the language.

If you would like to contribute to this series with oral history relating to this site, please contact Wakan Tipi Center director, Maggie Lorenz (Spirit Lake Dakota/Turtle Mountain Metis) or Mishaila Bowman, our communications coordinator (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate).

Citations

It is worth noting here that Carver’s use of the word “Naudowessee” is a misspelling of a derogatory word coined by the Anishinaabe and used by French fur traders—nadouessioux—to refer to people of the Očéti Šakówiŋ.
Carver, Jonathan. Journals of Jonathan Carver and Related Documents, 1766 - 1770. Edited by John Parker. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1976: 91-92.
Carver, 1976: 115-120.
Durand, Paul. C. Where the Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux. Faribault, MN: The author 1994: 99.
Westerman, Glen, and Bruce White. Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012: 219-220.
“Dakota Language Program.” University Of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, Department of American Indian Studies. Regents of the University of Minnesota, 2021. Online: https://cla.umn.edu/ais/undergraduate/dakota-ojibwe-language-programs/dakota-language-program
Riggs, Stephen R. A Dakota-English Dictionary. Edited by James Owen Dorsey. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992: vi-viii.
Schommer, Carolynn I., in Riggs, 1992: viii.
Durand, 1994: 99.
Durand, 1994: 99.