Sacred
We dropped off the bluff and went for a brief walk down in the flats along the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. The Minnesota splits at its mouth and flows around a small island named for Zebulon Pike to flow into the Mississippi at two points. This is the farther upstream of those points. The point downstream is at the other end of Pike Island, about 1.3 miles to my right. We were tired by this point and didn't feel like walking down there.
I might have called that differently if I'd known the significance of this place in the cosmology of the Native people. The Mdewakanton Dakota Sioux called this place Bdóte, which means "the place where waters meet," and they considered it to be the site of the Earth's creation and its very center. All lands spread out into the universe from this point, where the Earth, the waters, and the sky all connect. Before the Euro-Minnesotans showed up, there were seasonal Dakota villages and burial sites all over the place around here. I haven't done a lot of reading on the Dakota and don't know whether they ever had the kind of political capital the Ojibwe maintained over near the Apostle Islands, but this was definitely the Dakota's spiritual capital.
Which makes it logical that this is where the white men came when they wanted to get the Dakotas to sign a treaty. I already mentioned Zubulon Pike and his 1805 Treaty of St. Peters. Years later, in 1837, the Dakotas came back and signed the second Treaty of St. Peters, ceding everything around here they hadn't already lost. The Ojibwe were here for that one, handing over Wisconsin timber land. My great-great-great-grandfather came to down for that one. So I am not the first in my line to stand in Bdóte.
Sacred
We dropped off the bluff and went for a brief walk down in the flats along the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. The Minnesota splits at its mouth and flows around a small island named for Zebulon Pike to flow into the Mississippi at two points. This is the farther upstream of those points. The point downstream is at the other end of Pike Island, about 1.3 miles to my right. We were tired by this point and didn't feel like walking down there.
I might have called that differently if I'd known the significance of this place in the cosmology of the Native people. The Mdewakanton Dakota Sioux called this place Bdóte, which means "the place where waters meet," and they considered it to be the site of the Earth's creation and its very center. All lands spread out into the universe from this point, where the Earth, the waters, and the sky all connect. Before the Euro-Minnesotans showed up, there were seasonal Dakota villages and burial sites all over the place around here. I haven't done a lot of reading on the Dakota and don't know whether they ever had the kind of political capital the Ojibwe maintained over near the Apostle Islands, but this was definitely the Dakota's spiritual capital.
Which makes it logical that this is where the white men came when they wanted to get the Dakotas to sign a treaty. I already mentioned Zubulon Pike and his 1805 Treaty of St. Peters. Years later, in 1837, the Dakotas came back and signed the second Treaty of St. Peters, ceding everything around here they hadn't already lost. The Ojibwe were here for that one, handing over Wisconsin timber land. My great-great-great-grandfather came to down for that one. So I am not the first in my line to stand in Bdóte.