The land where the waters reflect the clouds

Before it was Minnesota, this land was Mni Sota Makoce, the land where the waters reflect the clouds. It was a Dakota place.

For centuries before European contact, the Dakota people actively managed the forests of mid-Minnesota, plains of southern Minnesota, the fertile valleys of the Mni Sota Wakpa (Minnesota River) and Haha Wakpa (Mississippi River), and their convergence at B’dote.

Beginning in the early 1800s, the United States began to take this land by swindle, fraud, and theft. A 1805 treaty took 100,000 acres but left the sale price blank. Later treaties paid European traders and their children instead of compensating the Dakota for the land.

In 1862, the Dakota—forced out of their traditional hunting grounds, depended on treaty payments to purchase food from the local Indian Agency. The United States’ treaty payments were late, and the Dakota’s food stash was low. But the traders who worked closely with the United States “all determined not [to] give any more credit hoping to starve them into a change of sentiment.” Instead, they precipitated the U.S.-Dakota War. In 1863, the United States formally revoked the treaties they had broken and exiled all Dakota from Minnesota.

But the Dakota persevered. Some remained in and others returned to Cansa’yapi (where they marked the trees red), their traditional Minnesota River Valley homeland. By 1884, a handful of families lived on 160 adjoining acres that they repurchased from private sellers. For the next 50 years, the settlement grew to 20 Mdewakanton families. As the community persisted, federal policy changed. In 1936, the United States recognized the Lower Sioux Indian Community as a tribe and designated their privately re-purchased parcels as the tribe’s reservation. For the area that is now the Twin Cities, the Dakota are the only people who have lived here since time immemorial, and who have never called any other land their ancestral home.

Minnesota is a Dakota place.

In 2021, a settler-colonizer descendant asked the Tribal Council of the Lower Sioux Indian Community to accept this honor tax. You can read the Council’s resolution accepting the contributions here. The honor tax is a voluntary contribution made directly to the Lower Sioux Indian Community by people who live, work, and learn within their traditional territory. Each individual decides how much to contribute, and the tax is unrestricted— the Community will use the funds for those essential governmental functions it determines are best for its people. The honor tax is a concrete recognition of the debts that settler-colonists have incurred on this land, the promises that the United States broke, and the enduring sovereignty of Dakota who continue to steward Mni Sota Makoce.