Where the rivers meet, a new exhibit offers fresh approach to Historic Fort Snelling

The exhibition "Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place" tells 10,000 years of the site's complicated history, shining light on under-represented stories

By Alicia Eler Star Tribune

March 7, 2024 — 6:30am

A blue-tinted 4,000- to 8,500-year-old copper blade. A pair of U.S. Infantry Captain's shiny silver epaulets, worn on dress uniforms, each with a golden numeral 5 imprinted onto it. Abigail Snelling's mourning ring, which once contained a lock of Josiah Snelling's hair. A pair of quilled moccasins, circa 1890, embroidered with blue and pink beads, made by an unknown Santee Dakota craftsperson.

These are just a few of the myriad objects associated with Historic Fort Snelling on view in "Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place," a permanent exhibition at the newly remodeled Historic Fort Snelling, which was built between 1819 and1825 at the confluence of the Mni Sota Wakpa (Minnesota) and Haha Wakpa (Mississippi) rivers.

"There is this trope or the standard narrative when we're talking about Dakota people in Minnesota that gets relegated to the U.S.-Dakota War," said Associate Vice President of Tribal Nation Relations and Native American Initiatives Amber Annis.

The new approach to this exhibition departed from the building of the fort as a starting point, while taking into account the changes that its construction brought to the land.

"It was a space and a place where a lot of diplomatic interactions were happening," Annis said. "Indigenous leaders, fur traders, these people all came along on the 'highways of the water' to figure out that relationship of what it meant, before Minnesota was a state, before there was a fort — what it meant to be relatives on this land together."

The exhibit is the last phase of a $34.5 million revitalization project, including rehabilitating the 1904 cavalry barracks and transforming it into the Plank Museum & Visitor Center.

"For the first time, it gave us a gallery space where we can create a long-term exhibit that tells the comprehensive history of both Fort Snelling and Bdóte, the region that surrounds Fort Snelling," said Bill Convery, research director at the Minnesota Historical Society, which runs Fort Snelling.

Deep histories

The exhibition begins with the deep history of the land, explaining it as the Dakota homeland of Bdóte, which means "a place where two rivers meet." In the Dakota worldview, it is known as the Center of the Earth and holds sacred significance.

Visitors will meet characters such as Dakota leader Little Crow, who with six other Dakota leaders welcomed Americans to Bdóte in 1805. (By the 1830s, Dakota leaders had to decide whether to sell off land to pay debts incurred to traders.) The story of Abigail Hunt, who was married off to 30-year-old Josiah Snelling when she was 15, appears through panels and realistic renderings of their faces.

The powerful "Living Legacies" video series offers oral histories from people who can trace lineage to the land, such as Cheyanne St. John, whose great-great-great-grandfather Chief Wápahaśa was one of the principal leaders of the Mdewakanton Band of Dakota in the Minnesota River Valley area.

He signed the Treaty of Mendota in 1851 and then was forcibly relocated.

"You have named a place for our home, but it is prairie country," said the voice-over of Chief Wápahaśa in the video. "I am a man used to the woods. I do not like the prairie. Perhaps some of those here will name a place we would like better."

From there, the exhibition zooms in on specific groups whose history is entwined with the fort.

Despite the fact that in 1820 Congress banned slavery in Minnesota, there were enslaved people at the fort. The exhibition highlights the stories of Harriet and Dred Scott, two enslaved people who sued the U.S. government in 1846 for their freedom.

During World War II, Japanese Americans who were interned at concentration camps were recruited to Fort Snelling where Isamu "Sam" Saito worked as a linguist, and Toyome "Terry" Uyeno Nakanishi worked in the Women's Army Corps.

Physical gems abound in this show, like a life-sized Model T ambulance and a record player used by Minneapolis-born Harold Brown, who flew with the Tuskegee Airmen and ended World War II in a POW camp. The exhibition also touches on the early 2010s, when there were protests demanding that the fort be taken down, calling it a symbol of American imperialism.

One of the highlighted histories is that of Coxswain William Little Wolf (White Earth Ojibwe), who was only 18 when he left Carlisle Indian School and enlisted in the Army. Native Americans served in the U.S. armed forces at higher rates than any other ethnic group, with more than 16,000 in World War I.

"It's not a military story, but it's a symbol to a lot of people of patriotism, nationalism, military pride, and we wanted to remind people that you know, people of color and Native people served in the military, that they have histories and stories that are all similar," Annis said. "And we wanted to show that nationalism looks different for a lot of different folks. And so, it's important, you know, that people were seeing that there were you know, Native people, African American, Japanese American, Latinx folks that served in these different wars at a time when they were struggling with the United States government."