The First Peoples: Dakota and Ojibwe at the Center of the Continent

Long before any word of this land appeared in a European language, two great peoples held it. The Dakota called themselves Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. Their territory stretched from the Great Plains to the lake country of the upper Mississippi, and at its heart stood Bdote, the sacred confluence where the Minnesota River meets the Mississippi. The Dakota understood Bdote as the place from which human life first emerged. It was the center of the world.

The Ojibwe, known also as the Anishinaabe, came to the Great Lakes country through a long migration from the eastern seaboard, guided by the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society, which preserved oral traditions recording each stage of the journey. By the seventeen hundreds, Ojibwe communities had established themselves across the northern lake country of what is now Minnesota, trading and at times fighting with the Dakota over territory along the wild-rice lakes and the rivers that connected them.

The two peoples were not enemies by nature. They traded. They intermarried. They shared knowledge of the land. But competition over the rich fur-trade economy that European contact introduced sharpened older rivalries, and the northern lakes became contested ground through much of the eighteenth century.

By the time the United States began negotiating treaties with both nations in the eighteen thirties and forties, the Dakota and the Ojibwe together represented centuries of civilization built on the lakes, the rivers, the wild rice, the white-tailed deer, the bison of the western prairies, and the sturgeon of the deep cold streams. What the treaties asked them to surrender was not just acreage. It was that entire world.

The Dakota lost most of their Minnesota land in treaties signed at Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in eighteen fifty-one. The Ojibwe ceded vast tracts across the northern third of the state in a series of treaties through the eighteen thirties, forties, and fifties, though they retained rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the ceded lands, rights that are recognized by federal courts to this day.

Both peoples are still here. The Dakota communities of Minnesota include the Prairie Island Indian Community, the Lower Sioux and Upper Sioux communities, and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. Six Ojibwe bands form the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and other Ojibwe bands across the Great Lakes belong to the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Their presence is not a remnant. It is a continuation.