Devils Lake: Mni Wakan, the Spirit Water
North Dakota
The Dakota people called this body of water Mni Wakan, meaning Spirit Water or Holy Lake. When white settlers named it Devils Lake in the eighteen eighties, it was an unhappy mistranslation of something sacred. The lake sits beside the Spirit Lake Nation Reservation, home to the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota.
The lake itself has become a regional crisis: since nineteen ninety-three, a wet climate cycle has caused it to rise more than twenty-six feet, swallowing hundreds of homes, farms, roads, and utility lines with no natural outlet to carry the water away. Scientists call it a runaway lake. Tens of thousands of acres of once-productive farmland are now under water.
The Spirit Lake Tribe and surrounding communities have spent decades trying to manage a body of water that keeps growing.
