Counterpoint: Small group of activists commandeers Minnesota Historical Society

Countless Minnesotans treasure memories of Sunday afternoon visits to Historic Fort Snelling, our state's first national historical landmark and most valuable historic asset. The fort is the birthplace of Minnesota — the reason the Twin Cities are here — and has long been a source of pride.

In the future, however, Minnesotans who visit Fort Snelling may increasingly hang their heads in shame. The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), which manages the site, is "re-envisioning" the fort in terms of contemporary identity politics — depicting it, first and foremost, as a place of victimization of minority groups, particularly Dakota Indians. The fort is being reframed as a "concentration camp," a place of "genocide" and a "site of conscience." In the process, its rich, 200-year military legacy is becoming a footnote, a source not of pride but of shame to present-day citizens.

Double standards abound, not only at Fort Snelling, but throughout MNHS exhibits, events and publications. For example, a typical MNHS interactive video for Minnesota schoolchildren — who are required to study Dakota history — depicts white settlers as swarming locusts and settler leaders like missionary Stephen Riggs as malicious, robotic puppets, while romanticizing the Dakota as noble and peace-loving.

Recently, state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, proposed legislation that would transfer management of 16 state historical sites from MNHS to the State Historic Preservation Office ("Public process must illuminate state history," Opinion Exchange, June 15; "History, in full light, is always changing," editorial, June 14; "This work, like history itself, is messy," Opinion Exchange, June 11). The takeover of MNHS, the highly respected steward of our state's history, by a small group of political activists is the untold story behind the resulting controversy.

In 2016-17, MNHS created a Native American Initiatives department and ceded much of the power to interpret and control activities at Fort Snelling to a new 16-member Dakota Community Council (DCC).

Under this influence, MNHS has promoted a revisionist historical narrative driven by "decolonization" ideology. This holds that today's Minnesotans are here illegally and unethically, and that the Dakota have a right to enhanced control of the land.

We often hear that MNHS's current campaign to revitalize Fort Snelling is just about expanding the stories told there. But MNHS has characterized the $34 million "re-envisioning" as a "sweeping transformation," and Minnesota Monthly magazine describes it as an "indigenous-inspired revitalization" led by the DCC.

By law, only the Minnesota Legislature can change the fort's name. But MNHS has unilaterally chosen to rebrand the fort as "Fort Snelling at Bdote." In fact, according to the historical record, the correct Mdewakanton Dakota name for the site is "Mdote," meaning "confluence of rivers," not "Bdote" — an undocumented name promoted recently by Native American activists.

The new narrative about Fort Snelling rests on three claims: that the fort's site is Dakota "homeland" and has been for thousands of years; that the area is traditionally sacred to the Dakota, and that the Dakota are entitled to payback and control of the fort because it was a site of oppression, including a "concentration camp" and "genocide" after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

These claims are inconsistent with MNHS's own collections and publications and are vigorously disputed by independent Minnesota historians.

In fact, the Dakota arrived in the Twin Cities area around 1700 from Mille Lacs. They made war on the Iowa and Otoe tribes living here and seized the land they were occupying, according to the historical record. The claim about sacred status is largely based on contemporary, undocumented Dakota "oral tradition." Stephen Osman, the fort's former longtime director, cannot remember hearing or reading such accounts before about 2000. No mention of such claims appears in a 1998 MNHS book "Fort Snelling in 1838: An Ethnographic and Historical Study," by Helen White and Bruce White, although the book focused particularly on the Dakota "point of view" on Fort Snelling.

The final claim, about the concentration camp and genocide, is based on an egregious rewriting of the history of the U.S.-Dakota War. In this complex and tragic conflict, Dakota warriors massacred more than 600 southwestern Minnesota settlers — the largest number of whites killed in a war with Indians in U.S. history. Many were defenseless women and children, including about 100 children ages 10 and under, and some victims were murdered in extraordinarily brutal ways.

After the war, the U.S. Army created an internment camp to feed 1,600 Dakota women and children throughout the winter and protect them from grieving, revenge-minded settlers before they were moved elsewhere. Far from a "concentration camp" — loaded language that conjures up images of Auschwitz — the camp's purpose was to protect Dakota dependents, not exterminate them.

What is the source of this revisionist history?

In 2012, MNHS published a book titled "Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota," which pulled all these claims together. The story behind it exemplifies how political advocacy is replacing rigorous scholarship at MNHS.

The book began as a project of the Two Rivers Community Development Corporation, a Native American nonprofit. Syd Beane, the group's co-founder, has described himself as the first Native American to train in a long-term program at political organizing guru Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. The mission of "Mni Sota Makoce" was baldly political: To "research alternative approaches for the recovery of historic Dakota lands" and to "advocate for Dakota involvement" at "the Fort Snelling area." Kate Beane, Beane's daughter, was a primary researcher.

Despite the book's self-serving agenda, MNHS took over and completed it in 2010 with a grant of $100,000 in taxpayer funds. "Mni Sota Makoce" became the ideological cornerstone of the campaign to reconceive Fort Snelling that is currently underway.

Today, Kate Beane is MNHS's director of Native American Initiatives, while Sid Beane and another daughter, Carly Bad Heart Bull, are members of the DCC, which has major control over the fort's future.

What's happening at MNHS goes far beyond "expanding voices." It is an attempt to drive a political agenda by rewriting Minnesota history.

Katherine Kersten (kerstenkatherine@gmail.com) is a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment.