May 5, 2018
Meghan Tierney, Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Humanities and Art History, organized a one-day field trip centered on connecting Carleton faculty, staff, and students to Dakota notions of place in Minnesota. Organized through the Minnesota Humanities Center and featuring Dakota tour guides, the trip visited sites important to Dakota culture, including the sacred Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.
The tour guides stressed the traumatic past of the site that sits in the shadow of Fort Snelling, trauma that continues to this day. Nevertheless, the guides also highlighted the continuing sacredness of the site to the Dakota people. Students emerged from the experience with a greater understanding of Dakota connections to the local landscape, as well as new ways of engaging with: the imagining of spatial relationships and concepts; dominant frameworks of study; spatial and temporal engagement with place through indigenous perspective; and the construction of narratives of place.