George Growingthunder looked at ancient rock carvings and cried every day at Jeffers Petroglyphs, a historic site in southwestern Minnesota. He was grateful to be able to visit his ancestral lands, and was satisfied with the Minnesota Historical Society’s efforts to better tell the history of the land from the perspective of Native Americans—a perspective that is shared throughout the nation. missing in many museums and historic sites).
Growing Thunder hopes to incorporate that perspective into his career soon. The Glowing Thunder students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are among six students from across the country for a Summer Historical Society program aimed at bringing more Indigenous voices into the storytelling. I was alone. He studied museum decolonization efforts, learned about the repatriation of museum collection items, and assisted in the construction of exhibits.
“I have changed,” he said. “[The Minnesota Historical Society]is a template. They change the story and treat us like people instead of objects of collection. They did what many other museums don’t do.”
The Native American Undergraduate Museum Fellowship has been a member of the Minnesota Historical Society for over 10 years and is nearing 100 alumni. Her 2019 grant from the Mellon Foundation expanded this program into his 10-week program. Many graduates work in the museum field. 6 received Ph.D.
While interning in their chosen field of specialization, Fellows work around Muni Sota Makose (Dakota’s “land where water reflects clouds” and the place that inspired the name Minnesota). visited the historic sites of Some have compiled the museum’s collection of tribal documents and artefacts into a digital database. Others digitized tribal newspapers and engaged in research. Growingthunder was responsible for the exhibition design.
“Students never thought of museums as their place, they felt they They often say they never thought it was their home.” “Museums have responsibilities, and they have responsibilities in the historical field, the field that has tapped indigenous communities. There is no one.”
Annis said the field is slowly shifting around native voices. However, the Minnesota Historical Society is still a rare state history museum with a department dedicated to indigenous peoples and local communities.
Gavin Sempel is from the Lower Sioux Indian community in Southwest Minnesota and is a senior at Minnesota Morris College. He taught the Pipestone Indian Training School (one of his many boarding schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s aimed at assimilating Indian youth into mainstream American culture) and the school and its impact on the people of Dakota, including his own family.
“My family didn’t have many options,” Sempel said. “Poverty on the reservation was terrible. Multiple diseases were rampant. Part of the reason they went to boarding school was their home environment, which is often not talked about.”
Mr. Sempel was inspired to enter the museum field after working as a historic site custodian in the Lower Sioux Indian community. After graduating, he hopes to complete his PhD.
“Historically, there have been many problems with how indigenous peoples have been portrayed,” Sempel said. “Written history was written by people who were prejudiced against the Dakota, so for Native Americans like me, there is a great opportunity to tell the history of the Dakota, the history that has been ignored. ”
Taylor Fairbanks, a sophomore at the University of Minnesota majoring in sociology and American Indian studies, has families from White Earth Nation, Minnesota and Ho-Chunk Nation, Wisconsin. When her grandfather was sent to boarding school in India, she said, her family’s ties to their culture, traditions and language were severed.
She joined the Fellowship to reconnect that bond and bring that history back to St. Paul’s family.
“The Minnesota Historical Society believes that American history is Native American history,” she said. “We are slowly decolonizing these spaces, but it won’t happen overnight. Within us, we have a responsibility to be the next generation of knowledge bearers.”
Fellows described the program as both an academic pursuit and a more personal one. Like when Glowing Thunder stood 161 years ago on the same Sioux quartzite outcrop in southwestern Minnesota where his ancestor Standing Buffalo, Dakota chieftain of Sisetswan, was—his people before being exiled.
As a child in Montana, Growing Thunder knew the stories of his ancestors. In the mid-1800s, Standing Buffalo advocated peaceful relations with whites seeking further encroachment on Native American lands in the upper Midwest. In August 1862, he had just returned from a buffalo hunt and heard disturbing news. At Acton, east of Wilmer, four young Indians murdered five white settlers.
This is how it started American-Dakota War of 1862also known as the Dakota Uprising: Indian attacks to drive settlers out of the Mississippi River valley, U.S. militia counterattacks, hundreds killed on both sides, execution of 38 Dakota men – largest single day in U.S. history Executions – Dakota non-combatants (mostly women, children and the elderly) were placed in the Fort Snelling Internment Camp and the Dakota people were expelled from Minnesota.
When he heard about the first attack, Standing Buffalo knew the war had begun. He was Jeffer’s Petroglyph and prayed that his descendants would return and pray in the same place.
And that’s exactly what he did when Glowing Thunder visited the same spot at sunrise earlier this summer.
“It was like déjà vu. I had never been there physically, but my soul was there,” Growing Thunder said. “Our culture, language, rituals, everything is coming back. We are exiles. This is our home, but we fled. I want to bring my family back to Minnesota.” is.”