Minnesota has always been home to a diverse array of religious traditions, but any significant embrace of that diversity has been a long, halting process. Historian William R. Hutchison usefully distinguishes between the fact of religious diversity and the fuller engagement with that diversity that he understands as pluralism.  Though Hutchison tells the story of American religious diversity in terms of stages in the understanding of pluralism: from pluralism as toleration throughout the 19^th century to pluralism as inclusion in the late 19th and early 20^th century, to something approaching the fuller vision of pluralism as participation from the 1960s on.¹ These are less stages than overlapping and contentious approaches to religious diversity at any given time. This narrative of the gradual increase over time is belied in Minnesota by a robust engagement with religious diversity practiced by the region’s Indigenous peoples.

Mni Sota Makoče, Ashinaabe Akiing

The story of religion in Minnesota is a story as old as the land itself from the perspective of Minnesota’s Indigenous peoples: the Dakota (Sioux) and Ojibwe (Anishinaabe, Chippewa).² Minnesota, Mni Sota Makoče, is a Dakota name for these eastern-most peoples of the Oceti Sakowin, Seven Fires, of Dakota and Lakota peoples comprising what the U.S. called the Sioux Nation. Ojibwe homelands in the northern part of the state are known to the Ojibwe people as Anishinaabe Akiing, translated either as the “land of the people” or “the people’s land.” While archeologists and historians point out the changes over time in Minnesota’s Indigenous populations, it is important to know that Dakota and Ojibwe peoples do not see their presence in Minnesota as an accident of history.

Many people of one of the Seven Fires, the Mdewakanton Dakota, believe their genesis occurred at Bdote, the place where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. Ojibwe people tell a sacred story of migration in which they journeyed, in obedience to a prophetic vision, from the Atlantic seaboard to the place “where food grows on the water,” referring to manoomin, or wild rice, their traditional staple and sacred food.³

Dakota and Ojibwe presence in Minnesota, then, is as much a religious matter as it is an historical, ecological, or economic one. It can be understood as a calling, a spiritual gift that involves ethical, day-to-day obligations of living on, and caring for, traditional lands and waters. Dakota and Ojibwe religions make sense in terms of the state’s lands and waters, of its plants and animals, and of traditional life ways that participate in the land’s natural cycles.

Indigenous Embrace of Religious Diversity

Although the Dakota and Ojibwe have typically been depicted as foes whose conflicts were ramped up under the pressure of Euro-American expansion, these two peoples have shown principled respect for internal and external religious diversity. Perhaps this respect stems from the theological humility encoded in their respective languages: both the Dakota term for spirit, wakan, and the Ojibwe term for spirit, manidoo, can be translated as mystery; their respective words for the Creator -- wakan tanka in Dakota; giche manidoo in Ojibwe – can be translated as Great Mystery.

To be sure, the two languages, cultures, and religions are anything but variations on the same thing; Dakota and Ojibwe languages stem from different language families altogether. Their respective and religious practices, too, generally follow entirely different lineages–more like the difference between Christians and Hindus than between Catholics and Protestants. Yet despite these differences, the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples share a posture of generosity to religious and cultural difference. In each of the two nations, internal differences were settled and alliances cemented in ceremony. Both Dakota and Ojibwe traditional religions encompassed many individual variations, and people could be gifted by spirits with new visions, new ceremonies, new songs, and new dances: the Jingle Dress dance, involving the ringing out of prayers from metal cones on dresses, came to a young Ojibwe woman through a vision to bring healing during the Flu Pandemic of 1918.⁴ With pipe ceremonies and prayer involving pipes carved from the sacred stone of Pipestone, MN, diplomacy followed ceremony. The Seven Fires, or Oceti Sakowin of the Dakota/Lakota is itself an expression of this ceremonial practice of diplomacy and peacemaking. The term Dakota, or its equivalent in the dialects of the West, Nakota, and Lakota means “ally”. For their part, Ojibwe peoples cemented alliances with Potawatomi and Odawa peoples to form the Three Fires confederacy of Anishinaabeg. In each of these cases, religious exchange of story, dance, vision, and ceremony were part and parcel of the relationship building that kept the peace in Mni Sota Makoče/Anishinaabe Akiing.

As important, even as they could challenge one another on the battlefield, hostilities never broke along religious lines. In fact, Dakota and Ojibwe people practiced deliberate respect for one another’s spiritual teachings, even conducting ceremonies together at key moments of diplomacy. Mni Owe Sni, or Coldwater Spring, near the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport was one such location for not infrequent celebrations of the Grand Medicine Ceremony.⁵

In the late nineteenth century, religious exchange between the two people was dramatic. Lakota people brought the Big Drum, or Peace Drum, to the Ojibwe, along with its attendant songs and ceremonial traditions. The annual June White Earth Powwow, which was such a going concern that Minnesota’s governors and other elected officials didn’t dare miss, was one hub for the ceremonious sharing of visions, stories, songs, dances, and other religious practices happened.