New France, The Arrival of Europe

It would be some time before Dakota and Ojibwe people felt the full force of European presence, but colonization of Minnesota began with a religious ritual. On June 4, 1671, on an overlook above Sault Ste. Marie, where Lake Superior flows into Lake Huron in the heart of Ojibwe territory, Monsieur de Saint Lusson and the Jesuit priest Claude Allouez erected a cross in the presence of Native onlookers, declaring the territories of the Western Great Lakes for the King of France and for Christianity.¹

Although Allouez and his fellow Jesuits Louis Hennepin, Jacques Marquette, and others first extended Christianity to the Ojibwe in Minnesota, French colonization took a more commercial interest in the fur trade, which required Indigenous lifeways on the land largely to continue apace Gichi Onigaming, known to the French as Grand Portage, became a bustling multilingual and multicultural center in the 1700s, as furs brought down the portage from the vast network of interior waterways were exchanged with traders who navigated the Great Lakes in their large canoes to markets in Montreal. French Catholic missionaries were always part of the presence, but conversions at the time were few, eclipsed by the French focus on trade. The majority of Native Catholics were the children of French fur traders and Ojibwe women. But on the horizon, a sea change was rapidly approaching.This is a pivotal part of Minnesota’s religious history, for it ritualized the Doctrine of Christian Discovery – an emerging principle of the “law of nations” that European monarchs could legally claim discovered territory in the name of their Christianity and the lack thereof among Indigenous peoples. This theological assertion would later become a legal doctrine, incorporated into U.S. law in 1823 when the Supreme Court ruled that European sovereigns (and their U.S. heirs) enjoyed absolute title to lands they claimed in the name of Christianity and assigned to Native peoples the rights of occupancy only. 

Minnesota Claimed by the United States of America

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase transferred title of lands west of the Mississippi to the United States. The state’s Indigenous peoples had no say in the matter and the legal fiction, at first, had little effect on Dakota and Ojibwe people, who continued apace with traditional lifeways, practicing religions that maintained their spiritual relationships with lands and waters.

Two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike traveled up the Mississippi to secure, through Minnesota’s first treaty, a place for a military fort. In 1805, at Bdote, the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers and a sacred landscape for the Mdewakanton Dakota, the U.S. recognized a treaty that was signed by only two of the seven Dakota leaders.[1] For 100,000 acres of what would become much of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Senate only approved a $2,000 payment, one percent of what Pike estimated as its valuation.[2]

In 1820, the U.S. built Fort Snelling on the bluff atop the confluence of the rivers, and the federal government maintained significant lands near the fort, which is why the national cemetery, the Veterans Hospital, and airport are located where they are.

The Ojibwe ceded much of central Minnesota to the U.S. in 1837, but Native leaders reserved rights to hunt, fish, and gather on those ceded lands, indicating they were not selling their rights to traditional lifeway activities or rights to their relationship with fish, game and plants on those lands. Despite Minnesota’s efforts to regulate all fishing and hunting, Ojibwe people continued to assert their rights to traditional uses of ceded lands, and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed these rights in 1999.[1]

In an 1854 Treaty whereby Minnesota’s Arrowhead region became U.S. territory, Lake Superior Ojibwe leaders similarly reserved rights not only to three reservations but to hunt and fish off the reservations throughout the ceded lands. The Treaty of 1855, which ceded a large swath of north central Minnesota, arguably included Ojibwe expectations that their agreement also reserved their access to traditional ricing, hunting, and fishing harvests on the lands in question.

In 1851, the state’s four Dakota peoples were coaxed into agreeing in two treaties (Mendota and Traverse des Sioux) to cede most of Southern Minnesota save for a significant reservation in the heart of their homelands running along the Minnesota River from Mankato to near what is now the South Dakota border. But the U.S. ultimately took that reservation too, and failed to honor the payment commitments under the 1851 treaties. Without a land-base to support themselves and routinely deprived of treaty payments, many Dakota rose in military challenge to the US in 1862 and with few exceptions were forcibly exiled from their homelands later that winter. President Lincoln ordered the public execution of 38 Dakota warriors in Mankato on December 26, 1862.

[1] Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa, 576 U.S. 172 (1999)

[1] Minnesota Historical Society, “Looking at the Territory: the Treaty Story,” https://www.mnhs.org/talesoftheterritory/territory/treaty/treaty4.php

[2] Minnesota Historical Society, “Looking at the Territory: the Treaty Story,” https://www.mnhs.org/talesoftheterritory/territory/treaty/treaty4.php