Introduction to Pipestone

Among the most sacred Native American places in what is now the geography of Minnesota are the Pipestone quarries in the southwestern corner of the state. The quarries are distinct geologic features: out of the prairies in that part of the state rise pink quartzite bluffs, beneath which run seams of soft, dull-red pipestone rock. In the Dakota language, the compound is called cannononpa in’yan. To geologists, the rock is called Catlinite, named after George Catlin, the Euro-American painter who visited and documented the quarries in 1863.¹ For the Dakota peoples and others who traded with the Dakota to make ceremonial pipes, the quarries are a very sacred place. Indigenous people have quarried pipestone to carve pipe bowls for at least 3,000 years.²

The place was important enough to the Native Americans of the region that the Yankton Dakota took pains to secure continued access to the quarries in the 1858 Treaty of Washington in which they ceded the territory in the region to the U.S. In 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set aside the quarries as Pipestone National Monument. The ongoing sacred nature of the place to the Dakota and the charged history of place in non-Native imaginations, have made a complex tangle of competing claims on federal managers of the site for years.

Authored by Ben Welna with contributions from Johanna Scheu, Will Yetvin and Laura Levitt