Minnesota Claimed by the U.S.

In a series of treaties with the U.S., most of the traditional homelands of Dakota and Ojibwe became U.S. lands. Each treaty was broken, but treaty rights in the state, affirmed by courts, point to ongoing relationships, including spiritual relationships with traditional homelands.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase transferred that absolute 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 to practice their traditional lifeways, and related religious traditions, that maintained spiritual relationships with lands and waters.

Two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike traveled up the Mississippi to secure, through the first treaty in the region, 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.

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.

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 1999.³  

The 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, depicted in a 1905 painting. 

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.