Who was here when the French arrived?
Long before French explorers and traders came to the forests and plains of what is today the state of Minnesota, Native peoples lived here. The name Minnesota, in fact, comes from the Dakota name for this region, Mni Sota Makoce. The Indigenous peoples found or created all they needed from this land, which was linked together in all directions by its many waterways.
While there are multiple Native people of Minnesota whose lives are tied to this land, there are two major groups who dominated in the time just prior to the arrival of the French explorers and traders. In the eastern and northern parts of the territory were the Ojibwe people, who had spread there from the Great Lakes. In the west were the Dakota (called the Sioux by the French), who had lived in the eastern part of the state, but moved west as the arriving Ojibwe brought territorial pressure. For both groups, the land and waters of Minnesota held spiritual significance. The Dakota regarded Minnesota as their birthplace, with the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, which they called Bdote Mni Sota, and Lake Mille Lacs, known as Spirit Lake or Mde Wakaŋ, holding particular importance.
One place of high cultural and spiritual significance for multiple Native peoples from long before the French arrival is at Pipestone National Monument located in southwest Minnesota. For more than 3000 years Indigenous peoples have been coming to this location to quarry pipestone, a material used to make items such as pipes or statues that held great spiritual and ceremonial power. This red pipestone is known as catlinite after frontier artist George Catlin, who painted the pipestone quarry during a visit to Minnesota in 1836. Pipestone is the material used to make the pipe bowls often used as part of the calumet, a stone pipe with a highly decorated detachable reed or wooden stem, that was central to many religious ceremonies in Native communities.
The calumet ceremony, often involving several days of feasting, singing, dancing, and gift giving, helped to create and maintain relationships between Native communities. During the fur trade era, the calumet ceremony was a mechanism for integrating French “strangers” into Indigenous communities as trading partners and kin. Today, members of federally-recognized tribes can apply for permits that allow them to continue to quarry this stone.
Minnesota’s two primary biomes—prairie lands in the south and southwest, and forests and lakes in the north—provided rich resources for Ojibwe and Dakota people, as for other groups like the Iowa (or Ioway), the Meskwaki, and the Otoe who spent time in what is now Minnesota and consider this place important to their histories. The Native people moved purposefully to enable them to use various resources as the seasons changed. In the east and north, Ojibwe people lived part of the year in large villages where they cultivated corn, beans, and squash. In spring, the women went to the sugaring camps to tap the maple trees; in late summer and autumn, they moved to the lake areas where they harvested wild rice. The Dakota followed similar seasonal patterns, with the bison hunt becoming a dominant feature as they moved west into the plains. For all Native people, hunting, trapping, and fishing provided many resources for food, clothing and shelter, and tool-making.
In Minnesota, there are seven federally recognized Ojibwe tribes (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, and White Earth Nation) and four federally recognized Dakota tribes (Lower Sioux Indian Community, Prairie Island Indian Community, Shakopee Medwakanton Sioux Community, and Upper Sioux Community).
The name “Dakota” means “ally” in the Dakota language, referring to the relationship between the confederated tribes. The Ojibwe people are part of the group of peoples with similar cultures known as Anishinaabe, which also includes the Odawa and Potawatomi tribes. Today, the state of Minnesota also recognizes the importance of its land to the Ho-Chunk, Cheyenne, Oto, Ioway, Hidatsa, Arikara, A’aninin, Cree, Blackfeet, Assiniboine, and Sac and Fox tribes in addition to the eleven federally recognized tribes. With eleven Native reservations and communities in Minnesota, Native peoples have demonstrated their cultures’ resilience as, for centuries, their interactions with outsiders have challenged their very existence. Their expertise and knowledge of the land and waters of Minnesota were central to the survival of the French who arrived in the 1600s.
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