Weaponizing History

 From The American Experiment:

Fort Snelling was built in 1820, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. It was the first permanent outpost of American sovereignty on the Upper Mississippi. Minnesota’s 24,000 Civil War soldiers mustered there, including the valiant First Minnesota Volunteers, who sustained an 82 percent casualty rate at Gettysburg — the highest of any unit in any one battle of the war. More than 275,000 Minnesotans were inducted at Fort Snelling to fight Hitler’s Germany in World War II. The fort was also home to our state’s first school, hospital, library and post office.

But today MNHS is reframing the fort as a site, first and foremost, of “genocide” and minority victimization. Its rich, 200-year military legacy is becoming a footnote — a source, not of pride, but of shame to present-day citizens. Museum codes of ethics require museum leaders always to act in a way that preserves public confidence and trust. Scholarly, balanced historical interpretation is at the heart of that responsibility.

But MNHS has broken trust with the people of Minnesota. Today, misleading “narratives” and double standards abound in its exhibits and publications.

For example, Ft. Snelling’s website now features the logo of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, connecting it in Minnesotans’ minds with sites of mass murders like Soviet gulags and Nazi death camps. To justify this, MNHS is grossly misrepresenting the complex history of a central event in Minnesota history: the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In this war, Dakota warriors massacred more than 600 Southwest Minnesota settlers — the largest number of whites killed in a war with Indians in United States history. In relative terms, the death toll today would be 15,000 — fully five times the lives lost on September 11, 2001. But MNHS fails to convey either the nature and scale of the conflict or the brutal way many victims were slain.

Likewise, a typical MNHS interactive video for Minnesota schoolchildren — who are required to study Dakota history — romanticizes the Dakota as peace-loving, while depicting white settlers as swarming locusts and prominent settlers, like missionary Stephen Riggs, as malicious, robotic puppets. The video is “the definition of propaganda,” in the words of one dismayed Minnesota historian.

At MNHS, we hear constantly these days about “stories” and “voices,” but next to nothing about facts and evidence. The underlying premise is that the study of history is not an evidence-based search for truth, but a clash of opposing groups’ subjective “narratives.”

MNHS justifies its new orientation by claiming it is merely telling “all the stories.” In fact, it is primarily selecting stories that support an ideologically driven political agenda.

MNHS was founded in 1849, and enjoyed a sterling reputation for scholarly integrity for more than 150 years. Though legally a non-profit, it is largely publicly funded. MNHS’s new revisionist narrative is inconsistent with history as documented in its own extensive collections and publications. How did it take hold?

The ideology that now dominates MNHS’s Native American initiatives — called “decolonization” — is rapidly gaining influence on the Left. At its heart lies a Marxist concept: history is a relentless, zero-sum power struggle between oppressors and victim groups. White Europeans are the villains, cast as “colonizers” who ruthlessly exploit the land, labor and resources of non-white people.

Decolonization seeks to discredit our nation’s foundations, opening the way for transformation of our political and cultural institutions. At the national level, the New York Times’ 1619 Project is a paramount example. In Minnesota, MNHS holds that “most Minnesotans today are descendants of immigrants, living on conquered land,” and are here illegally and unethically, according to Fort Snelling at Bdote: A Brief History, by Peter De Carlo, published in 2017 by MNHS Press.

Decolonization began to take hold at MNHS around 2008, the 150th anniversary of Minnesota’s statehood. That year, Native American activists, skilled in political theater, mounted a “Take Down Fort Snelling” campaign, with protests that pressured MNHS to embrace their revisionist historical narrative.

This campaign was the brainchild of Angela Cavender Wilson (Waziyatawin), a college professor and Wahpetunwan Dakota from Minnesota. She denounced the fort as an “icon of imperialism” and called for “an end to settler domination of life, lands and peoples in Dakota territories.” She advocated “taking down Fort Snelling” along with “all monuments, institutions, place names and texts” that perpetuate the “institutions and systems of colonization.”

At the time, MNHS leaders were already flirting with the trendy new ideology. They “used the external pressure as a catalyst for action,” according to the De Carlo book. “The demonstrators’ criticisms…and the work of site staff members have brought changes in focus, in vocabulary, and in message to Historic Fort Snelling’s programing.” (Read more.)

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