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.)
