Fort Snelling

"I don't think we need forts in the United States anymore. Because their usefulness is no longer beneficial to us today. And so I think we've outgrown those structures of colonial dominance over Native American people. If we expect Native American people to be a part of and proud of who they are and a part of American society, we need to start to make concessions, historical concessions of reconciliation."

Dr. Clifford Canku, Sisseton Wahpeton community of Dakota, 2010

The junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers is a place of major social, cultural, and historical significance to all people inhabiting the region, a place whose history evokes both pride and pain. For Dakota people it is a historical gathering place, the site of the Bdote creation story, and a place of internment and exile after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

The site was the crossroads of two major river highways of the fur trade, one of the most lucrative businesses of the 19th century. After the War of 1812, the U.S. government established its strategic presence at the river junction with the arrival of military forces and an Indian agent, whose goals were to promote and protect the interests of the United States in the region's fur trade and to gain the friendship and cooperation of Indian communities. The fort and its Indian Agency became a foothold of U.S. expansionism in the territory that would become Minnesota.