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Coldwater Journal is a record of personal observations and reflections from visits to the Coldwater campus.
Please feel free to submit your thoughts and reflections about Coldwater for posting here on the FRIENDS of COLDWATER site via email. |
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2017
Coldwater Journal is chronologically reversed. The newest postings are first.
click for 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | |
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Coldwater Journal
July 2017 |
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The Purpose of Coldwater
The purpose of Coldwater Springs park depends on who you ask.
If you ask local National Park Service authorities they want funding and recognition for advancement in the bureaucracy. It is an extremely competitive, career-dominated organization.
If you ask Dakota people the preservation of this 10,000-year-old spring is preeminent. Coldwater is home to a Dakota water spirit, an acknowledged sacred site, and a traditional place of meetings and rituals.
For dog walkers Coldwater’s import is free parking for access to the Mississippi River island where their pets cavort off-leash. Ironically dog park permit fees are paid to the Minneapolis Park Board but the island is owned by the National Park Service.
Dog litter is abundant. Dog walkers who do not pick up after their animals claim that dog poop is “natural.” Eighteen million Americans drink out of the Mississippi.
Environmentalists treasure Coldwater as the last natural major spring in Hennepin County, that is water issuing directly from the limestone bedrock. In Eden Prairie, William-Miller Spring water comes out of a pipe on the downhill side of Spring Road.
The Great Medicine Spring in Theodore Wirth Park and nearby Glenwood Spring were both permanently dewatered with construction of Interstate 394 west out of Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Dewatering is like tiling a farm field to remove water considered excess that could drown plants. Plastic pipes with many small holes are buried. Groundwater trickles in through the holes. The pipes funnel groundwater quickly away so that the natural process of filtering or “scrubbing” water as it seeps through the soil, sand, clay, and rock, does not occur.
Historians value Coldwater as the Birthplace of Minnesota, the first civilian community of Native, European and African Americans, founded to service Fort Snelling. Coldwater furnished water to the fort from 1820 to 1920.
Dred Scott drank Coldwater while he was stationed there from 1836 to 1840, and based his famous case for freedom from slavery in part on his residency in the free then-Wisconsin Territory.
Scott lost his case in 1857 on the technicality that a slave was not a citizen and therefore had no right to bring a case into federal court. Not until 1954 with Brown versus the Board of Education was the Scott case reconciled because separate can never be equal.
The birthplace of our state is a dog park. There is no mention of Dred Scott or the Dakota oyate (people or nation), the sacredness of the place, just a scattering of spindly and dying trees and thigh high vegetation. A
The Supremacy of Trees
When the National Park Service was appointed to maintain Coldwater’s 27-acre campus in 2011, its leadership wanted a quick, cheap traditional-looking park. Appearance was the goal.
Planted prairies are the vogue in parks as the fastest low-cost method of prettifying, in this case, a former Big Woods top-of-the-Mississippi-bluff shoe string of land.
NSP clear cut the entire park, moved-in $60,000 of (free) low grade construction dirt fill for a semi flat created prairie and planted hundreds of prairie plant plugs after the original seeding washed down the Mississippi gorge with heavy spring rains.
But the spirit of the land at this ancient spring, the last natural spring in the county, home of the Dakota water deity Un K’te Hi, has called back the indigenous trees, baby oaks, maples and cottonwoods are peeping up among the paid prairie plantings.
Having clear cut Coldwater Park, NPS officials purchased dozens and dozens of toothpick trees to be planted by volunteers. Many of those little trees died and are still dying. It was not the volunteers’ fault. Simply sticking trees in holes in the ground is no guarantee of survival.
Trees grow in community. Clear cutting all the trees meant there were no “mother trees’ around to nurture the next generations. Big trees subsidize the young ones through the underground fungal network, says Suzanne Simard PhD.
“Without this helping hand, most of the seedlings wouldn’t make it.” Check out her 4 ½-minute video at www.ecology.com/2012/10/08/trees-communicate/.
NPS removed all the trees in the park but did not remove the old concrete ore bins or the dewatering pipe system from the military-industrial Bureau of Mines days, noting the expense. Dewatering around the last natural spring and clear-cutting amounts to an environmental apostasy.
“The older the tree the more quickly it grows,” forester-researcher Peter Wolhlleben notes. Elder trees are markedly more productive when it comes to climate change. “If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, which is exactly what large conservation groups are asking.”
Climate scientists repeatedly tell us that if you want to slow global warming—plant trees. Trees slurp up heavy rains, hold the soil, provide shade, absorb carbon pollution, calm winds and make people happy. It’s a fact. Social statistics show less stress, less crime and greater property value in forested neighborhoods.
In a few centuries, the Coldwater dewatering pipes will fill and rot and the trees will win despite the NPS plan to burn them out—assuming the park survives. The land holds the memory of its once and future.
--Susu Jeffrey
Letter to Coldwater
July 7, 2017
From: Pierre
I just read a chunk of your Friends of Coldwater website and was very frustrated to hear about how the sacred, indigenous history of the site hasn't been respected as much as it should have been as this land was reworked by the NPS.
Is there anything going in with the site now? Is there anything that concerned citizens can do to help encourage the sacred history of the land and spring to be honored?
Thanks,
PJ M
Pierre,
I am forwarding your email about the lack of indigenous history to the local National Park Service superintendent, John Anfinson, who is responsible for the land at, and publicity about Coldwater. Perhaps Mr. Anfinson can answer your question.
On many occasions he has stated, “We begin history here in 1820.” 1820 is when European-Americans assumed military control of Coldwater. Coldwater has been flowing for at least 10,000-years.
Having lived in 11 different states, I can say that Minnesota is known nationally as a racist and an especially anti-Indian state. Unfortunately, Minnesota suffers from this ahistorical approach to educating its children and adults and promoting itself as a destination.
The recent display of the replica mass hanging scaffold of 38 Dakota men at Mankato in 1862 at the renown Walker Art Museum sculpture garden is evidence of conscious and unconscious efforts to erase our Minnesota heritage.
It is confusing to live in a place that does not celebrate the peoples who have walked for 9,000-years, here where we now walk—as if we are glorifying ignorance.
Sheldon Wolfchild, from the Lower Sioux reservation in Morton, led the paperwork effort for National Park Service recognition of Coldwater as a Dakota Sacred Site. Dakota cultural teachers say that “All springs are sacred.”
Last October Wolfchild organized a pipe ceremony at Coldwater on Indigenous Peoples Day. The park service called in numerous national police to oversee the ceremony where more than 100 children attended. This kind of deliberate insensitivity is immature, sad and embarrassing.
But it is also temporary. There is an indigenous upwelling in America today. Park Service authorities come and go. The land and the people remain, the spring still flows and the stories are being repeated.
The most important advice Friends of Coldwater was told is to continue to come to Coldwater, to be here, to leave offerings, to commune with the spirits of the place; to be quiet, to listen to the breeze, the sounds of the water, the birds and frogs; to steep ourselves in the landscape and to feel its continuing presence. Despite the clear cut of trees at the park, the disrespect, the place is sacred. Coldwater can infuse its subtle power in your soul if you take the time to sit with it.
Respectfully,
Susu Jeffrey for Friends of Coldwater
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Coldwater Journal
June 2017
The Purpose of Coldwater |
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The purpose of Coldwater Springs park depends on who you ask.
If you ask local National Park Service authorities they want funding and recognition for advancement in the bureaucracy. It is an extremely competitive, career-dominated organization.
If you ask Dakota people the preservation of this 10,000-year-old spring is preeminent. Coldwater is home to a Dakota water spirit, an acknowledged sacred site, and a traditional place of meetings and rituals.
For dog walkers Coldwater’s import is free parking for access to the Mississippi River island where their pets cavort off-leash. Ironically dog park permit fees are paid to the Minneapolis Park Board but the island is owned by the National Park Service.
Dog litter is abundant. Dog walkers who do not pick up after their animals claim that dog poop is “natural.” Eighteen million Americans drink out of the Mississippi.
Environmentalists treasure Coldwater as the last natural major spring in Hennepin County, that is water issuing directly from the limestone bedrock. In Eden Prairie, William-Miller Spring water comes out of a pipe on the downhill side of Spring Road.
The Great Medicine Spring in Theodore Wirth Park and nearby Glenwood Spring were both permanently dewatered with construction of Interstate 394 west out of Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Dewatering is like tiling a farm field to remove water considered excess that could drown plants. Plastic pipes with many small holes are buried. Groundwater trickles in through the holes. The pipes funnel groundwater quickly away so that the natural process of filtering or “scrubbing” water as it seeps through the soil, sand, clay, and rock, does not occur.
Historians value Coldwater as the Birthplace of Minnesota, the first civilian community of Native, European and African Americans, founded to service Fort Snelling. Coldwater furnished water to the fort from 1820 to 1920.
Dred Scott drank Coldwater while he was stationed there from 1836 to 1840, and based his famous case for freedom from slavery in part on his residency in the free then-Wisconsin Territory.
Scott lost his case in 1857 on the technicality that a slave was not a citizen and therefore had no right to bring a case into federal court. Not until 1954 with Brown versus the Board of Education was the Scott case reconciled because separate can never be equal.
The birthplace of our state is a dog park. There is no mention of Dred Scott or the Dakota oyate (people or nation), the sacredness of the place, just a scattering of spindly and dying trees and thigh high vegetation. A
The Supremacy of Trees
When the National Park Service was appointed to maintain Coldwater’s 27-acre campus in 2011, its leadership wanted a quick, cheap traditional-looking park. Appearance was the goal.
Planted prairies are the vogue in parks as the fastest low-cost method of prettifying, in this case, a former Big Woods top-of-the-Mississippi-bluff shoe string of land.
NSP clear cut the entire park, moved-in $60,000 of (free) low grade construction dirt fill for a semi flat created prairie and planted hundreds of prairie plant plugs after the original seeding washed down the Mississippi gorge with heavy spring rains.
But the spirit of the land at this ancient spring, the last natural spring in the county, home of the Dakota water deity Un K’te Hi, has called back the indigenous trees, baby oaks, maples and cottonwoods are peeping up among the paid prairie plantings.
Having clear cut Coldwater Park, NPS officials purchased dozens and dozens of toothpick trees to be planted by volunteers. Many of those little trees died and are still dying. It was not the volunteers’ fault. Simply sticking trees in holes in the ground is no guarantee of survival.
Trees grow in community. Clear cutting all the trees meant there were no “mother trees’ around to nurture the next generations. Big trees subsidize the young ones through the underground fungal network, says Suzanne Simard PhD.
“Without this helping hand, most of the seedlings wouldn’t make it.” Check out her 4 ½-minute video at http://www.ecology.com/2012/10/08/trees-communicate/.
NPS removed all the trees in the park but did not remove the old concrete ore bins or the dewatering pipe system from the military-industrial Bureau of Mines days, noting the expense. Dewatering around the last natural spring and clear-cutting amounts to an environmental apostasy.
“The older the tree the more quickly it grows,” forester-researcher Peter Wolhlleben notes. Elder trees are markedly more productive when it comes to climate change. “If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old, which is exactly what large conservation groups are asking.”
Climate scientists repeatedly tell us that if you want to slow global warming—plant trees. Trees slurp up heavy rains, hold the soil, provide shade, absorb carbon pollution, calm winds and make people happy. It’s a fact. Social statistics show less stress, less crime and greater property value in forested neighborhoods.
In a few centuries, the Coldwater dewatering pipes will fill and rot and the trees will win despite the NPS plan to burn them out—assuming the park survives. The land holds the memory of its once and future.
--Susu Jeffrey |
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Coldwater Journal
February 2017
Dred Scott in Minnesota |
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By Susu Jeffrey
Between 1836-40 Dred Scott lived at Fort Snelling, in what was then the Wisconsin Territory, a "free territory" where slavery was prohibited. He had lived at Fort Armstrong in the free state of Illinois with his master, Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, from 1833-35.
Dred Scott's famous suit for freedom from slavery was based on his residency in the free territory now called Minnesota and in the free state of Illinois.
In 1857, on March 6, Dred Scott was found to be "not a person." This finding by the Supreme Court of the United States was ridiculed inside the country and abroad.
Like the "illegal aliens" of today, the "enemy combatants" and the extradited and disappeared, slaves had no legal standing. The Scott decision is considered to be one of the five most consequential Supreme Court cases.
In the Dred Scott decision, Minnesota played a part in the cultural battle against slavery in the United States. Like the war on terrorism and "just war" debates, the great slave debate divided the nation, divided families, and was as much about finances as ethics.
Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom in 1846 in St. Louis, Missouri. After an 11-year court battle Scott, Harriet, his wife and the mother of their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, lost their freedom case.
The high court found that Scott was a slave, and was therefore not eligible to bring his case for freedom from slavery into the federal court system. Dred Scott, 62, was found to be "not a person," and therefore had no personhood rights in the federal courts of the United States.
Now corporations are considered "persons" under the law.
Scott was born in Virginia, 1795, a slave child to the Blow family, named Sam. The family and slaves moved west settling in St. Louis, Missouri. He changed his name after his first wife was sold "down the river." He was 19-years-old, ran away as Sam and returned as Dred Scott, caught and beaten by a gang of young thugs who returned slaves to their masters for reward money.
Scott met and married his wife, Harriet Robinson, at Fort Snelling. Their wedding was performed by Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro. It was illegal for blacks to marry. Native American marriages were also unrecognized.
The Scott case was initiated in 1846, six-months after Dr. Emerson's widow refused to permit Scott to purchase his emancipation. Scott lost a first trial on a technicality, won his freedom on retrial, and lost in the Missouri Supreme Court.
This was a contrary opinion because Missouri courts consistently ruled that slaves taken into free states were automatically free. The case was maneuvered from state to federal court by anti-slavery interests looking for a definitive legal blow to the institution of slavery.
On January 1, 1853 in St. Louis, the family's deranged master ordered Dred Scott, his wife Harriet and their two daughters into a barn where he forced the adults to strip and whipped them with a horse whip for "being worthless and insolent." Sanford then spanked the girls Eliza, 13, and Lizzie, 7, and locked the family inside the barn.
In the 1850s slaves were quietly freed if outrageous abuse became public knowledge. This blindness allowed the institution of slavery to continue while rooting out "a few bad apples."
A few bad apples among the Abu Ghraib guards were rooted out but prisoner terrorism continues—think Gitmo, think U.S. “black sites” where non-persons are held indefinitely in non-sites. According to Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, torturing people is also devastating to the bad apples. Their acts self-contaminate and leach into the national character tainting all Americans.
The Dred Scott family lost their 11-year battle for freedom in the "most unpopular Supreme Court decision in the (then) 70-year history of the court." Into the rising fire of abolitionist sentiment in Scott v. Sandford (1846-57), the high court declared Dred Scott to be ineligible to file a suit in federal court because he was a slave, that is property, and "not a person." The Dred Scott decision ruled that blacks, whether slave or free "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
So the Supreme Court declared persons to be property, and now corporations to be people. The Occupy movement brought up economic inequality in a cultural context that leaked into American consciousness with the possibility of uniting citizens across race and class boundaries.
The Scott case legalized inequality and laid the groundwork for "separate but equal" racial discrimination throughout the nation which was not overturned until 1954 with Brown v. Board of (Topeka, Kansas) Education. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and of Muslims in the current wars on terrorism, like reservation restrictions for Native Americans, illustrate the breath of racist mentality—America’s original sin.
After the Supreme Court decision Dred Scott's original masters, the Blow family, purchased and freed the Scotts. Dred died a free man the following year of tuberculosis. Harriet survived into grandmother-hood until 1876.
Their elder daughter Eliza Scott married and had two sons. Lizzie never married but, following her sister's early death, she helped raise her nephews. One of Eliza's sons died young, but the other married and has descendants, some of whom still live in St. Louis.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), published a two-volume novel about runaway slaves, Dred, in 1856 (the year before the Scott Supreme Court decision). One of the principal conspirators in Nat Turner’s Rebellion, Southampton County, Virginia 1831, was named Dred “a name not unusual among the slaves and generally given to those of great physical force.” Dred Scott, short, slight and tubercular, was a powerhouse.
In case you missed the Dred Scott story in your local schools read MRS. DRED SCOTT by Lea VanderVelde. The first half of the book is a lively, detailed account of early Fort Snelling. VanderVelde’s exhaustive research includes the Scotts, Native Americans, homes of the period, food, Fort Snelling politics, the extreme weather, and a sense of the historical time in a very readable book. |
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Coldwater Journal
17 January 2017
SAD NEWS |
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Coldwater’s lead attorney, Larry Leventhal, who argued for the validity of the 1805 U.S.-Dakota Treaty in our 2001 “disobeying a lawful order” case, has passed on January 17.
Edited from Randy Furst’s STAR TRIBUNE article.
Larry Leventhal, a legendary Twin Cities attorney who devoted his career to defending American Indian activists and their causes, died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 75.
"He became one of the foremost experts on Indian treaty rights in the country," said Bill Means of Rosebud, S.D., co-founder and board member of the American Indian Treaty Rights Council. For more than 40 years, Leventhal traveled the country representing Indian tribes and activists in battles over water, land, fishing and hunting rights.
"He believed in the treaties, and thought the government should abide by them," said Clyde Bellecourt, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM).
One of Leventhal's last political acts before he became bedridden was to narrate a video last fall produced by folk singer Larry Long, in support of a campaign on behalf of Leonard Peltier, an AIM activist who has been imprisoned for more than 40 years for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents in South Dakota.
Leventhal believed Peltier was innocent. "It's time for there to be an effort to pardon Leonard Peltier," he said in the video.
Leventhal represented AIM in some of its most famous struggles. Bellecourt said that Leventhal was the first lawyer he called after AIM activists occupied Wounded Knee, S.D., site of an 1890 massacre, in 1973.
Leventhal joined attorneys William Kunstler, Mark Lane, Ken Tilsen and Doug Hall in representing Dennis Banks and Russell Means in a nine-month federal trial in St. Paul for their leadership role at Wounded Knee.
His primary job was to argue that the occupation was legally justified by an 1868 treaty. U.S. District Judge Fred Nichols criticized Leventhal whenever he raised the treaty issue, Bellecourt said, "but toward the end of the trial, he was listening to Larry, and it started making sense to him." Nichols eventually threw out the charges, citing government misconduct.
A graduate of St. Louis Park High School, Leventhal attended the University of Minnesota, where he spun records at the college radio station, WMMR, and served as its news director. In 1968, just out of law school, he ran into Banks and Bellecourt, who were monitoring the courts, believing Indians were getting short shrift from the system.
Leventhal got involved in their work.
"He incorporated every Indian organization we put together — the American Indian Health Board, the Native American Community Clinic, Little United Tribes housing project, Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis and the Little Red School House in St. Paul," Bellecourt said.
Over a 48-year legal career Leventhal's clients were frequently in the headlines. Among them were Charles Lone Eagle and John Boney, two Indian men who were picked up by Minneapolis police officers for intoxication, thrown in the trunk of a squad car and taken to Hennepin County Medical Center. Leventhal and an associate, Gary Bergquist, sued Minneapolis over their treatment, and a jury awarded the two men $100,000, plus legal fees.
Leventhal was one of the attorneys, including Kunstler and Dan Scott, who represented Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of black activist Malcolm X. She was charged in Minneapolis in 1995 with plotting the murder of the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The indictment was eventually dismissed.
Kunstler was amazed at Leventhal's work ethic. "He works all the time," Kunstler once said. Indeed, Leventhal often slept in his office.
Senior U.S. District Judge Michael Davis, Minnesota's former chief federal judge, called Leventhal "one of the finest constitutional lawyers in this country.
"He was a zealous advocate for all his clients, respectful to the court and to the opposing counsel," Davis said. "What we need is 1,000 more Larry Leventhals."
Boyish in his looks even as he aged, Leventhal had the look of a consummate innocent in the courtroom. "He disarms so many opponents," Vine Deloria Jr., an American Indian attorney and author, once said of Leventhal. "He comes across as the bumpkin. Then all of a sudden you're on the canvas, asking, 'Who was that masked man?' "
In an interview 21 years ago, Deloria described Leventhal as one of the top five lawyers in the country on Indian treaty issues. And, Deloria said, "He's the only one who is white."
Services have been held. |
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