(upbeat instrumental music) - [Madison] For me and my people, sacred spaces to us, it's a really nice place to be able to go to and connect and like, know that your ancestors were walking there at one point in time.

- There are many the sacred places within this larger Bdote landscape.

I think about it as sort of being a landscape that's really connected by water.

- [Madison] Our people have been coming to these places and various other sacred sites in the Twin Cities.

- [Iyekiyapiwin] Where we're at right now is Oheyawahe, which is "a hill much visited."

Both a site of ceremony, we had our Wakan Wacipi in this place, it's a site of burial.

- The 1851 treaty was signed at this very location which opened up over 35 million acres in Southeast Minnesota for development.

- You can see in the distance those condominiums that are on the river.

This place was slated for that exact same development.

- We have urban sprawl and the built environment around and encompassing many of our sacred sites or places of importance here in the Metro area.

- [Iyekiyapiwin] I encourage people to come out to Oheyawahe, it's a lovely place.

But I want them to think about what it's like for contemporary Dakota people to come here.

I also want them to sort of shut out the beautiful landscape and experience this place only with their ears and I think they're going to experience a very different place.

While it is beautiful, there's no escaping that this is a site of colonization.

It is not a pure and pristine place, but it doesn't have to be.

The power is still here.

But the experience of being here, when you hear the noise, the cacophony of colonialism around you it is hard to avoid.

- [Franky] This is Dakota Homeland, and these sites of relevance and importance connect us directly to Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, here.

And so we have a responsibility as contemporary Natives in this Metro atmosphere to protect these sites.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Madison] Bdote, that's like one of our places of creation, where we came from.

- [Iyekiyapiwin] (speaking Dakota) Right now, we're in a place that Dakota people hold very sacred.

On my left, we have the Haha Wakpa: "the River of the Waterfalls," or the Mississippi River.

And then kind of in front of me is the Mni Sota Wakpa: "The River Where the Water Reflects the Skies."

And where those two rivers come together is a confluence and in Dakota, we call that confluence a "bdote."

This Bdote is particularly important to us because it's the site of our creation.

We emerged out of the Earth.

We came out of this place out of our Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth.

And the place that we emerged is this place, the Bdote.

This Bdote.

And so for that reason this is really an important place to Dakota people.

Many people call this sort of the center of our existence as Dakota people.

- Long before Fort Snelling and those walls were constructed in this location, that place had a significant meaning to Dakota and Ojibwe people here in Minnesota.

- But it's also important because of the losses and the hardships and the ways that our ancestors fought that we would still exist, that we're still a people.

And we're still here.

After the U.S.-Dakota war of 1862, the women, children and elders are forced marched from Lower Sioux, where I'm from, to this place, with concentration camps that held non-combatants over the winter, until in March of 1863 and exile order is done at a federal level that exiles all Dakota people from Minnesota.

It is the sort of connection of our histories both between our genesis and our genocide that really sort of tie together the importance of this place as a sacred place.

(upbeat instrumental music) - One of our most sacred sites for Dakota people in the twin cities known as Wakan Tipi, which means "Dwelling Place of the Sacred" in the Dakota language.

- Wakan Tipi, down in St. Paul, there's a cave there.

And that's a place where they'd pray to the water spirit Untunktahe.

- [Maggie] The site itself has undergone really significant transformation due to colonization, industrialization, vandalism, and mistreatment, but after a hundred years or so of the site being abandoned as a rail yard, some folks on the East Side came together to reclaim the site, restore it as a natural area, and try to protect the site to allow for Dakota people to reconnect with this place.

(upbeat instrumental music) - So we're at a place called Coldwater Springs, which, when we're talking about erasure from history, this is a prime example.

Back in 2005 and 2006, there was efforts to nominate Coldwater Springs as a Traditional Cultural Property.

And those efforts failed.

Ultimately the Park Service rejected the Traditional Cultural Property survey without a thorough explanation at all, rejecting many of the oral histories that were collected by elders who are no longer with us today.

Elders from our Canadian, South Dakota, and Montana reserves talk about Coldwater Springs.

Talk about Tipi Wakan, the caves.

And we had relatives from Crow Creek and Sisseton and Flandreau share stories about how annually they come and collect this water to use in spring ceremonies, back on their reservation.

The other two sites that we visited today where you've got clear signage and interpretation that you're standing on Dakota Homeland.

When you walk up to this place, there's nothing in terms of signage or site interpretation that would allow you any understanding of why this site is significant to Dakota people.

Just as recently as last week, there were prayer ties along the creek here.

Those prayer ties are gone.

What happened to those?

Back in 2009, we had elders come to us and they asked us to protect this site.

It will stir emotions inside of you but it will also keep a fire burnt to continue that fight that they started many years ago.

- I feel like sense of power to be able to walk the same places that your ancestors did and able to carry that little bit of knowledge.

(upbeat instrumental music)