Letter to The Heritage Preservation Commission

The following letter was sent by Hiawatha for All to the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission on January 16th, 2023.

To the members of the Heritage Preservation Commission,

I am writing on behalf of Hiawatha for All, a group of Minneapolis residents who have been advocating for a sustainable and inclusive future for Lake Hiawatha and the surrounding parkland. I understand you will be discussing the nomination to add Hiawatha Golf Course to the National Register of Historic Places. I am asking that you decline to provide a recommendation on this nomination.

As the commission that oversees historic preservation in Minneapolis, you have a tremendous influence over what values the city brings to this work, and thus also a responsibility to safeguard those values. Concerning the nomination for Hiawatha Golf Course, I wish to draw your attention to an excerpt from the Heritage Preservation topic of the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan:

“A function of heritage preservation that’s becoming more relevant is its ability to help residents see themselves and their cultural identity within the city and empower them to more fully participate in civic life; thus, it’s critical for public engagement to include all interested groups in the preservation process, especially those whose history has been marginalized and whose places suffered deliberate disinvestment and removal.”

The nomination before you was not developed in accordance with these principles. The nomination was developed in private, without consultation from the Minneapolis Parks & Recreation Board or any members of the public outside of a group of golfers who have organized politically to oppose changes to this course. We have reached out multiple times to the initiating organizations (the Bronze Foundation and The Cultural Landscape Foundation) to request that they recognize the long history of the Dakota people on this site and that they include members of the Dakota community in the process of creating the nomination. Our requests have been entirely ignored.

There is little doubt that the Dakota are a people “whose history has been marginalized and whose places suffered deliberate disinvestment and removal”. Lake Hiawatha and the land around it were taken from Dakota tribes under the Treaty of 1805. The golf course in question was created by the dredging and effective destruction of Rice Lake, a lake and wetlands that had supported Dakota communities for many generations. The 1863 Dakota Expulsion Act, a federal law still on the books, made it illegal for any Dakota person to live in Minnesota.

The original nomination document submitted to SHPO did not contain a single mention of the Dakota peoples’ history on the site in question. Only after that document was rejected by SHPO as incomplete was an addition made of two and a half paragraphs concerning Dakota use of the land. That’s 241 words about Dakota history in a document of 37,000 words.

A decision by this body to recommend this nomination would be an endorsement of a process that does not live up to your stated values. Heritage preservation in Minneapolis, most of all heritage preservation concerning public lands, must be conducted in the open and through an inclusive process. Please stand behind your commitments and do not provide a recommendation on this nomination.