(gentle spirited music) - [Bret] The Minnesota River that runs through the state's heartland draws its name from the Dakota Word, "Mni Sota," meaning cloudy water.

The river served as a thoroughfare for the Dakota Nation and fur traders before European settlers arrived.

(gentle spirited music continues) John Robertson, a retired Episcopal priest, manages the historic side at the Lower Sioux Agency.

A community of Indian people whose ancestors once traveled along the Minnesota River.

- If we look at the petroglyphs, which are 30 miles south of this location or so, is that we know based upon those that this area has been a transportation route for millennia.

We have indications that pottery up on Big Stone Lake, Lake Traverse was in the 1600s, 1700 era.

We know that there were things that were resourced in that area.

So the Minnesota River was the highway.

(gentle spirited music continues) (soft spirited music) When the French first made contact with the Dakota.

I believe it was the 1620s or 30, something like that.

But there was no things like boundaries as we know them today in terms of nation states.

Tribal boundaries or aboriginal boundaries were fluid, and one of the ways that we used to describe it is that your territory was that in which your language and culture had influence.

So that sets the early pre-contact Dakota territory from roughly southern Hudson Bay down around into what's the Wisconsin Peninsula or the Wisconsin landmass today into northern, what's now northern Iowa, Eastern north and South Dakota, back up into Canada to Hudson Bay.

(soft spirited music continues) And the center became around what's now known as Mille Lacs Lake or Spirit Lake.

That area was the first center of the Dakota Nation.

The Ojibwe were with the French and the one of the stories goes is that the Ojibwe were telling the French that they were those that lived on the river.

The French, supposedly, according to myth and legend thought they were talking about they were the people of the snake or they were snake.

So then we end up with the "nadouessioux," which is a word that is French for snake and ends up being Sioux.

(soft spirited music continues) (solemn music) Then as the intellectuals disappear and the actual line people, the fur trappers come in.

They then began to.... and we'll put it in parentheses, "married into the Dakota families," realizing that they were the, that by doing that, they had a built in network of access to what they were after, the resource that they were after, which were the furs.

So that meant that most of the French participants in the fur trade learned to speak Dakota.

They lived as Dakota.

During that fur trading time and the development of the emerging colonies and power, there begins to be a shift within the North American landscape in terms of the Aboriginal territories.

The center of their universe shifts from Mille Lacs Lake to the mouth of the Minnesota, Mississippi River.

(energetic music) - [Bret] The Dakota moved south under pressure from the Ojibwe, which diminished some of their food supplies such as maple syrup, wild rice, and woodland game.

The French fur industry brought in much needed supplies and trading posts were established along the waterway as far as Lake Traverse.

- The fur traders would come in, they were lower class French people, the voyagers.

Usually they would make a run down the Minnesota River and then down to Prairie Du Chien and that's where the goods would come in, either from what's now Canada.

And then they would load 'em up and then go back up to Lake Traverse so it was a major trip.

They would do their rendezvous and then they would load up the furs and take 'em back up.

And then they would go out then to Europe from there.

And then the goods would come out here and be distributed amongst the Dakota people.

So that would be the pots and pans, the hatchets, the iron, the metal, the things that were beginning to make Dakota life livable in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

- [Bret] The British competed with the French for the fur trade and eventually dominated.

Historian John Grenier is writing a book about British Commander Robert Rogers, who commissioned cartographer, Jonathan Carver to map the region.

- Rogers had a grand vision for discovering the northwest passage across the North American continent.

(energized music continues) (bright spirited music) Carver travels in the fall of 1766, gets all the way up to the falls of St. Anthony and his guides tell him that they're not gonna go any farther.

They're gonna return down to the Wisconsin River and winter there.

He meets a band of Dakotas, and the Dakotas say, they invite him, essentially, to come out to Lac Qui Parle, which is their wintering grounds.

It was not a large segment of the Dakota Nation.

Small family groups.

And he spends the winter of 1766, 1767 at Lac Qui Parle.

While he's here, he is the first Anglo American, or the first Englishman to learn the Dakota dialect, which is a pretty profound accomplishment.

It's one of the great coincidences of early American contact with the Dakota people that Carver learns to speak Dakota at the place called Lac Qui Parle, the lake that talks.

And the Dakota's treated him incredibly well, generously shared their resources and their expertise and their community with him.

(bright spirited music continues) (curious music) - [Bret] After wintering and Lac Qui Parle, Carver went back to the falls of St. Anthony.

He waited for Rogers to send him supplies and an expedition crew, which never arrived.

- Robert Rogers often played loose and fast with the facts, and he would promise people things that he knew he could not deliver.

So he promised Carver eight shillings a day, plus food and material for the expedition.

(indistinct shouting) (gavel banging) The British government never honored carver's expenses.

So Carver died in poverty in the late 1770s in England.

As he went back, after he went back to parliament and submitted his request for refunds of all his expenses.

(curious music continues) (dramatic music) - Shortly after he leaves, that's the beginning of the real ferment in the United States that leads to the Revolutionary War.

That then is beginning to shift then the relationship of all the major players in what's now the United States or North America in terms of the relationships between the tribes, the various Native nations and the various foreign powers.

During the Revolutionary War, the Dakota people are aligned with the British and dramatically so, and it becomes even more obvious that alignment in the next war, the war of 1812.

The choice becomes between that next group of fur traders who were British because they had taken over the operation of the fur trade from the French.

The fur traders just left.

They didn't want to be American citizens then.

My great-great-great-Grandma was married to one of those British fur traders then who refused to become an American citizen after 1812.

- [Bret] The fur trader moved to Canada and left his wife and daughter behind.

- And then eventually sends for my great-great grandma to give her an education in Canada.

And that's how she meets the Robertson guy and then comes back to Minnesota.

So that's (stammers), that era of the fur trade and that transition in the Dakota alignment with the British is played out in my family history.

- [Bret] By 1852, the fur trading era was over, and American homesteaders were settling the land.

1850 treaties relegated the Dakotas to narrow strips of land along the Minnesota in exchange for goods, services and money.

Tensions over late payments, corrupt agents and no hunting woods erupted into the US Dakota War of 1862.

38 Dakota were hung, and the rest marched to Fort Snelling, then South Dakota, hundreds died along the way.

(bright music) When the US government agreed to put former Indian lands into federal trust status as a lower Sioux agency, Dakota started to return home and eventually became a self-supporting community.

The Upper Sioux Agency was established as a state park in 1963, and 60 years later, the land was transferred back to the original Dakota community.

(bright music continues) - As we continue to go forward as a total American culture or United States culture, society, is that if we are going to make change, if we are going to be able to create a future, that part of what's going to have to, in my opinion, going to have to be recovered, is the spirit, that the Dakota, or the understanding that the Dakota people had, the Ojibwe people had, Iowa people had, everybody had that lived in North America, is that this that we're standing on is what we are.

And unless we know what we're standing on, then we can't know who we are.

(bright music continues)