The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has taken a big step toward closing a popular off-leash dog park along the Mississippi River as it works to restore an area considered sacred by the Dakota people.
Last week, the Park Board advanced a resolution to close the Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park no later than the end of the year.
The 6-acre site, which runs along river bottomlands, has been an off-leash dog park since 1992. But the area has deep cultural and spiritual ties for the Dakota and other Native groups due to its proximity to Mni Owe Sni, or Coldwater Spring.
“At the time that the city of Minneapolis was being developed, and the park was being developed, it was known that this was a sacred area, and it just wasn’t respected,” said Maggie Lorenz, executive director of the Native-led nonprofit Wakan Tipi.
Over the last two decades, the National Parks Service has been restoring the area directly around Coldwater Spring in collaboration with more than 20 tribes. Mni Owe Sni was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.
The Park Board’s resolution focuses on the land below the bluff, where the spring flows to the Mississippi River.
The vote to decommission the off-leash dog park means that the site would still be open to the public but no longer as an off-leash park. The proposed plan also involves seeking an alternative site for an off-leash dog park.
The resolution will be brought to the full board on June 17.
A place of prayer and medicine
The change in use for the land has spurred a debate between tribal members who want to restore and protect the site and dog owners who have long enjoyed access to the riverbottom park.
The Park Board started discussing the matter internally with its Native American Advisory Council a year ago. The conversation comes ahead of the planning for the Minnehaha Regional Park’s long-term plan.
Native leaders and community members say that it’s never been an appropriate use of a way to engage with a sacred site.
“The current off-leash recreation use is incompatible with Mni Owe Sni as a Traditional Cultural Place,” Jolene Goldade, communications and marketing director for MPRB said in a written statement.
Juanita Espinosa, a Dakota-Ojibwe elder and community organizer and a member of the Park Board’s Native American Advisory Council said that beyond spiritual and historical ties, she also has personal connection with the site because of family ceremonies performed there.
“My relatives left all these prayers and these medicines in the ground for us to care for ourselves, and now they’ve been desecrated, and now as the next generation, we have to grow them back,” she told Sahan Journal.
Espinosa also spoke at the May 27 Park Board meeting where she elaborated on the significance of the site, which is part of a larger landscape called Daku Wakan Tipi that extends beyond the park and the site of the restored Coldwater Spring to the airport and the Veteran Affairs Hospital.
“People think that it’s OK to desecrate because it doesn’t have a tombstone, it doesn’t have a sign on it, you know. And that’s what’s not fair to our way of life,” Espinosa said.
Even though the history of the site dates back thousands of years, it is only recently that it has come to light. Even for Lorenz, who is a member of the advisory council, the discovery was recent.
“I’ve been there myself with my dog and even as a Native person, really not fully understanding, in my younger years, the expansiveness of the Mni Owe Sni site, the really high likelihood of burial remains in the ground at that land up until my more adult professional career.”
Lorenz hopes that this landscape will be integrated into the restoration plans that are happening at the National Park Service Mni Owe Sni area to take that holistic view of the landscape in engagement with tribes, tribal historians and elders.
Mixed feelings from the community
The residents who spoke at the Minneapolis Parks Board meetings in recent weeks and dog owners Sahan spoke to at the park feel conflicted about the historical and cultural significance of the site they have come to love over the years. Park Board members heard from Native and non-Native speakers at their June 3 meeting.
“What occurred here was a historical injustice, that’s a fact. Now, what we do about it is it’s a little bit more in our control,” said Minneapolis resident Allen Michael Owen, a chef at the Indigenous Food Lab.
Owen said restoring the park helps return land with deep spiritual significance to tribes removed and relocated from their lands and offers a rare space for Native people to practice their religious freedom in a heavily urban area.
Minneapolis resident Jeremy Fink argued that public parkland is meant to be shared and also that dog owners keep the site clean. “I strongly encourage the Park Board to put aside their activist ideas considering the broader public,” he said.
“It’s where I connect to God. There’s just nothing else like it in the city,” Kim Kelly said in the meeting. “… My biggest hope is that we can find some way to share the space still, and honor the Natives that originally used it.”
Two dog owners interviewed at the park also had mixed feelings about losing access to it.
Nate Bunkers, who lives in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of north Minneapolis, has been going to the park for about four years with his dog Meeko. Bunkers said that he wishes that there will be “some compromise that we can all come to an agreement together” as well as more awareness and education about the history of the park and the sacred site it sits on.
Alan Lopez, however, is not as conflicted about what should happen to the park. Even though he has been coming to the park for a little under 15 years and would be “sad to see it go,” he is willing to find another off-leash option for his dog Lulu if it means honoring the history of the place.
“Let’s give this land back to the Native folks if it’s sacred to them, and let’s find a place,” Lopez told Sahan Journal. “I’m from Mexico, so I would want the same thing if it happened to us for sure.”
History of the site
The Dakota history of the site goes back 13,000 years, according to a timeline shared by Jennifer Rankin, the director of archaeology at the Minnesota Historical Society at the Park Board’s May 27 meeting.
The history also involves Camp Coldwater from 1820 to 1840. The site was also used as a research campus by the U.S. Bureau of Mines before the National Parks Service took over in 2010 and started ecological restoration.
“Those are very short periods of time when you consider the long history that ancestral Native Americans have been present in this area,” Rankin said, referring to the history of settlement and colonization of the area.
Mni Owe Sni translates to “the spring that never freezes” in Dakota. The water is used for ceremonies and this area is used for gatherings and a ceremonial site for the Dakota and many other tribes who believe that the mouth of the Minnesota River is their place of creation, or B’dote.
Later, it served as the original base camp for the U.S. soldiers who built Fort Snelling. Drawn by the site’s abundant fresh water, they established the area’s first U.S. government outpost in the early 1800s.
An archaeological assessment conducted last year as a result of the conversations with the Native American Advisory Council produced further evidence of the archaeological and historical significance of the site.
That report is being withheld from the public in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act and the Minnesota Private Cemeteries Act as it contains findings of detailed archeological and burial records that is reserved for qualified archeologists, historic preservation professionals and tribal historic preservation offices.
“We do see a lot of different types of cultural material on the surface, and so if we do have our canine friends digging into the dirt, that’s actually dislodging some of those artifacts,” Rankin said at the previous Parks Board meeting.
“I have a dog, and we’ve gone there, and I’ve definitely gone off path, and I’ve definitely done some things that I am not super happy that we did, but in that moment it was beautiful for me and Paige and Perry,” Park Board President Tom Olsen said.
The commissioners expressed their support for the resolution which is now directed to Park Board Superintendent Al Bangoura. If the resolution is approved by the full board, the next step would be for staff to develop a decommissioning plan. This resolution will include identifying additional off-leash recreation opportunities.
