AUGUST 31, 2019 – Yesterday we took our international guests on a boat ride down the Mississippi River and then to the historic Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Mighty Miss and the Minnesota River. Much water had flowed since I’d last seen the old fort, built in 1820.
It’s staffed by engaging, knowledgeable staff of the esteemed Minnesota Historical Society. By its new emphases, MHS reveals a decidedly “revisionist” approach to the state’s history. For example, prominently displayed in the bookstore are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and onslaught of works critical of the white power structure and imperial thrust of foreign policy in American history.
We learned that Dread Scott, whose landmark Supreme Court case was a stop on the way to the Civil War, and his wife were joined with other slaves—yes, slaves in Minnesota!—working for their military masters at Fort Snelling; among the soldiers, the future president, Zachary Taylor.
A large display told how Fort Snelling had been the site of MILS—“Military Intelligence Language School”—during World War II, where hundreds of “Nisei” (second generation Japanese Americans) had been stationed to study Japanese. They went on to serve America heroically. The reason for their location here, apparently, was that the officer in charge of the operation found Minnesota more receptive to these “pariah” than were other parts of the country.
I was invited to register online my opinion regarding the proposed name change of the fort to “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote”—“Bdote” being the Dakota name for “where the waters meet,” the sacred place where the white man’s fort was built.
The name change sends people into a tizzy. Last spring in reaction to MHS’s “revisionist” initiative, Republicans in the state senate launched an effort to reduce MHS funding by 18%. In the end, the effort failed. (If any of those Republicans read Zinn’s aforementioned communist-socialist tome, they’d try to put MHS out of business altogether.)
As a student of history myself, where do I stand regarding all of this? Perhaps you’ve heard the adage, “History is written by the victors.” But in the end, who will the victors be? One never knows until more history unfolds.
Each day that we go about our business of living, we help determine how history unfolds. Some of us work at it deliberatively. All of us, however, are amassed in the current of a great river. Some of us swim upstream but only so far; some of us drown, while most just tread water while floating along. Others try desperately to hang on to a low hanging branch that provides an illusory respite from muddy, churlish waters.
The river has many bends and backwaters, falls and rapids, flooding and the opposite, as it cuts a course that changes over time. Inexorably the waters carry all of humanity toward one great ocean in which determinist, swimmer, drowner, treader, branch-hanger all coalesce into the history of civilization.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
