Being a Good Relative: Following Mni into the Future (2023)

Julia Helen Rice
Advised by Craig Douglas
In collaboration with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi

Abstract

This thesis engages with the challenges and disciplinary discourse of collaborative design with Indigenous people who are working to heal their homelands both ecologically and spiritually. The design project is located at a sacred site for the Dakota (an Indigenous people whose home is the state now called Minnesota). The landscape has been permanently altered by the infrastructure of colonization, resource extraction, and urbanization. I have been given permission to work on the site by the Indigenous caretakers who now maintain it. The site will function as a laboratory to enact a design practice that is embedded within, conceptualizes, and translates across multiple ways of knowing and being in relation to land. The project structures its methodology through three ethics of relationality which decenter the futurity of design to instead co-labor with the site’s Indigenous caretakers towards the realization of a shared, common future.

This thesis engages with the challenges and disciplinary discourse around collaborative design with Indigenous people who are working to heal their homelands both ecologically and spiritually. It begins with the proposition that landscape architecture has been both a tool and a participant of settler colonialism and seeks to develop an anticolonial landscape architecture practice.

To explain how I am crafting an anticolonial design practice, I want to first ground this thesis project in who I am and where I am working. I grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin which occupies the ancestral homelands of the Oceti Sakowiŋ, Anishinaabeg, Hoocąk, and Menominee.

I have chosen to work in the place that I am from because my ancestors came here for the cheap land that was available after the U.S. government forcibly removed the Indigenous people. Thus, I am implicated in the settler colonial project of the United States.

“I think Indigenous peoples across cultures have this guiding narrative which is being in good relation. And one does not have to be us to be good kin. … I think that it is about learning how to be not only in good relations with Indigenous people without trying to be us and usurp everything that is ours, it is also about learning to be better relations with the planet.”

Dr. Kim Tallbear, “Can a DNA Test Make Me Native American?”, All My Relations Podcast

Within Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is Wakáŋ Tipi, a cave sacred to the Dakota, who are the eastern members of the Oceti Sakowiŋ.

Historically, the land around Wakáŋ Tipi was a shifting landscape of water, sandbars, and floodplain forests.

In the 19th-century, Wakan Tipi was permanently damaged when the bluffs were dynamited to make room for the railroads and the area was turned into a railyard. This dynamiting carved 70 feet off of the bluffs and destroyed the ancient petroglyphs housed within Wakáŋ Tipi.

In the early 2000s, the heavily polluted site was acquired by the city of Saint Paul and designated as a nature sanctuary.

These are the people who care for Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary today and they agreed to partner with me on my thesis project. Wakaŋ Tipi Awanyaŋkapi (“those who take care of Wakaŋ Tipi”)is an indigenous led environmental advocacy organization. Because I am of settler descent, it is important that my thesis work with Native people on a project they view as vital to their community.

Before developing a program for this thesis, I first created an ethical framework within which I structured my work throughout this project. I defined three ethics of relationality. These are Mitákuye Oyásiŋ, which is a Dakota phrase that recognizes all of our shared relations, an ethic of incommensurability, and an idea of co-laboring.

At their center, these ethics created accountability for me to work respectfully with the Dakota people and to honor all the beings connected to Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. They are a recognition that I now have a responsibility to support the efforts of Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi to restore Dakota cultural and spiritual practices to the land. This ethical framework guides my collaboration with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi as well as the design for the site.

Program

The site was once part of an extensive network of rivers and lakes which gives Minnesota its name. In Dakota, Mni Sota Makoce means the land where the water reflects the sky.

Note: Wakpá Tháŋka (the Mississippi River), Hoġaŋ Waŋke Kiŋ (the St. Croix River), and Mnísota Wakpá (the Minnesota River) are not drawn to scale but are highlighted to make visible their importance as transportation routes for the Indigenous people of Mní Sota Makóče.

Mitákuye Oyásiŋ, the Dakota concept that we are all related, does not just apply to humans but expands to relations with plants, animals, land, water, and the other-than-human. Wakáŋ Tipi joins these relations as a place where waters gather.

The site is defined by its sandstone bluffs which percolate ground water into a floodplain where the ground water joins the Mississippi. This intermingling of different water sources marked the site as a sacred dwelling of Uŋktehi, the God of the Waters.

When Euro-American settlers arrived in Mni Sota Makoce, they brought with them entirely different ontologies and land relations which clashed with the Dakota kinship systems. By 1858, treaty making had forced the Dakota onto a thin reservation along the Minnesota River.

Unable to feed themselves, they fought back. In response, the U.S. army rounded up thousands of Dakota and placed them in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Congress abrogated all treaties with the Dakota and ordered their forced removal from Mni Sota Makoce. This act of Congress has never been repealed.

Removing the Dakota from Minnesota allowed a new land regime to structure the landscape. Our modern infrastructure is evidence of a very different ontology which views nature as a resource and prioritizes the efficient movement of commodities and people in support of global, capitalist economies.

It is neither neutral nor apolitical. It has harmful consequences on our land, water, and bodies and is the cause of ongoing contamination within the sanctuary.

In partnership with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi, we have decided that this thesis will propose solutions for the ambient and soil pollution of the western boundary of the sanctuary. The long-term vision is to reconnect the site to the Mississippi and restore culturally important plants so that the site can once again be a place of harvest and ceremony.

St. Paul, MN

To support their work of healing Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary both ecologically and spiritually, I have expanded the scope of this project to follow the hydrological system of Lake Phalen to the now buried Lamprey Lake.

Rail Network

For the plant and animal relatives of the Dakota to return to the Mississippi, the land and waters must first be made safe for their habitation. Each infrastructural system which bounds and fragments Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary has different and multiple impacts on the landscape. The rail corridor which borders Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary has left and continues to leave a legacy of contamination from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals like lead, mercury, and arsenic.

Major Roads

The roads which surround Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary are responsible for similar contaminants as the railroads. But, because this is Minnesota, there is also heavy salt contamination from winter de-icing.

St. Paul Downtown Airport

The St. Paul Downtown Airport services private, corporate, and charter flights. Piston-engine aircraft still use leaded fuel which implicates the airport in the high childhood lead exposure in the neighborhoods around Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

Census Tracts with Childhood Elevated Blood Lead Levels

“We may go the way of the dinosaurs, and it will be because the dominant human ideological paradigm of our day forgot to tend with care to the oil, the gas, and all of the beings of this place. Forgot to tend to relationships, to ceremony (in all the plurality of ways this may be enacted), to the continuous co-constitution of life-worlds between humans and others.”

Zoe Todd (Métis), “Fish, Kin and Hope”.

We frequently consider the toxic contaminants from infrastructure as separate and unrelated to us because they are so harmful. But the Dakota belief that we are all related is also an obligation to attend to those relations which are damaging.

The program of this thesis imagines the unfolding of a future in which the ethics and land practices of the Dakota alter and disrupt our contemporary infrastructure to reconnect the fragmented hydrological system of St. Paul and return Dakota cultural practices to the lands they call home. Beginning within the sanctuary itself, working outwards to reconnect Phalen Creek with Wakáŋ Tipi’s spring waters and the Mississippi, and finally to the entire floodplain.

Phase One

Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi already has an initiative to daylight portions of Phalen Creek which is currently channelized underground in a storm interceptor. Historically Phalen Creek functioned as an important transportation corridor for the Dakota to the wild rice beds north of the Mississippi.

In support of the work of Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi, during its first phase, this thesis focused on developing proposals around how to daylight Phalen Creek through Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

Today underground spring water flowing out of Wakáŋ Tipi is captured in a series of constructed ponds and is channeled into the Phalen Creek storm interceptor which empties into the Mississippi just outside of the sanctuary.

Previous restoration efforts have removed most of the remnants of the former railyard as well as excavated 13 tons of soil contaminated with heavy metals, creosote, diesel, and oil. Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is currently under a covenant that prohibits disturbing the soil below 4’. Any hydrological changes have to operate within these realities.

These realities also create interesting opportunities for design. Following the ethic of co-laboring that I have defined for this project, I created a series of possibilities for daylighting Phalen Creek which I developed in collaboration with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi.

Each possibility offered different ways of reconnecting the three water sources across the site.

And proposed multiple hydrological conditions which could create a broader range of habitats that reintroduce culturally important plants of the Dakota.

The railroads that border Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary serve as important transportation networks for freight rail. In the spirit of being a good relative, the designs do not propose to remove them entirely, but to elevate them just enough to reconnect the three waters at the sanctuary. Each design possibility proposed elevating the railroads 10’ above the existing ground to allow water to flow underneath and a pathway to be constructed so people can follow the course of the water to the Mississippi.

In late March of 2023, I shared these design proposals with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi and had a discussion about the future they envision for the sanctuary. Based on their feedback I synthesized the three possibilities into a new design proposal.

This design allows Phalen Creek to meander through the western half of the sanctuary until it reaches the lowest spot on the site. There it pools with the water flowing out of Wakáŋ Tipi. Seasonal fluctuations will impact how much water gathers in the center of the site before it is released to the Mississippi.

But before the water can be brought back to the sanctuary, the remnant soil contamination within the site has to be attended to.

Phase Two

Some of the discussions I had with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi were about how Dakota ethics guide their decision making when it comes to pollution mitigation.

Historically, the Dakota moved cyclically across the ecosystems of Mni Sota Makoce. Their burning practices supported prairie and oak woodland habitats while their gathering and hunting practices maintained the wild rice beds and hardwood forests along the waterways.

These traditional land practices guide the maintenance cycles that Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi uses today within Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. Together, we decided that any pollution mitigation strategies would be guided by these care practices.

We wouldn’t remove any soil from the site. Nor would we rely on synthetic chemicals to rapidly alter habitats. But we did decide that harvesting and removing from the site, plants which could absorb pollutants into their cellular structures, was a necessary compromise towards diminishing the impact of contamination.

“Through an Indigenous lens, we can begin to think of displaced relatives in a different way - as visitors trying to figure out their role and place within their new environments. As relatives and active participants in the natural world, it is our job as people to find out the role of our displaced relatives and how to help keep balance with our other nonhuman relatives. The idea of eradication as a form of invasive species management is not a sustainable method to dealing with our displaced relatives. Rather we should think about how we can best support our native relatives and their communitites.”

Gabby Menomin (Forest County Potawatomi), Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi

Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi has given me a list of culturally important plants which they developed through community surveys with the four Dakota tribes of Minnesota. From this I have created a list of 10 plants that are excellent phytoremediators and are either already on site or are important to the Dakota.

These plants can help us clean up many of the contaminants found on site.

Native Plants Found on Site

Using what I have learned from Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi, I have designed a cycle of remediation practices that can be deployed across parts of the sanctuary to break down the heavy petroleum products and immobilize the heavy metal contamination. The challenge has been how to diminish the impact lead, arsenic, and mercury are having on the soils of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. This remediation cycle takes advantage of the burning practices of the Dakota to regularly add soil amendments of compost infused with iron and rock phosphate. These compounds bind to the heavy metals and immobilize them, rendering them less harmful.

And these remediation practices can be integrated into the larger cycle of maintenance and Dakota cultural practices that Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi is brining back to Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. Contamination impacts the site unevenly and not all areas will need to be or are able to be cleaned up.

This cycle of phytoremediation will be most concentrated in the areas of the site that will be re-graded to allow for the daylighting of Phalen Creek.

Other areas, like the oak planting in the center of the site, will probably continue to be impacted by the legacy of industrial pollution.

Once the railroads are elevated to allow for the reconnection of Phalen Creek to the Mississippi, this cycle of remediation will move beyond the boundaries of the sanctuary to prepare the ground to be graded into terraces which slowly move the waters towards each other.

I have intentionally not assigned specific time scales to this cycle of remediation and reconnection. Each phase is dependent on the one before it and knowing when it is time to move on to the next phase requires an ongoing relationship and obligation to the land.

The cycle of remediation may take ten years or it may take 30 years. We won’t know how it’s progressing without ongoing testing and a commitment to working on the site for generations. Dakota ontologies and cultural practices already support a way of understanding our land relations as practices attending to past and future relatives. Co-laboring with Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi to develop these proposals has challenged me to understand design as a practice of embodied work in a specific place, and that these drawings are only the beginning of much larger project. But through enacting these care practices, over time, we can help our nonhuman relatives return and find balance in future ecologies that attend to the impacts of our past histories.

Phase Three

The long term goal of Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi is to restore Dakota ceremonial practices to the landscape around Wakan Tipi.

Historically, Wakáŋ Tipi was a place where the Dakota and other Indigenous peoples would bring their dead, sometimes from hundreds of miles away. Burial ceremonies were performed at the cave itself and then the bodies would be interned on scaffolds constructed on the bluffs above the river. Over the centuries, the Dakota constructed huge burial mounds that once lined the bluffs throughout the Twin Cities. Today, the only remaining burial mounds in the metro area sit above Wakan Tipi in Indian Mounds Park. Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi hopes to one day restore those ceremonial practices to Wakáŋ Tipi.

One major challenge is that the roads which bound and cross over the site disrupt the privacy needed for the Dakota’s traditional ceremonies. Structuring future master planning for Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary around the creation of spaces that are provide the privacy needed for the restoration of ceremonial practices guided the final design development of this thesis. I have designed a planting plan that uses massing and a graduated sequencing of verticality to create gathering areas which are shielded from view both from the ground and from elevated positions. These gathering areas range in size from 160 feet in diameter to 8 feet in diameter, allowing for large, communal gatherings but also creating smaller, intimate spaces for individual practices.

This planting plan works with the existing vegetation. The greyed-out vegetation in this drawing is existing while the full-color vegetation is proposed.

This final design stage imagines a future in which Dakota cultural practices, through remediation and caring for Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, guide the transitioning plant communities into spaces which allow for the restoration of ceremonial practices.

Ultimately it is Mni or the water which will guide the future development of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. If we can create the conditions for the site to once again be a place for the waters to gather.

Then it can also be a place which supports the diversity of peoples and nonhumans which call the landscape of St. Paul, Minnesota home.

A Larger Network

Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is not an isolated site, it exists within a larger system. The design strategies developed in the first phases of this project can be used to connect a larger network of sites and spaces beyond the sanctuary.

The possible daylighting of Phalen Creek already begins to make visible this network of water and land which has been so important to the Dakota.

The city of St. Paul, Ramsey county, and the state of Minnesota own a number of properties along the Phalen Creek and Mississippi River corridor. Most of these properties are already designated as parks or open public spaces and Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi has been partnering with different government agencies across multiple projects. Currently, the railroads separate these various sites from each other.

Using the strategies developed in the first phases of this project, in which the railroads are reimagined instead of removed, plant relatives help mitigate and contain pollutants, and hydrological systems are restored, creates a huge opportunity to connect these parks and greenspaces into one large system. And ultimately, that will allow this thesis to truly support the future of Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi as it works to preserve and restore Dakota cultural spaces from Lake Phalen to Pig’s Eye Regional Park.

Conclusion

I structured this thesis around a process of learning through doing. Because the project is so processed-based, how I did the thesis became as important as the design proposal of the thesis. Indigenous knowledges and ontologies have become a popular topic in contemporary landscape architecture. Often non-Western ways of knowing and being offer powerful alternatives that bridge the nature – human divide that capitalist and colonialist land relations produce. What I have learned through the process of this thesis is that access to Indigenous epistemologies, cosmologies, and land relations cannot be presumed based on a desire to make a better future. Permission must be granted. And if I am refused, I have to practice good relations and respect that refusal. Refusal is an important practice which keeps community knowledge from becoming a resource that can be appropriated. But in asking for permission to work with Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary and Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi, I have been able to engage in a process of learning how to be in good relation to the Dakota. Through this process I have also learned so much from the people at Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi about caring for a landscape and developing a relationship with a particular place. It is through that relationship building that I have been able to imagine a landscape architecture practice which supports the elevation of Indigenous knowledges towards the creation of a shared, common future.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Craig Douglas, my advisor, for your patience, support, and critical feedback which helped make this project a reality.

Many thanks to Gabby Menomin, Franky Jackson, Sam Wegner, & Maggie Lorenz of Wakaŋ Tipi Awaŋyaŋkapi for generously sharing their time and knowledge with me and for their willingness to collaborate across great distances.

Thank you to:

John Koepke, Ana Maria Durán Calisto, Anna Eleria, Bob Zimmerman, Abby Spinak, Jenni Matchett, David Moreno Mateos, Britton Jones, Bert De Jonghe, Elaine Stokes, & Aubrey Jahelka-Myers for sharing your perspectives and expertise which always kept this project moving forward.

Nick Gray, for the late night laughs, the drawing inspirations, and being an island of calm in a sea of insanity.

Giovanna Baffico, Michelle Urano, Yazmine Mihojevich, & Hana Kim for your time and energy in helping to realize this project.

My thesis cohort and fellow students who always made time to talk, listen, and help at all hours of the day, especially: Alison Maurer, Morgan Vought, Kevin Robishaw, Erin Voss, Zoë Toledo, Rebecca Shen, Meg Koglin, Lara Treble, Catherine Auger, Chandani Patel, Zina Fraser, Pavin Banternghansa, and Forrest Rosenblum.

And finally to Aaron, for keeping me grounded and always reminding me that this project has a larger future ahead of it.

This statement recognizes the traditional owners of the land on which this research occurred. Mni Sóta Makoce (Minnesota) is the homeland of the Dakota. The Anishinaabe made Minnesota their home after following the guidance of the Gete-anishinaabeg and Aadizookaanag to the manoomin (wild rice). Many other Indigenous people from other Tribal nations have made Minnesota their home and contributed to its history. Harvard University, which provided funding for this research, occupies land within the traditional homeland of the Massachusetts. This atlas aims to remember and honor the history and people of these lands.