Join the Conversation

Connect with Native leaders, the design team, and neighbors and consider the future of this place.

Leave comments and feedback online in response to design concepts and programming ideas.

Step into 360 degree views of the Upper Lock and visit a simulated museum exhibit from your desktop.

Read the complete Engagement Plan to see how our process is structured to center Native voices and seek a fuller understanding of Indigenous experience at this place.

At the first Community Conversation, Native leaders discussed the erasure of Indigenous history, relationships between language and place, and the inherent rights of water.

“We have a responsibility to maintain a connection with the River.”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council

“I’ve been taught that the earth remembers. The more time we spend in a place in silence and ceremony, the more we can remember, both the bad and the good.”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council

“The white/dominant culture doesn’t see the earth as alive; they see it as a resource to be extracted and used. They never saw Spirit Island as a place of birth and life, but as an economic resource that needed to be extracted to run the mills.”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council

“[Previous generations] knew there was a law that said they couldn’t be here… so they stayed away. It took a long time for me to know that we’re illegal.”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council

“How can we begin to heal? How can we understand and acknowledge this site, this home, of our Dakota people, if we don’t have access?”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council

“We need to recognize the River has been here for ages. The River knows what she wants to happen… She is alive, she is a Spirit.”

-Member of the Native Partnership Council