Sacred Dakota Ancestral Homeland At Mille Lacs Lake

by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer

On October 6, 2012, Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN), the world's largest Indian news source, published an article titled Great Sioux Nation Comes Together in Historic Gesture of Unity in the Name of Sacred Pe'Sla. ICTMN also approved and posted a comment of mine in response to the article. In my comment I present a link to a web site page of mine. My comment is the article's first comment. The comment is presented below. Or you can go directly to my ICTMN comment by clicking here

COMMENT:

I am an indigenous peoples' rights activist. I work closely with Leonard Wabasha, a hereditary chief of the Mdewakanton Dakota people. I have been working for many years to help the Sioux or Dakota regain their sacred Mille Lacs ancestral homeland and independent sovereign nation status and rights.

In the Mille Lacs Messenger, Mille Lacs County's official newspaper, several letters of mine about this campaign of mine have been published. http://www.towahkon.org/Messengerletters.html

One prominent Dakota creation story says Mille Lacs Lake is the birth place of the Great Sioux Nation.

On the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe's web site there is a comprehensive history paper that can be downloaded on the history of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe.

In this paper there is the statement: By the seventeenth century, when the first contacts with French explorers occurred, the Sioux or Dakota were established around Mille Lacs Lake, north of what is now Minneapolis, where they had been for a long time.

In 1656, the Dakotas were living near Mille Lacs, in five villages numbering about 5,000 people. It is possible that the Tetons and Yanktons had at this point already begun migrating west, although Hennepin found them above the Falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi River in 1680. In 1701, they were at Lake Traverse. The Yankton and Yantonai left Mille Lacs at about this time.

I [Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer] support the Great Sioux Nation's renewed unity and hunt for sacred lands.