This article was the first published newspaper article about the Rum River name-change proposal. It was published in Mille Lacs County's office newspaper, the Mille Lacs Messenger.

RIVER BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Wanda D. Coppernoll

A petition to rename the Rum River was presented to the Wahkon City Council Nov. 10 by Thomas Dahlheimer of Wahkon.

The petition, which was tabled by the Council, opens by stating, "In cooperation with the state of Minnesota's Commissioner of Natural Resources, we thereby petition you, the County Boards of Anoka, Isanti, Sherburne and Mille Lacs, to come together at a public hearing and act jointly as one body to determine if you believe the naming of the Rum River was radically derogatory toward the Native American culture and should be renamed." The petition spurred council member Sue Fredcrickson to write a memorandum to the Mille Lacs County Board of Commissioners saying. "The petition is ludicrous, and what's more ridiculous is that it's sanctioned and/or supported by our State Commissioner of Natural Resources." "Could this 'contemporary multicultural society possibly consider that there was no harm meant when the name was changed." Frederickson wrote. "Can we please stop looking for the negatives in history and spend more time looking for the positive impact history has had on the 20th century."

Fredcrickson submitted the memo to the Wahkon City Council to show her intentition to respond personally to the Mille Lacs County Commissioners concerning the petition.

Glen Yakel, geographic namekeeper for Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources in St. Paul, said that, although he had not read the petition, the "cooperation" mentioned is only to aid anyone interested in getting the name of a lake or river changed. The DNR does not approve of or disapprove of name changes, he noted, but his office will only give guidance in the pursuit of a name change. Yakel did reaffirm that the name of the river originally meant something quite different and quoted, as did Dahlheimer, passages from "Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origins and Historic Significances" by Warren Upham.

Part of the statutory process in Minnesota for naming or renaming bodies of water or geographical features is that no names that have existed for 40 years shall be changed, Yakel said, and noted that the name "Rum" goes back to 1766.

"There are two exceptions to that statutory process," Yakel said. "One is that if there is a commonly duplicated name, such as Mud or Long lakes, and if there is good local support to do something else, certainly we'll listen. The other exception is if it's clearly a derogatory name, we'll also listen to any proposal to change "it".

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Dahlheimer acknowledged that the DNR was only assisting in procedures, and no other interpretation was intended. He also clarified that the Mille Lacs County Board of Commissioners had not yet been contacted concerning a name change for the Rum River.

With the new knowledge that the DNR had not "sanctioned and/or supported" the name change, and the fact that the Mille Lacs Board of Commissioners had not been contacted, Fredcrickson amended her memo to the board, and included a copy of the petition to show its misleading nature, should the board be presented with the name change petition in the future. According to Dahlheimer, a group of citizens of Anoka and Mille Lacs counties are interested in renaming the Rum River primarily because it was named by English-speaking fur traders, in the early 1700s performing a "punning translation" for the Sioux's name for the river, which is Wahkon (translated Spirit, as in Great Spirit).

The petition reads, "We believe that their punning translation for the Sioux's Great Spirit (Wahkon) degraded the Sioux's Great Spirit to a radically different kind of spirit, that being the distilled spirit rum. This distilled spirit (rum) was the distilled spirit most commonly used by white men as a chemical weapon of warfare to try to destroy the Sioux's belief and faith in their Great Spirit (Wahkon), so as to weaken their resistance to their cultural genocidal attacks."

Dahlheimer says he will continue working through the propel channels to correct the wrong.

Excerpt from "Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origins and Historic Significances" by Warren Upham, Minnesota Historical Society, 1969 (reprint of 1920 edition)

The name of Rum river, which Carver in 1766 and Pike in 1805 found in use by English-speaking fur traders, was indirectly derived from the Sioux. Their name of Mille Lacs, Mde Wakan, translated Spirit lake, was given to its river, but was changed by the white men to the most common spirituous liquor brought into the Northwest, rum, which brought misery and ruin, as Du Luth observed of brandy, to many of the Indians. The map of Long's expedition in 1823 has these names, Spirit lake and Rum river. Nicollet's map, published in 1843, has "Iskode Wabo or Rum R.," this name given by the Ojibways, but derived by them from the while men's perversion of the ancient Sioux name Wakan, being in more "exact translation "Fire Water." More frequently, as noted by Gilfillan, the Ojibway name for Rum river was taken from their name for the lake and meant simply as Great Lake river.