Listers,
Yes, I admit it. When I think about Nicollet Island, I ask myself 'what
did this place look like before the Indians met Zebulon Pike, Hennepin,
Nicollet, before Thomas Jefferson bought the joint from, was it
Napoleon?' How did this place look before they took out five islands to
build a dam? What was it like when the two great Tobacco Rocks were in
situ? The library has the Seth Eastman sketches--and a boatload of other
cool stuff about Nicollet Island and the loop. There are accounts of the
land rush for what is now Minneapolis from the east side of the river.
Sad to say, it is in the nature of civilizations to dick up the planet.
No wonder the Indians are honked; THEY had a park and then some it would
appear. They gathered, by the many thousands on the flats in St. Paul.
They wrote their history for thousands of years in a cave in a language
that made sense to them. Up here at the falls seems to have been a
sacred place. A powerful spirit lived at the falls or in the falls or is
the falls (I'm not clear on that anymore, but the Indians' observation
that the falls is power is certainly correct). The tobacco rocks were
sacred from texts of the time.
OK, OK, I admit it. I dream a perfection which nature herself probably
doesn't subscribe to and pretend it's a possibility. So sue me.
Chris Johnson is right, how we define 'regional park in the middle of a
large city' is part of the question. I have no idea. Is Williamsburg a
park, is Gettysburg? Is Niagara Falls? In my estimation Niagara Falls is
>>the<< most amazing slice of nature I ever laid eyes on. Do the
Indians, as a group or conference of groups, get to say anything and be
heard? To me, the true value of organizing community is to have all of
us come to some agreement about so vast a question as How must we treat
our place.
If we are to talk of the historic value of Nicollet Island, it's one
tricky question. Whose history, what part of the history. Do we follow
that to the absurd end of the line and reenact the falls going out in
1873? Have guided tours through the tunnels? If it were up to me alone,
we'd break up a lot of the concrete just cause it's ugly. We'd tear down
DLS and build something handsome for the school. They've been there 100
years, they are part of the history. All the reformers are trying to do,
it seems, is to limit the amount of acreage on which DLS gets to make
further history. That seems reasonable.
So long as we have no agreed upon definition of a regional historic park
in the middle of a city that we are working from and holding ourselves
accountable to, the park and rec board will always have a way for the
majority faction to whipsaw the minority and no one will have a base
line from which to judge anything so larkish as accountability. The way
we have it now, any flim flam man with a little slickery can get us to
buy the Brooklyn Bridge and move it here.
WizardMarks, Central
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