Pipestone National Monument Cultural Landscape

A National Park Service cultural landscape profile. It covers what the NPS has documented and interprets at the park; some details and perspectives of associated groups are left out because of the narrative's purpose and the sensitivity of the information.

The Three Maidens. NPS / N. Barber, 2019.

A sacred landscape

Many American Indian tribes consider the landscape of Pipestone National Monument, in southwest Minnesota, sacred. Twenty-three tribes have ongoing government-to-government consultation with the monument, and under an 1858 treaty the Ihanktonwan Nation (Yankton Sioux Tribe) has a particular and special relationship with it.

Quarrying catlinite, or pipestone, remains an important cultural tradition and is written into the monument's founding law. The stone is carved into pipes for ceremony, and smaller pieces into other objects. A ceremonial pipe appears in many tribal stories of religion and ethics, as do natural features such as the Three Maidens — large granite boulders left by glaciers, where the quarries' spiritual guardians dwell. Ceremonies continue at the monument, including prayer and annual Sun Dances. Because of this long cultural use, the NPS classes the landscape as ethnographic.

The landscape also matters for its archeology, which reflects a long history of tribal presence, and for its Mission 66 development — part of an NPS initiative to expand and modernise the park system over ten years, by its 50th anniversary in 1966.

The land

The monument covers 301 acres on a glacial plateau in the Coteau des Prairies ("highland of the prairie"). Its features include:

• granite glacial boulders, the largest being the Three Maidens, which once rested on bedrock carved with ancient petroglyphs — often turtles and bears. The surviving petroglyphs are shown at the Visitor Center;
• Sioux quartzite outcrops, including Leaping Rock/Old Stone Face and the Oracle;
• the pipestone layers themselves;
• Winnewissa Falls, where Pipestone Creek cascades over a quartzite escarpment;
• streamside zones and wetlands with several species of freshwater plants.

Quartzite cliffs beside the tallgrass prairie. NPS photo.

History

Quarrying and the pipe

Archeological evidence suggests limited quarrying as early as 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. People travelled great distances across the Great Plains to quarry pipestone, and tribes saw the quarry as neutral ground where all could get stone. The Lakota author Luther Standing Bear wrote that for the Lakota every idea of moral duty, ethics and religious and spiritual belief was symbolised in the pipe.

Treaty and dispossession

• After 1840 the United States negotiated treaties forcing tribes to give up the Pipestone territory in exchange for land farther west and annual payments. Several Dakota tribes had left by 1851.
• The Ihanktonwan — one of the Seven Council Fires of the Oceti Sakowin — held out for seven years and kept their rights to the quarry in the Treaty with the Yankton Sioux, 1858, which set aside a 648-acre (one-square-mile) reservation at Pipestone, with the U.S. government taking stewardship of the quarry.
• Commercial quarrying and settlement followed anyway. In 1865 James Boyd Hubbell and Alpheus F. Hawley began what became the largest extraction of pipestone at the quarry. In the 1880s commercial quarrying continued after a homestead patent was unlawfully issued for part of the reservation that included the Three Maidens; left standing, it invited more land-seekers and threats to Ihanktonwan quarriers.

Joe Taylor in the quarry, about 1916. NPS photo.

The courts

• 1884: the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court and upheld the treaty's promises to the Yankton. At first nothing was enforced and squatters stayed.
• 1887: Yankton agent Major J.F. Kinney, authorised to remove the squatters with Army help, arrived with soldiers. They found a railway had been built across the reservation, partly destroying Winnewissa Falls. The Ihanktonwan chose to sell the railway the right of way and keep all their land.

The school

As settlement grew in Pipestone County, residents proposed an Indian boarding school to boost the economy. The Ihanktonwan did not object to the school but did object to putting it on the reservation. Congress authorised it anyway, despite their title and quarrying rights. The Pipestone Indian School ran from 1893 to 1953; most of its buildings were later removed or destroyed. The Ihanktonwan sought compensation in court for forty years, and in 1926 the Supreme Court ruled they were owed damages but that the United States kept ownership.

Winnewissa Falls before it was lowered to try to control flooding; date unknown. NPS photo.

Becoming a monument

In the 1930s local residents formed the Pipestone National Park Association (later the Pipestone Indian Shrine Association). Some Dakota tribes and the Consolidated Chippewa Tribes of Minnesota supported a park; the Ihanktonwan opposed it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt created Pipestone National Monument in 1937.

The Visitor Center in 2012. NPS photo.

The Pipestone Indian Shrine Association helped regulate the sale of pipestone crafts. After many years of dialogue and consultation, the monument decided to stop selling pipes. Surviving historic features also include some roads, paths and signs, among them the Nicollet historical marker.

Today

The monument continues to protect Native Americans' right to quarry and to use the landscape and its resources for ceremony. The first Sun Dance was held in 1991; today two groups each hold one every year. The Visitor Center offers exhibits and demonstrations on the monument's cultural and historical significance.

Quarrier and carver Travis Erickson talks about quarrying with young people. NPS photo.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Pipestone National Monument" (cultural landscape profile 501118). https://www.nps.gov/articles/pipestone-national-monument-501118.htm
• The profile draws mainly on Theodore Catton and Diane L. Krahe, The Blood of the People: NPS Historic Resource Study (NPS, 2016), and the NPS Cultural Resources Inventory System record; the Standing Bear passage is from Land of the Spotted Eagle. Further: the National Register nomination (Cannomok'e – Pipestone National Monument), the Library of Congress HAER documentation, and a 2004 University of Arizona cultural affiliation study.
• The original spells the plateau "Couteau des Prairies"; it is the Coteau des Prairies. It dates the master plan to 1952 and places it under Mission 66, which it describes as a ten-year programme to 1966; the year is left out here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.