Making Place from Story

We commonly make sense of place through story. Beginning in 2016, a coalition of six state agencies in Minnesota, working with host sites around the state, developed a traveling exhibit and associated activities focusing on the water that makes Minnesota such a distinctive place. The headwaters of the Mississippi is in northern Minnesota; three major continental watersheds come together in the state; the northeastern part of the state borders Lake Superior. Indeed, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” is a watery place.

A storymap created for this project, which is called We Are Water MN, illustrates just how varied the stories and places of “Minnesota” are. Listen to Jim Rock explain how St. Paul, where he was born, is a singularly important place for Dakota people. Likewise, for people in the Anishinabe community around Lake Mille Lacs, rivers and lakes are central to their understandings of who they are and where they are. 

Indigenous understanding of the connections between place, water, and story, are of course quite profound and have been developed over millennia. One of the significant aspects of the We Are Water MN storymap, though, is that it includes stories from the people who have been here the longest, the people who are some of the most recent arrivals, and pretty much everyone in between. The map contains dozens of stories, from all over the state. Together, they constitute a richer sense of place than if we had not had access to these stories.