Southside Pride

by Susu Jeffrey

The Coldwater Springs protection law of 2001 was effectively repealed in May with an amendment to the transportation “housekeeping” bill of 2002. Under the earlier law, MnDOT was prohibited from any action resulting in the “diminishment of flow to or from the spring.” The new compromise ammendment takes responsibility for the design of a Highway 55/Highway 62 interchange out of the courts and places the burden of deciding upon a design directly on MnDOT and the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD).

Controversy over the Highway 55/62 interchange extends back to 2000, when the MCWD first voiced concerns that the new road construction could impact the behavior of Camp Coldwater Springs, which flows in the vicinity. A number of hydrological tests validated that concern, and resulted in months of wrangling between MnDOT and the MCWD over the road design.

Preliminary discussions about the new plan call for the Highway 55 roadbed to be raised 2 ½ to 5 ½- feet above the bedrock, a move that MnDOT expects to eliminate any interaction between the new construction and Camp Coldwater Spring. However, the road would still be built 4 to 8-feet down into the water table, about 35-feet below the former land surface. The water table forms a pond which is visible under the military bridge at the 55/62 interchange construction site.

A liner beneath the 4-lane roadbed would theoretically isolate the road from the surrounding underground water. A Minnehaha Watershed District engineer described the liner as a “somewhat impervious geo-textile.”

MnDOT spokesman Tom Worke said there are no guarantees that the proposed design will work as intended because the area’s hydrology is complex and the liner approach is untested (Star Tribune 3/23/02). If MnDOT’s 2 ½-foot adjustment to the roadbed does not satisfy the MCWD, it will alter the already constructed military bridge or tear out the bridge and start again.

“Easing” the Coldwater environmental law was the result of months of secret negotiations sponsored by Reps. Wes Skoglund (D-Mpls) and Dennis Ozment (R-Rosemount). Presented as an amendment to a transportation bill, the “stipulation” agreement doesn’t mention “preserving the natural flow to the spring” or even point the case back to Hennepin County court. The two government agencies, MnDOT and the MCWD, simply must agree on what sort of limited damage might be inflicted on Coldwater.

These are not negotiations among equals: just compare MCWD’s $6 million 2002 budget to MnDOT’s $4.5 billion. The latter also benefits from extensive legal services provided by the office of the state attorney general. Furthermore MnDOT has already floated legislation to “streamline the process” by bypassing Minnesota’s regional watersheds with their “not in my back yard” roadblocks.

A Personal Perspective

The most crucial issue is water—not roads, not politicians or the egos at MnDOT, or how cheap the fix is—it’s the water. The water.

Is limited damage enough to save Camp Coldwater Springs? Welcome to the water wars. Control of water resources is shaping up to be the crisis of our time. Water resource conflicts have raged in California, and between Israel and Palestine. The Seattle WTO agenda even included a plank to privatize all the world’s water. Our bodies are 70 percent water, as is the earth’s surface. But of all that water, less than 1 percent is potable. Coldwater Springs is still drinkable.

In all likelihood there will be a loss of flow to Coldwater because all the new concrete will eliminate “recharge” area for the spring. Native science, taught as “legend,” indicates Coldwater is gravity-fed from Taku Wakan Tipi (“Something Sacred Dwells Here”), the airport hill called Morgan’s Mound by early European settlers.

Camp Coldwater Springs is recognized as a sacred site, both traditionally and, more recently, by the 250-member National Congress of American Indians. What’s more, it is both the largest and the last major spring in the Twin Cities area. The other important spring in the area, the Great Medicine Spring in Theodore Wirth Park, went dry with construction of I-394 in the late 1980s. I-394 is permanently dewatered at a rate of 2.5 million gallons a day. The Great Medicine Spring had been frequented by Indian people “who came hundreds of miles to get the benefit of its medicinal qualities,” according to Col. John H. Stevens (1874), first white settler in the Minneapolis area. The Great Medicine Spring is now extinct.

The rainwater that falls on the new road surfaces will be drained by a sewer system directly into the Mississippi River, rather than filtering through soil and rock to Coldwater or to “seeps” (mini springs) along the river gorge. The area between St. Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis and the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers is the only true river gorge on the entire 2,350-mile length of the Mississippi River. Camp Coldwater Springs is halfway between Minnehaha Falls and the Mississippi/Minnesota confluence, flowing at a pre-construction rate of 100,000-144,000 gallons per day (70-100 gallons per minute).

“We know that the falls, which came to be known as Minnehaha Falls, was a sacred place, was a neutral place, a place for many nations to come … and that the spring from which the sacred water should be drawn was not very far,” Eddie Benton Benais, Anishinabe spiritual elder from northern Wisconsin, said in sworn, court-ordered testimony, 3/19/99. “My grandfather (born 1834) who lived to be 108, died in 1942—many times he retold how we traveled, how he and his family, he as a small boy traveled by foot, by horse, by canoe to this great place to where there would be these great religious, spiritual events, and that they always camped between the falls and the sacred water place. How we take care of the water is how it will take care of us,” Benais recalls the prophecy.

Soldiers who built Fort Snelling (1820-23) lived at Coldwater and a civilian community developed around Camp Coldwater to service the fort. Those families founded St. Paul and Minneapolis—indeed the state of Minnesota.

And Dred Scott walked at Coldwater. Scott was born a slave to the hard luck Blow family of Virginia. He ran away, was caught and beaten by a gang of young thugs who returned the slave to his master for the reward money. He and his wife lost their 11-year battle for freedom in “the most unpopular Supreme Court decision in the 70-year history of the court.” Into the rising fire of Abolitionist sentiment in Scott v. Sandford (1846-57), the high court declared Dred Scott to be ineligible to file a suit in federal court for his freedom because he was not a person.

“The Camp Coldwater settlement is in many ways a dream archaeological site,” says historical anthropologist Bruce M. White, Ph.D. “The birthplace of Minnesota [is] a rich, culturally diverse area in which Indian people, whites, fur traders, missionaries, soldiers, and settlers came together to create the basis for the state as it is today.”

Every body of government claims it wants to save Coldwater. Every local politician this election year claims he or she has saved the springs. But recently the flow at Coldwater has been yo-yoing between 55 and 115 gallons per minute. Inserting a 4-lane highway into the water table, airport expansions, dewatering along the new 55, the old 55, the temporary road, the frontage road, the park road, the bike path, the walking path, the parking lots, the accumulation of impervious surface, the removal of trees—all of these so-called improvements negatively impact Camp Coldwater Springs.

The springs have been flowing at least 10,000 years. The new highway is designed to be rebuilt and expanded in 20 years. Those are the facts. In the midst of our state’s major population concentration a quiet, sacred, beautiful, historic landscape still exists.