Is Coldwater for sale?
BY SUSU JEFFREY
 Last
fall the National Park Service (NPS) considered selling off 23 percent
of its total acreage. That proposal was booed out of existence by
public outcry, but groups like the Sierra Club are keeping a watchful
eye, since the Bush regime would like to privatize hundreds of thousands
of public land acres.
No Minnesota parks were on the cut list. And
the 27-acre Coldwater Spring property may never make national park
status. Only congressional approval creates new national parks and
Coldwater is losing its champion with the retirement of Rep. Martin
Sabo (D-Minnesota).
Park or Parking Lots
Five years ago Coldwater was scheduled to be sold to the Metropolitan
Airports Commission (MAC) for $6 million. MAC planned to build a
multi-story parking garage into the bedrock that supplies groundwater
to the spring. Several warehouses would have provided storage space
for airport maintenance vehicles. After the 9/11/01 World Trade
Towers disaster and the collapse of the airline economy, the sale
was canceled.
Coldwater is classified as “the former
Bureau of Mines” in National Park Service lingo. A two-year
process to determine the “disposition” of the Mississippi
blufftop acreage will stretch into a third year as deadlines are
missed and extended. Clearly NPS, which was willing to sell Coldwater
for parking lots, is not hoping to keep Coldwater. Coldwater is
“too complicated,” according to JoAnn Kyral, NPS superintendent
of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area.
An office park is one of the alternatives NPS is looking at for
Coldwater’s future. When Tiffany Eggenberg, a Mendota Dakota
community member, heard “office park” she was “Flabbergasted!”
“Office park! Oh my gosh, I am so
appalled! I hadn’t heard talk of this,” said the mother
of sons aged 13 and 7. “You know myself and my family
want to be involved, the kids too. We are not church people and
we never really did much praying before because we couldn’t
find a ‘religion’ or whatever you want to call it that
we agreed with, until we became involved in the Mendota community.
“I will say it again, my kids learned how to pray at the spring
and, well, so did I pretty much. It turns out we are very spiritual
people and always have been as far as nature and the earth are concerned,
now we have found an avenue to act upon our feelings, and they are
trying to ruin one of the most special places we know!
“We love Coldwater and want to be
involved in preserving it,” Eggenberg said. “The kids
ask all the time, ‘When are we going to Coldwater?’
”
Options other than an office park that the Draft
Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) will review include demolishing
the 11 abandoned office and warehouse buildings and turning the
property over to a university or government entity “with or
without (unspecified) conditions.” The DEIS, originally due
out in March of this year, will probably be made public in August.
Two park options will also be discussed in the
DEIS—open space and an interpretive museum. After the draft
comes out, the public will have 60 days to comment on the various
proposals. Meanwhile two federally recognized Dakota tribes, Shakopee
and Prairie Island, have indicated they want to acquire the land.
A final decision on the future of Coldwater should be announced
in 2007.
Complications
Just about the time the Final EIS comment period closes, a federal
district court case is scheduled concerning Coldwater and Dakota
treaty rights. Last October, two Dakota men and a guest entered
the Coldwater campus without a paper permit in order to collect
water and pray. The three were ticketed and have appeared twice
in U.S. Federal District Court on petty misdemeanor charges. A motion
to dismiss the charges based on 1805 Dakota treaty rights was rescheduled
from June 9 to September 25.
In 1805, Zebulon Pike signed a treaty with the
Dakota Oyate (people or nation) for a fort to keep pioneer encroachment
out of Dakota Territory. The treaty guaranteed the Dakota Oyate
visitation and land use rights in perpetuity, specifically the rights
to “pass, repass, hunt and do other things as they have formerly
done in said district ….”
On the old maps Mni Owe Sni (water-spring-cold)
is situated at the foot of Taku Wakan Tipi (Where the Spirit Dwells),
the traditional burial hill where the Veterans’ Administration
stretches up to the Twin Cities airport. This great hill is the
water source that still delivers 100,000 gallons a day to Coldwater
Spring.
In court-ordered testimony during a 1999 Highway 55 case, the 2.5-mile
Mississippi blufftop land from Minnehaha Falls to Coldwater Spring
to the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers was described
as “forever neutral and forever sacred.”
The last time a Hiawatha-Highway 55 case was
in federal court was six days after the Four Sacred Trees were felled.
The December 1999 case involved a Traditional Cultural Property
claim by the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community for the protection
and sacred recognition of the Four Trees.
While the future of Coldwater is being decided,
determining the legitimacy of the 1805 treaty is postponed until
September, and a court case among federally recognized and unrecognized
Dakota peoples is in the offing.
Why Bother Saving Coldwater
Coldwater is the only non-park land along the west bank of the 9-mile
gorge from the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers
upstream to the falls now called St. Anthony. The downtown riverfront
was given a $300 million facelift recently. This 9-mile stretch
is the only true river gorge on the 2,350-mile length of the Mississippi,
and Coldwater is the only fenced-off blufftop portion.
Coldwater is the last natural spring in Hennepin County. The spring
that furnished water to Fort Snelling for a century, until 1920,
is the last local place people can drink water directly from limestone
bedrock. The chemically-treated river water that is electronically
delivered to our kitchens and bathrooms may not always be available
and MnDOT permanently dewatered the Great Medicine Spring in Theodore
Wirth Park with construction of I-394 in the 1980s. Glenwood Spring
is gone, permanently, and the William Miller Spring in Eden Prairie
comes out of a pipe below a road.
“Forever sacred” Coldwater has to
re-verify its sacred credentials in a court that weighs paper proof
above oral history. If European Minnesotans are not impressed with
9,000 years of Native American life in the Coldwater area, they
may be interested in military and pioneer settlement here.
Coldwater is the birthplace of Minnesota, and
its history is inextricably bound with that of Fort Snelling. Soldiers
who built Fort Snelling lived at Coldwater, providing protection
for the developing pioneer community. In turn, the community provided
the fort with translators, servants, wives and meat.
Despite being sacred Native American land, the
birthplace of the state of Minnesota, and the last natural potable
water source in the Twin Cities, Coldwater is in danger of being
privatized. Michael Shnayerson in June’s Vanity Fair exposes
the Bush agenda for National Park Service lands.
The NPS was established in 1916 to leave parklands
“unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Under the current regime, conservation has been downgraded to equal
consideration with recreation, including private development. “Recreation”
includes gas-powered snowmobiles, all terrain vehicles, jet skis,
even viewing parklands from helicopters and airplanes.
The window of opportunity that will allow us
to save Coldwater is opening. Public pressure is the key to preserving
and protecting the spring. ||
“Who’s Ruining Our National
Parks?” by Michael Shnayerson is online at www.vanityfair.com
The watchdog group, Coalition of National Park Service Retirees,
is outraged and talking at www.npsretirees.org
Coldwater is open Monday-Friday, 9AM-3PM to the public without a
permit. For directions and information: www.FriendsofColdwater.org
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