Pilot Knob Update: Mendota Heights to Decide on Environmental Impact Statement for Pilot Knob on November 18th or November 24thAction Alert: Attend Mendota Heights City Council MeetingDate: November 18th
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Place: Mendota Heights City Hall
1101 Victoria Curve
Mendota Heights, MN 55118
651-452-1850 (phone)
651-452-8940 (fax)
FYI, here's a press release just put out by the Mendota Dakota today.
Bones found at Acacia Cemetery on Pilot Knob identified as Native American
For Immediate Release
Contact: Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community, (651) 452-4141Mendota: Three boxes of bones from a vault at Acacia Park Cemetery on Pilot Knob in Mendota Heights have been identified by a forensic anthropologist as Native American. The bones, discovered during digging over the 75-year history of the cemetery, were stored in Acacia’s vault and were turned over to the Minnesota Office of State Archaeologist for identification just last April. The bones were examined by a Wisconsin forensic anthropologist shortly after that.
Information about the identification of the bones as Native American was not revealed until October, when documents were filed with the City of Mendota Heights during the comment period for an Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW) for a proposed 157-unit housing development to be placed on 25 acres of land on Pilot Knob, including 17 acres of cemetery land. Now that the comment period is over the Mendota Heights City Council will make a decision, at their meeting on November 18 or at a possible special meeting on November 24, about whether to order an Environmental Impact Statement.
The development is controversial because of extensive documentation—including some provided by the developer himself—showing the entire area of Pilot Knob, including Acacia Cemetery lands, to be a sacred site and burial grounds for Dakota people and a place of geographical and historical importance for European-American pioneers, which has not diminished to this day. Individuals, organizations, and agencies filed 226 comments with the city concerning the proposed development. Of these, only one, filed by Acacia Cemetery General Manager Dale Bachmeier, speaks in favor of the development proposal. Bachmeier wrote that he believed the development would be “an amenity to the city.”
Included in the comments filed with the City of Mendota Heights is extensive documentation about finding Native remains and artifacts on Acacia Cemetery property. When the cemetery was initially landscaped prior to 1928, part of the very top of Pilot Knob was removed revealing a number of burials. Later, during the digging of graves on cemetery property, additional remains and artifacts were found, according to newspaper and magazine articles over the years and statements by local residents and former cemetery employees.
“During the landscaping of the grounds many graves of the Indians were found and the bones carefully transferred to other parts of the park and there reburied,” according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press on October 1, 1928. An article from Golfer and Sportsman magazine in the 1940s, called “Pilot Knob… Most Historic Site in the Northwest”—later reprinted by the cemetery as advertising—said, “bones and relics recovered on the ground some years ago have been reverently set aside to be buried at some future date with fitting ceremonials.” There is no evidence to show that such reburial ever took place. Instead, the West St. Paul Booster of July 13, 1962, reported that twenty juveniles were arrested for breaking into Acacia Park cemetery buildings and “stealing seven Indian skulls out of a burial vault.” It is not known how many of the skulls were later recovered.
Throughout the early 19th century, early white visitors described Pilot Knob as a burial place for Dakota people. The latest recorded Dakota burials in the area of Pilot Knob took place during the Dakota Conflict of 1862-63. The St. Paul Press of April 30, 1863 reported that the many infants who died during the winters of diseases such as measles “were usually buried in an old Indian burial ground back of Mendota,” the location of the Pilot Knob burial grounds. When Dakota people later returned to Minnesota, many came back to Mendota to revisit the graves of their ancestors. An article in the Hastings Gazette of February 20, 1886, stated: “The Pilot Knob is an ancient burial place of the Dakota’s, and is yearly visited by many of the Indians of that nation.”
Acacia Cemetery has used the importance of Pilot Knob for Native Americans as a feature of its advertising for many years. It has been suspected for years that Native remains were still held by Acacia Cemetery. Requests for corroboration from cemetery officials were first made by members of the Mendota Dakota community in October 2000, and renewed by Mendota Dakota lawyer Thomas E. Casey in December 2002 and February 2003. There was no response from cemetery officials until April 2003, when three boxes of human bones—including two jaw fragments, twenty-two thighbone fragments, and three virtually complete skulls later identified as Native American—were turned over to the Office of State Archaeologist. At the time, cemetery officials stated that they did not know where the remains came from or if they were Native American.
No written records have been found to show the extent of Native-American remains found on Acacia Cemetery property and whether all remains found over the years have been accounted for. There is also no evidence to show that Dakota burials were confined to the cemetery property west of Pilot Knob Road. The cemetery’s 17 acres east of Pilot Knob Road were purchased between the 1930s and 1951 and were declared in a filing with Dakota County in 1967 “to be and constitute a cemetery or burial place.” This property is now slated for development. A recent archaeological survey done on this property by the 106 Group for the developer of the proposed housing development did find some fragments of eroded bone—identified only as mammal remains—but no intact bones.
Criticisms, however, have been leveled about the developer’s archaeological survey during the EAW comment period. The survey involved digging test pits to a depth of an average of two feet at 50-foot intervals on a portion of the development property. Historian Bruce White and Historical Archaeologist Alan Woolworth noted in their comment to the city that Dakota burials in the ground were generally deeper than two feet. Stanley Crooks, chairman of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community wrote in his EAW comment that test pits at 50-foot intervals were not useful for finding burials.
Crooks further stated that if remains were found they would be eroded, like the bones that were found in the survey. “Our ancestors were not buried in caskets nor marked by a tombstone. The fact that our ancestors have not been buried there for over 150 years means that human remains have decomposed to an extraordinary degree.” Michael Scott, a member of the Mendota Dakota community said in his comment to the city that removal of human bones from the area would not change the place’s nature as a sacred burial place because of the decomposition of flesh and bone fragments that became part of the soil. “My ancestors are in the whole hill, in the dirt, you can not remove them. It’s impossible to remove them.”
Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota CommunityP.O. Box 50835
1351 Sibley Memorial Hwy
Mendota, MN 55150
(651) 452-4141 Phone
(651) 452-4232 Fax
Blbmmdc@aol.com
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