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together as one.2 Public memory and commemoration weigh heavily on the hearts and minds of
both the Dakota and white American population along the Minnesota River Valley, both for
good, and the bad. Focusing on monuments, various degrees of voices and emotions, as well as
physical locations, demonstrates the desire of the white population to place all blame on the
Native Americans in the region. The Dakota people push back against this bias, and successfully
commemorate their lost ancestors on the same landscape in which the white populations honor
theirs.

Public memory and commemoration affect the way history presents and perceives itself
to the public’s eye. These motives situate the visitor in a place that is unique, in ways that allow
the public to look back, and find comfort in the history they are learning.3 Displays, exhibits,
and tours depend on “a particular kind of nostalgia, and that this nostalgia functions as a way of
structuring knowledge.”4 This edifice requires stakeholders to fund, support, and pursue
enterprises to promote a new historical display and museum, and according to Amy K. Levin,
stakeholders must be appeased in the particular displays which are placed in the institutions they
sponsor. Simply, since these groups pay for efforts to produce the displays and remembrance of
individual historic sites, setting information which goes against their opinions may cause unrest
between the community and the stakeholders. While this is happening, present day scholars are
giving a new experience for the community, says Martha Norkunas, which is moving in the

2 Guy Gibbon, The Sioux: The Dakota and Lakota Nations (Hoboken, New Jersey: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003), 174.
3 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985), xvi-xvii.
4 Amy K. Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in
America’s Changing Communities (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2007), 13.