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direction towards “the authenticity of their travel experience.”5 To make sure the visitor is
understanding the history correctly, the focus on details and showing an unbiased display is vital
to the experience of the historic site. Norkunas also adds that “Monuments and historical sites,
meant to symbolize complex movements or historical events, could instead act to enshrine
singular visions of the past,” saying that as time and space change, individual interpretations
remain the same.6 This idea takes root along the Minnesota River Valley, ushering in challenges
for the Dakota nation in the process of remembering their heritage, culture, and history.

As displays are carefully placed and positioned along the historic sites throughout the
Minnesota River Valley, many interpretations are left out of the discussion. Dakota participation
is an ambiguous narrative that disagrees with the white stakeholders that want to honor their lost
ancestors, whose deaths came at the hands of the Native Americans. Kenneth Carley states, “In
the abundant source material on the Sioux Uprising of 1862, there is depressingly little testimony
from the Indian side,” showing that those interested in this conflict lack the other side’s
experience. They only allow the white perspective to be highlighted. Carley is suggesting that
there is little primary source material from the Dakota, as “the Indians were silent except for
brief and sometimes ludicrous statements attributing to them at the time of capture or during
trials.”7 The relatively few Native American voices demonstrate that in the regions surrounding
New Ulm and Mankato, the commemoration of the white settlers takes precedence over the
Dakota. Even worse, the bulk of the white population along the Minnesota River Valley wanted
to forget the event even happened. In 1927, when trying to understand a monument in Mankato

5 Martha K. Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in
Monterey, California (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 2.
6 Ibid.
7 Kenneth Carley, “As Red Men View It: Three Indian Accounts of the Uprising,” Minnesota
History Special Sioux War Issue, Vol. 28, No. 3 (September 1962).