Dakota Table

Rebecca Krinke is honored to be part of the Healing Place Collaborative, a Minnesota based, indigenous-led collaborative to explore healing people and place along the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers – the sacred center of the Dakota peoples’ world and the site of their genocide/concentration camp. Healing Place Collaborative is led by key leaders in the Dakota community: Mona Smith, Jewell Arcoren, Ethan Neerdaels, and Marty Case.

The Knight Foundation funded the Healing Place MN’s project: “Wahnawotapi: A Traveling Dakota Language Table”. Healing Place Collaborative created a sculptural, portable table to function as a map showing Dakota place names (and their erasure) in Minnesota, and work as a place–based Dakota language teaching tool.

Healing Place Collaborative grounds its approach to repairing community, River, and relationship in the Dakota concept of “bdote”. This word means a confluence of waters (in this case, the Mississippi and Minnesota) but also confluence in general. Healing Place Collaborative intends to encourage a confluence of interests among people who recognize that the River is important to creating a healthy community, and that a community-wide effort is needed to heal our River. The many issues that our community faces are too often approached in isolation from one another. People working diligently on solutions often operate with distinct agendas, budgets, and disciplines. Similarly, competing environmental, commercial, and cultural interests limit their impact on the health of the River. Both the River and the society it has engendered need healing.