Return to Bdote

This is why the Mni Owe Sni Bdote camp matters.

The camp is not just tipi lodges on the land. It is a stand by the Native community to return these lands. It is prayer. It is presence. It is a refusal to let our creation site be quietly managed without us. It is Dakota and Lakota relatives saying this place is alive, sacred, and we want to come home.

Before Fort Snelling.
Before the Dakota concentration camp.
Before the threat of that same carceral violence rising again at the Whipple Building.
Before our creation site was turned into “recreational” space.
Bdote.

Bdote means where two waters meet, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. It also means our first breath as a baby. It is the center of the world for Dakota people. It is our creation story. This is origin.
The Mississippi River does not end at the shoreline. It is reflected above as the spirit road, the path our spirits travel to and from this world. What flows below flows above, kapemni.

What lives here echoes in the sky. Our 7 council fires, the Oceti Sakowin, burn eternal in the Big Dipper, known as the sacred pipe & the burial scaffold constellation. Our governance is written in the stars. Our ancestors and future generations are mapped across the cosmos.

Today there is a dog park at Bdote. Land set aside for dogs to run freely at the center of our world. Yet there is no protected ceremonial space for Dakota women. No bark lodge. No sacred space restored for the life givers of our nation.
And we are told there are millions of dollars being planned for a “River Learning Center.”

If millions can be secured for a learning center, Dakota people cannot be forgotten when it comes to restoring our own sacred space. We cannot be erased again while development moves forward on our creation site. We cannot watch funding flow into buildings while ceremony remains displaced.

Dakota women’s ceremonies are not optional. They are foundational. We give life to the next generations. We carry the birthing medicines. We hold knowledge that colonization tried to sever. Bdote is our sacred birthing island. When Dakota women are denied ceremony here, that is continued dispossession.

Grandmother Earth is calling us back. The birthing medicines are returning. Bdote must be restored as living Dakota land with protected space for ceremony.

Land back means ceremony back.
Land back means Dakota governance at Bdote.
Land back means Dakota women have space again at the center of the world.

If there is land for a dog park and millions for a river center, there must be land and resources for Dakota ceremony.
Restore Bdote.

Honor Oceti Sakowin.
Return the land so our fires burn here again, not only in the sky but on our homelands.