Why is there a national monument near a small town on the Minnesota prairie? Why do the town’s residents dress as Indians each summer and perform a historical pageant based on a Victorian-era poem?
Sally J. Southwick is a native of southwestern Minnesota and has lived throughout the West. An independent scholar, she has written on United States culture and western history.
Pipestone illustrates the persistent tension inherent in American
attempts to adapt the continent’s past for use as a foundation on
which to build a cohesive identity. The selective use of a Native
sense of sacred traditions made the landscape historically
meaningful and worth preserving without compromising secular
cultural beliefs in American material progress.
“Who would have guessed that a slender volume about a tiny prairie
town could address so many important topics?”
*Western Historical Quarterly*
“This fine-grained study of a single community illuminates the
larger process of culture production and offers significant
insights on the ways that Euro-Americans rewrote the history of
expansionism and dispossession of native people.”
*Minnesota History*
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