It’s difficult not to be reminded of Henry Hastings Sibley if you live in northern Dakota County or even if you pass through it as a visitor.
Sibley Memorial Highway runs through the neighboring suburbs of Eagan, Lilydale and Mendota — an area where Sibley the fur trader settled after arriving in what is now Minnesota in 1834. And the name of the high school that has served students primarily from West St. Paul and Mendota Heights since its opening in 1953 bears Sibley’s name — at least for now.
On Monday night, following months of lobbying by community members and alumni, the West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan Area School Board agreed to ditch from the school the name of Minnesota’s first governor.
The board’s unanimous decision to change the name of the school, which is located in Mendota Heights, is being met with praise by those who pushed for it and cited Sibley’s treatment of the state’s Dakota people. During the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Sibley led 1,200 troops against the Dakota in Minnesota and pursued them into neighboring states the following year on a series of “punitive expeditions.”
“I don’t think it’s erasing history,” Bill Lindeke, a 1997 Sibley High graduate, said Tuesday, acknowledging what opponents of the change often argue. “I think it’s acknowledging history, and starting an important conversation for the students and the people who care about the school district.”
Lindeke believes the obscurity of Sibley’s treatment of Dakota people is partly why the school still carries its name. It just wasn’t discussed in classrooms, or anyplace openly for that matter, he said.
“My sense about him had been that he was sort of trying to play both sides and sort of defending Dakota against people like Alexander Ramsey, who really wanted to eradicate them completely,” he said.
Lindeke said his perspective of Sibley changed recently after reading a biography “that made it harder and harder to defend him in my mind, just because of how clearly he turned against Dakota.”
About the same time, one of Lindeke’s classmates, Bethany Williams, was working on the effort to bring Sibley’s dark past to light to the school board. Williams, who lives just outside of Chicago, called Lindeke following the May 25 death of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis police custody, and subsequent civil unrest, to see what he thought of joining an effort to change the suburban school’s name.
“Luckily I had been reading all about (Sibley),” said Lindeke, who teaches geography at the University of Minnesota and Metro State University. “So I knew his full story.”
FROM FUR TRADER TO GOVERNOR
So who was Henry Sibley? He was born in Detroit in the Michigan Territory. At age 18, one year after leaving home, Sibley became a clerk for the American Fur Co. Then, in 1834, at the age of 23, he accepted the daunting task of managing fur trade in the area surrounding a frontier outpost: Fort Snelling.
His new home was in St. Peter, which later was renamed Mendota. Dakota people became his allies; he hunted with them, fathered a child with a Dakota woman.
Sibley became a land baron and purchased large areas of Dakota County that became available after treaties were signed. Those holdings included the majority of land that became the cities of Mendota, Mendota Heights, Eagan and Hastings.
Lindeke, who writes a popular blog, notes that Sibley used his influence as a fur trader and supplier of goods to “cajole Dakota leaders by creating massive debts. He then ensured that he and his white partners got huge shares of the future annuity payments.”
In 1858, the year Minnesota became a state, Sibley was elected governor, defeating Minnesota Territorial Gov. Alexander Ramsey by a mere 240 votes. He served for two years.
In 1862, serving as a colonel and later brigadier general, he led U.S. Army raids in battles against Dakota. More than 500 settlers had been killed in southwestern Minnesota. Sibley defeated Dakota people in about six weeks.
More than 300 Dakota men were sentenced to hang, but President Abraham Lincoln, in a compromise decision, lowered that number to 38.
Lindeke says that Sibley’s betrayal of the Dakota people might have been worse than many of his peers from Minnesota’s dark 19th century history.
“Sure he was not explicitly genocidal from the beginning, but he knew far more about what he was doing and personally carried out the destructive plans of others,” Lindeke writes.
‘RIGHT TIME … RIGHT WAY’
Williams recalled Tuesday how when she was going to the high school in the mid-’90s that the Warrior logo was changed from a Native American’s head to a griffin — a combination of an eagle and a lion.
“No one really liked it, so they eventually changed to a guy in armor who you see now,” she said.
As she got older, she realized the school’s name “just didn’t feel right.”
She said she learned recently from community members that people have advocated for changing the school’s name over the years, but that “I think nobody had the momentum or there weren’t enough people pushing on it at the right time and in the right way … until now.”
An online petition that has been signed by more than 1,300 people includes a quarter of the high school’s current students, she said.
“The whole point of this … and I’ve taken some heat online from people who think I need to just get over this — and I get it,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t think I really had an understanding of the issue at age 16 or 17, nor do I necessarily think people would have taken me seriously. I’m an adult now who knows how government works, and I am confident enough to go out and try something like this. We shouldn’t put this on kids to fix, and I think it’s important to not also put it on the American Indian community like this is their problem that needs to be fixed.”
The resolution approved at Monday night’s virtual meeting directs the district’s administration to develop a process for bringing new names to the board for consideration, along with cost estimates and potential timelines.
