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Comments on the Future of Coldwater - footnotes
[1] "Neutral" in this context is more than check-your-guns-at-the-entrance. “Neutral” would include checking your attitude, taking a psychic shower before coming into sacred space so as not to pollute the space with your negativity. Coldwater Spring is half way between Minnehaha Falls and the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. It is 2.5-miles from the falls to the confluence. In March 1999, Anishinabe spiritual elder Eddie Benton Benais from Lac Courte Oreilles, Wisconsin offered the following in court-ordered testimony.
"We know that the falls which came to be known as Minnehaha Falls, was a sacred place, was a neutral place, a place for many nations to come. And that (to) further geographically define (it), the confluence of the three rivers, which is actually the two rivers. That point was a neutral place.
“And that somewhere between that point and the falls there were sacred grounds that were mutually held to be a sacred place….My grandfather who lived to be 108, died in 1942 [born 1834]. I will tell you this. Many times he retold how we traveled, how he and his family, he as a small boy traveled by foot, by horse, by canoe to this great place to where there would be these great religious, spiritual events. And that they always camped between the falls and the sacred water place. Those are his words.
"And I, having been born into an Ojibwa/Anishinabe family, having been raised in this tradition, and having been now entrusted with teaching this tradition and articles of faith, I can say that to you...[i]t is our belief that the prophesies contain a promise. The new people, the new awareness is here among us, among all people.
"There's a growing awareness that we need to care for the earth, we need to become concerned with the water, the air and all of creation. We need to do this together....We have to begin to reach out and say, 'Brother, we are of the earth.' That all prayer originates at the same place and arrives at the same place."
[2] For a 27-month period before construction Coldwater averaged 129,456 gallons-per-day (gpd). Post-construction court-ordered monitoring by MnDOT for 20-months averaged 101,908 gpd, a loss of about 27,500 gpd or 20 gallons per minute. |
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