Preface: This article was co-created with ChatGPT.

Before European colonizers arrived, what is now Minneapolis was not an “empty land.” It was a core region where the Dakota people had lived, migrated, held ceremonies, and governed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. St. Anthony Falls, formed by the Mississippi River at this location, was not merely a natural landmark or an energy resource to them, but a place of cosmic significance. Known as Bdóte, it was where rivers converged, where cycles of life and the spiritual world overlapped, and where political, religious, and social order were centered. This means that what later became the “geographic center” of the city was, in fact, the center of the Indigenous worldview.

From the late 18th to the early 19th century, the United States’ understanding of the upper Mississippi River was fundamentally military, logistical, and sovereign in nature, rather than an acknowledgment of existing societies, cultures, or civilizations. For the young American republic, the Mississippi River was not simply a river; it was a lifeline that determined whether the nation could survive. It connected inland agriculture, international trade, military movement, and territorial sovereignty. Whoever controlled the river controlled the future form of the state.

Within this logic, the area that is now Minneapolis was seen as an “upstream choke point.” Its proximity to the river’s headwaters, bends, and natural waterfalls meant that it was both the terminus of navigation and a gate controlling a much larger region. U.S. political and military elites focused on three priorities: preventing renewed European intervention, suppressing Indigenous sovereignty, and ensuring westward expansion would not be cut off. This focus itself defined the area as a “strategic space,” not as a society with its own internal order.

At the time, the United States was still a highly fragile nation. The original thirteen colonies were bound to the Atlantic, and the only viable path westward was the Mississippi River, whose mouth at New Orleans was controlled by European powers. Whoever controlled New Orleans determined whether America’s inland agriculture could survive. For the United States, this was not a diplomatic issue but a matter of survival. If cut off, the country would be forced back to the coast, and the West would never be integrated.

France’s return made the crisis more urgent. Napoleon attempted to rebuild a French empire in North America, using Louisiana as a base for expansion into the Caribbean and the continent. But yellow fever, colonial failure, and European wars quickly drained French capacity. The United States seized a historical window, using money rather than war to accomplish something usually reserved for empires: acquiring continental-scale strategic depth in a single move.

Crucially, however, this purchase did not equate to actual control of the land. To the United States, Louisiana in 1803 was largely unknown territory (and Minneapolis, purchased as part of the same transaction). Maps were crude, borders were vague, and Indigenous sovereignty remained very real. What the United States truly purchased was not land itself, but the European powers’ relinquishment of claims to it. In other words, America bought a license to legally deploy violence and restructure space through institutions.

This directly shaped the mode of expansion that followed. Since the land was now legally “American,” the remaining question was no longer whether entry was permitted, but how to remove obstacles. Military forts, treaty systems, land surveys, administrative divisions, and immigration policies advanced westward like a coordinated assembly line. The Mississippi River was redefined as the nation’s central axis rather than a shared, multi-ethnic living space. These regions were no longer peripheral; they were seen as key nodes for future agricultural, industrial, and population expansion.

The United States did not rush to “civilize” these places. Instead, it prioritized three conditions: military control, legal manageability, and demographic replaceability. Once these were secured, society and cities would grow naturally. This is why the Louisiana Purchase is often described in U.S. history as a “peaceful expansion,” while in Indigenous history it marks the beginning of catastrophe. War did not occur immediately, but the outcome was structurally predetermined. Indigenous peoples were recoded from sovereign actors into “problems residing on U.S. land.” Rivers were transformed from networks of life and spirit into channels of transport and taxation. Land shifted from an indivisible space of survival into an asset that could be sold, inherited, and mortgaged. This was an inverted order of civilizational expansion: not societies giving rise to a state, but a state first clearing space through violence, then permitting society to enter.

Fort Snelling, constructed in the 1820s, was not built to “protect the frontier,” but to control Indigenous peoples, monitor river traffic, and enforce land transfers. Subsequent treaties were not the result of equal negotiation, but of dispossession under military threat, debt coercion, and information asymmetry. Treaty language spoke of “cession” and “exchange,” while the reality was systematic expulsion and resource deprivation.

Fort Snelling’s location was critical, sitting at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers—precisely the sacred Bdóte of the Dakota people. In Dakota cosmology, this was the node of life’s origin and the cycle of souls; on U.S. military maps, it was a “strategic high ground that must be occupied.” This reversal of spatial meaning is itself the core act of colonization: not merely seizing land, but seizing meaning.

From the outset, Fort Snelling’s primary mission was internal control rather than external defense. It monitored river trade, restricted Indigenous movement, enforced treaty provisions, and provided security for white settlers entering the region. It functioned as the hardware interface of U.S. sovereignty projecting westward. Treaties “worked” not because of mutual consent, but because artillery stood behind them.

More importantly, Fort Snelling bureaucratized violence. Indigenous land was no longer taken outright, but drained through garrisons, paperwork, ration systems, and judicial procedures. Hunger was not accidental; it was administratively produced. Supplies were delayed or withheld, hunting was prohibited, migration restricted. These seemingly “administrative” measures dismantled Dakota society more effectively than open combat.

For the Dakota, this resulted in structural collapse. Traditional hunting and migration routes were severed, promised provisions withheld or embezzled, and communities forced onto barren reservations. Famine was not a natural disaster but an institutional outcome. The U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 was not an “uprising,” but a desperate reaction to prolonged starvation and deception. Its aftermath included public executions, mass exile, and de facto ethnic cleansing. The Dakota were expelled from Minnesota, and their social structure was shattered.

After the war, Dakota women, children, and elders were confined in camps near Fort Snelling, exposed to cold, disease, and hunger, with extremely high mortality. Subsequent executions and deportations formally erased Dakota social presence in Minnesota. Only after this clearing was completed could the region be “safely” opened to white settlers. Minneapolis and Saint Paul did not grow because natural advantages suddenly emerged, but because an existing society had been forcibly removed. Fort Snelling fulfilled its historical function: transforming inhabited land into seemingly “empty” developable space.

Only after this clearing did Minneapolis rapidly take shape. The falls were occupied by dams, mills, and factories; the river was recoded as a tool of capital and industry. From the beginning, the city’s legal system, property rights, and order rested on a single premise: the prior world had been legitimately erased. This was not a symbolic “original sin,” but a concrete institutional foundation. Today’s city boundaries, policing patterns, and land ownership all extend from this logic.

After large-scale white settlement in the late 19th century, Minneapolis was rapidly compressed, reshaped, and fixed.

From the late 19th to early 20th century, the city’s power structure was extremely concentrated, not as a natural outcome of later capitalism, but as something locked in during its founding. Urban direction was controlled not by dispersed merchants, but by a small number of vertically integrated industrial-financial conglomerates that simultaneously controlled energy, production, transportation, credit, and local politics.

The rapid privatization of St. Anthony Falls’ hydropower marked the starting point of this structure. Prime land around the falls was permanently occupied by flour-milling giants. Companies like Pillsbury and Washburn-Crosby were not merely factory owners; through rail contracts, grain pricing, banking loans, and tax policy, they locked the entire industrial chain under their control.

This meant the city lacked a “middle economic buffer.” You were either inside the capital core, participating in decision-making and expansion, or on the production floor, treated as a replaceable labor unit. Large numbers of Nordic and Eastern European immigrants, followed later by African Americans, were absorbed into mills, warehouses, railroads, and docks, but had virtually no path into the upper structure through labor alone. Class mobility was one-directional from the start.

As Eastern European, Nordic, and later Black populations entered the city, housing, education, and public resources were systematically zoned. Early 20th-century housing discrimination and later redlining locked race and class into specific neighborhoods within a generation. North Minneapolis became predominantly Black, while the south side and suburbs were designed for white middle- and upper-class residents. This segregation was not organic; it was the product of coordinated policy, banking, and urban planning.

Worker housing was deliberately placed near factories, rail lines, and riverbanks, with dense construction, poor conditions, and minimal infrastructure investment. Housing was designed not for quality of life, but to minimize commuting costs and maximize labor flexibility. Properties were often controlled by landlords or companies tied directly to industrial capital. Rents rose steadily while living conditions stagnated. “Low security” was not a lack of welfare, but an intentional design: survival was permitted, accumulation was not.

Meanwhile, urban governance overwhelmingly favored elites. City councils, planning departments, police systems, and business associations were deeply intertwined. Public decision-making consistently prioritized industrial efficiency, asset protection, and investment climate. Worker communities were managed, not served. Strikes, assemblies, and organizing efforts were frequently crushed by police and private security, which is why Minneapolis became one of the most labor-conflict-intense cities in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

More subtle and enduring was the transfer of risk. Industrial accidents, unemployment, illness, and economic cycles were borne almost entirely by workers, while capital offloaded risk through finance, insurance, and political influence. The city grew statistically, but the cost of growth was continuously compressed into the bodies, families, and communities of workers and immigrants. This structure did not require constant violence; it was encoded into contracts, deeds, policing rules, and urban plans.

The critical impact of this structure is that it was never truly dismantled. Even after the decline of the flour industry and shifts in capital form, the logic of “elite decision-making and bottom-heavy burden” persisted. The racial segregation, wealth gaps, and intense police-community tensions seen in Minneapolis today are not new phenomena, but successive historical projections of this early industrial-financial order. The city’s direction was set more than a century ago.