For 150 years the lake in front of you was called Lake Calhoun, after John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and the most prominent political defender of slavery in American history, a man who had nothing to do with Minnesota. The Minnesota DNR officially restored the Dakota name Bde Maka Ska — which means White Earth Lake — in 2018, and the Minneapolis Park Board followed. The Dakota people lived on and around this lake for thousands of years before European settlers arrived.
The treaty of 1805, negotiated at the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, gave the United States this land in exchange for promises that were largely broken. The Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 ended with the largest mass execution in American history — thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in Mankato on December 26th — and the expulsion of the Dakota people from Minnesota. The lake itself is the largest in Minneapolis at 401 acres, and the beach on the east shore is the busiest in the city on summer weekends.
Swimming here, in a lake with its original name restored, is an act of memory.