For decades, Dayton’s Bluff residents have enjoyed a pedestrian trail high atop the limestone and sandstone bluffs that long ago served as an American Indian burial ground.

But newly uncovered evidence of what lies beneath Indian Mounds Regional Park has St. Paul officials abandoning plans to rebuild the path. Instead, they’ll remove the trail entirely, curtailing access to the park and steering pedestrians to an upgraded bike path along Mounds Boulevard.

The decision has upset residents of the ethnically diverse, lower-income neighborhood, but American Indian activists say removing the trail is necessary in light of a new landscape study.

Both sides are trading accusations of bias and insensitivity. A community meeting in June erupted in shouts.

Maggie Lorenz, who heads the Lower Phalen Creek Project, said study results have yet to be made public to guard against looting, but radar has detected sacred history beneath the earth.

“This is a burial site of the Dakota community,” Lorenz said in an interview. “This decision wasn’t made lightly and it certainly wasn’t made in haste. I understand it may be new information … (but) I think the community has to trust that process, and they’re not.”

Some residents say the trail could uplift the history of the Dakota while preserving access to the regional park for residents of an increasingly diverse corner of the city.

“That’s a path we walk everyday, sometimes two or three times a day,” said Lisa Record, who has lived off Maria Avenue for 20 years. “I absolutely want to be respectful of the tribal members and their burial sites, but I would prefer to work with them for an understanding of how we can move forward.”

St. Paul Parks and Recreation has scheduled a public discussion for 5 p.m. Monday at Cerenity Senior Care, 200 Earl St., but Parks and Rec Director Mike Hahm said the public process is almost complete.

His department already has presented plans to the Federal Highway Administration to focus on resurfacing the bike path along Mounds Boulevard, rather than improving the walking path.

“This trail can’t be here anymore for safety reasons, and there’s no place to move it,” Hahm said.

FEDERAL FUNDING TRIGGERS HISTORIC REVIEW

Parks and Rec finalized a community master plan for the regional park in 2011, project manager Brett Hussong said.

The city intended to install a splash pad within the park, but tribal members objected. Instead, $662,000 in state Legacy Parks and Trails grants were redirected toward the ongoing landscape study.

“We realized there was this cultural component we needed to identify,” Hussong said. “What do we have on site that we don’t know?”

As part of a separate project in 2014, the city applied for federal funding to reconstruct the walking trail. It was awarded $1.4 million from the Federal Highway Administration and $1.1 million from a state Legacy Parks and Trails matching grant.

The trail project had to go through a federal “Section 106” review under the National Historic Preservation Act.

That triggered the involvement of the Tribal Historic Preservation officers, State Historic Preservation Office, Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, Department of Natural Resources, state Office of Archaeology and National Park service. Four Dakota tribes have taken the lead in discussions with the city.

Hussong said the city initially planned to pull the trail away from the bluff for safety reasons, including concerns about erosion. But in some spots, there was little room to relocate a walking path, and those efforts had to be drawn in a bit. Then, the city decided a relocated trail wouldn’t work at all.

“There’s new technology that’s become available — ground-penetrating radar — that identified some areas that have additional cultural significance,” Hussong said, though he was at a loss to identify the exact artifacts. “It could be an old burial site. It could be burial items. This area was most likely a cemetery.”

Franky Jackson, a compliance officer with the Prairie Island Indian Community, said tribal officers are supportive of the decision not to relocate the trail within the regional park, but it’s ultimately not their decision to make.

“The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council and State Historic Preservation Office made these determinations,” Jackson said. “The tribes didn’t. We don’t issue a determination letter for projects outside of tribal land. Only the state does that. It’s the city’s decision to move the path along the trail because of safety reasons. We support the recommendations as they’re presented.”

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Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump visit metro, pushing law-and-order message. Dems: What about the pandemic? The discovery of old artifacts shouldn’t come as a surprise. For years, fences at the 111-acre park have kept visitors off six large burial mounds that are over 1,500 years old.

At one time, at least 16 burial mounds existed atop the bluff, and 19 more were further down above Wakan Tipi, also known as Carver’s Cave.

Residents say efforts to preserve the area are at least a century too late. The bluffs once were dotted with both houses and Indian mounds, both of which have been removed or destroyed.

“The ground has been stirred up quite a bit there over the last 100 years,” said Plum Street resident J. Wittenberg.

A SHARED BIKE-PEDESTRIAN TRAIL

Instead of relocating the bluff trail, the city plans to resurface a 12-foot designated bike path that runs parallel to Mounds Boulevard. Spurs from the bike corridor will run to a series of cliff overlooks.

The result will be more pedestrians, strollers, electric scooters and cyclists sharing a single trail instead of two.

“What could go wrong?” neighbor Ann Gehrt said, sarcastically.

Limiting park access in one of the city’s poorest and most racially and ethnically diverse corners strikes Gehrt and other residents as a major step backward, and a contradiction of both St. Paul’s and the Metropolitan Council’s stated park equity goals.

The area is 32 percent Asian-American, 14 percent black and 13 percent Latino, according to the Wilder Foundation. Whites make up little more than a third of the neighborhood and American Indians 1 percent.

Around 55 percent of the households live on less than $50,000 a year.

American Indian activists see things differently. In early June, Crystal Norcross, a Dakota activist, filmed herself removing community fliers that had been posted in the park urging residents to “Say No!” to the city’s plans.

In a June 2 Facebook post, Lorenz described opposition to the trail removal as “white supremacy.”

“Whoever posted these signs is obviously familiar enough with the project to know why the sections are being removed. When you feel your desire for a view supersedes the desire of Dakota people that you not trample on their ancestors’ remains. That is white supremacy. This is Dakota erasure on Dakota land,” she wrote.

Wittenberg said the walking path through Indian Mounds has fostered community investment by providing more eyes on the ground, which he thinks has prevented littering and other bad behavior.

“It’s one of those elements that promotes respect, because it’s taking you off the grass and putting you on a path,” Wittenberg said. “I do think it promotes stewardship.”

Elsewhere, during volunteer clean-ups at the parking lot along the lower outlook near Plum Street, he’s seen the opposite.

“People polluting, dumping their garbage. I’ve found needles. There’s squealing tires racing up and down that parking lot,” he said. “You’re eliminating a walking path for people out walking their babies in their strollers, but you’re not taking a look at the lower lot?”

City Council Member Jane Prince, who represents Dayton’s Bluff, has sought to reassure residents they are not losing access to the park by shifting the trail onto the Mounds Boulevard bike path.

“We’re definitely going ahead with a trail reconstruction,” she said. “We have federal funding for it. We’re also doing a cultural landscape study up there, which was part of the Mounds Park master plan. That’s been part of a plan for almost a decade.” Related Articles St. Paul district to wait on reopening schools, citing lack of staff

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Gehrt feels shortchanged.

“I really feel that the city should broker a solution that is respectful to Native tribes, but also preserves the bluff trails. The impact of removing access to trails in a poor community has real costs to people’s health,” she said.

“We understand we’re just neighbors. We don’t have any money. … But (the tribes) don’t live in St. Paul, for the most part. This is not a majority-Native American neighborhood. The residents and people who use the park are stakeholders, too.”