Dakota-Led Group to Begin Restoring Five Acres at St. Anthony Falls Site This Month

A Dakota-led nonprofit will begin construction this month on a five-acre restoration project at Owámniyomni, the site along the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis also known as St. Anthony Falls. The work follows a decade of planning, fundraising and engagement with tribal nations.

Owámniyomni Okhódayapi announced the start of construction during a walking tour of the site on Monday. The project will remove a parking lot, an unused restroom building and the upper floor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers control station, replacing them with native prairie, oak savanna and traditional Dakota medicines.

For the organization's leaders, the central aim is restoring a Dakota presence along the river. "We're forgotten in our homelands. We don't see ourselves here in our homelands," said Shelley Buck, the group's president and a member of the Prairie Island Indian Community. "As Dakota people, this is our birthplace. We don't have a migration story to where we're at here. This is the place where we come from."

The site sits beside the Upper Lock, which closed to commercial barge traffic more than a decade ago. Kjersti Duval, a project advisor with Duval Companies, said getting to this stage took four acts of Congress, plus numerous resolutions from the city and the Minneapolis Park Board. "It has taken almost every level of government that we have to move this project forward," she said.

Site preparation begins in mid-May. Crews will demolish the restroom building, remove the top floor of the Army Corps' central control station and tear out the asphalt lot. In its place will go upland prairie planted with seeds and soils sourced from Dakota Tribal lands in Minnesota. The design also includes a limestone bluff restoration and an ADA-accessible switchback path leading toward the river.

John Barrick, a construction project manager with Loeffler Construction, said the first phase should take about 13 months. "We'll get the bulk of construction done this year going into the winter, have a slight break, and then wrap up middle of summer next year," he said.

The site will be closed to the public during construction, though the Stone Arch Bridge will stay open. Visitors can still view the area from above and attend programming at the nonprofit's engagement space in the nearby Crown Plaza building.

A second phase, planned for 2028, will focus on water. The mill race is now a stagnant back channel. "It's basically kind of a standing pool of back-channel water. There is no positive flow," Duval said. The plan calls for restoring the shoreline and routing river water over the escarpment to revive the channel and create a 25-foot waterfall.

Owámniyomni Okhódayapi has raised $40.5 million toward a $60 million campaign, leaving roughly $20 million to be raised. Major backers include the Mellon Foundation, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation and the Minneapolis Foundation, along with state environmental funds. Mellon recently contributed $4.7 million directly toward the land transformation work.

Buck said the construction itself carries weight for the land, which Dakota people regard as a relative. "We know that the construction is going to further disrupt this land, and the land, which we see as a relative, doesn't know if we're here to help it or hurt it more," she said. "We're not going to do harm. We're trying to repair the harm that has been done."