Southeast Minnesota boasts a unique geological landscape of rolling hills, fertile fields, dramatic bluffs, and freshwater streams. Beneath its lush surface is a hidden world of underground caves and rivers created after thousands of years of rain and snow seeped through fractured bedrock, slowly softening and dissolving sedimentary rock.

Ojibwe people have made maple sugar, a traditional dietary staple, for centuries. It is easily accessed in the woodlands of Minnesota and can be stored for months without spoiling. While the technology used in the process has changed over the years, Ojibwe people continue to harvest maple sugar in the present day.

Ozaawindib was a prominent figure among the Pillager Ojibwe who interacted with white travelers and participated in conflicts with the Dakota in the late 1700s. During one encounter in the 1790s, she successfully defended her Ojibwe kin with a bow and arrows, earning a reputation for bravery. As an agokwa (a person deemed male at birth who took on women’s roles), she was a respected member of her community who grew into a position of leadership.

Grand Portage (Gichi Onigamiing) is both a historic seasonal migration route and the traditional site of an Ojibwe summer village on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior. In the 1700s, after voyageurs began to use it to carry canoes from Lake Superior to the Pigeon River, it became one of the most profitable fur-trading sites in the region and a headquarters for the North West Fur Company.

The stretch of land between present-day St. Paul, Minnesota, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, served as a highway for Native and mixed-ancestry (metis) fur traders—especially those with French heritage or kinship ties—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Building on Native trade networks, they created new communities, adapted to cultural change, and contributed to Minnesota’s recognition as a state in 1858.

Augustin Roc was one of several generations of the Couilland dit Roc family who traded and lived on the upper Mississippi and St. Peters Rivers. As the nature of the trade between Europeans and the local Dakota people evolved, Roc moved, gradually progressing up the Mississippi River. In addition to trading, Roc worked for the United States as an interpreter because of his knowledge of and connections with the Dakota.

Dr. William S. Cooper, head of the botany department at the University of Minnesota, urged a newly formed committee of the Minnesota Academy of Science to purchase part of the Anoka Sand Plain in 1937. The Cedar Creek Forest was a bit of natural Minnesota worthy of active protection from disturbance, he believed. He and others would help establish and protect what became the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, about thirty miles north of the Twin Cities.

Ojibwe oral tradition identifies Little Round Hill, a small elevation on the banks of the Crow Wing River, as the location of a late-1700s French fur trading fort and a skirmish between Ojibwe hunter-traders and Dakota warriors. Located in Old Wadena County Park at the confluence of the Partridge and Crow Wing Rivers, it was the site of the first intensive archaeological excavation within Wadena County.

Oak savannas—open grassland studded by tall, spreading oak trees—once covered 10 percent of Minnesota, mostly in the southeast quarter of the state. They are an attractive ecosystem for animals such as deer, turkeys, and red-headed woodpeckers. Before European immigration, indigenous people valued the savannas for the good hunting they provided, fostering and maintaining them through the regular use of fire. In 2017, only about 1 percent of the savannas that existed 200 years ago remains.

The Cadotte Post was a fur trade encampment in the late eighteenth century—one of three archaeological sites in Wadena County identified through Ojibwe oral tradition as a late-1700s trading fort. It stood just north of the Crow Wing River on its east bank, south and opposite the mouth of the Leaf River in what later became the Old Wadena County Park.