About 35 miles south of Redwood Falls, MN is a place where natives started carving the Sioux Quartzite bedrock three thousand years before Moses was said to have parted the Red Sea.
More than 5,000 figures were carved over a period of 7,000 years at the Jeffers Petroglyphs historic site. The Minnesota Historical Society manages the place and tells us:
“…it is a very spiritual place — one where Grandmother Earth speaks of the past, present, and future…”
“…This long time span makes Jeffers one of the oldest continuously used sacred sites in the world, if not the oldest…”
“…The Ioway, Otoe, Cheyenne, and the Dakota consider it home and important to their tribal histories…”
“…Minnesota’s recorded history begins at this site…”
Eleven thousand years back, the last glacial retreats created the Minnesota we know. To imagine the River Warren which drained Glacial Lake Agassiz via Redwood Falls, examine an aerial photo from above Jeffers looking northwest at the valley of the Minnesota River. The Warren ran there – five miles wide and 250 feet deep – for 2,000 years.
A road trip took me to the spot in 2020. As they sprayed water to enhance the visibility of the carvings, our guides told us of the sanctity of the place, noting the absence of any immediate archeological evidence of daily native life. We walked over ripples in the sand laid down 1.6 billion years ago. No airplane noise, no traffic noise, just the sound of the wind and our footsteps. What did Grandmother Earth have to say that day?
To me, Grandmother whispered “peace;” every cloud a living thing, whispering across the sky. As one of my favorite bloggers said, the place made me “awake to the boundless spaciousness upon which our conscious experience is painted.”
A visit to the beginning of Minnesota’s recorded history should be high on your agenda.
