Envision Shakopee

SHAKOPEE’S PAST UNIQUE HISTORY ANDCULTURE

The City of Shakopee is rich in history. Once a trading post and then a small river town, the city is now a growing suburb to the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Located in the lower Minnesota River Valley, Shakopee has been home to Native Americans who have hunted and harvested in the Minnesota River Valley for thousands of years. Burial mounds located along the Minnesota River banks in Memorial Park and elsewhere date back approximately 2,000 years. For hundreds of years the Dakota people inhabited the Minnesota River Valley, establishing villages from which they hunted game in the surrounding prairies and valley woodlands, fished the river and streams, cultivated rice on the lakes and farmed maize in the fertile Minnesota River floodplain. Of these tribes in the river valley, Shakopee sources it’s name from the Sakpe Tribe, whom lived in a village not far from the eventual European settlement. At the time of the first European settlers, Dakota Indians inhabited the valley. Chief Ŝakpe I settled his tribe along the river banks in a time prior to the 1700s; his village was called Tiŋta-otoŋwe, “village of the prairie,” and located east of Shakopee’s present downtown. The first known contact between European settlers and the Native inhabitants occurred in the 1640’s and forever entwined the fate of the new settlers of the Minnesota River Valley with their preexisting Native American neighbors.

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