Letter to The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The following letter was sent by Hiawatha for All to the Board of Directors of The Cultural Landscape Foundation on August 10th, 2022. We have not received a response.
To the Board of Directors of The Cultural Landscape Foundation:
Hiawatha for All is a group of Minneapolis residents advocating for passage of an ecologically responsible plan at the Hiawatha Golf Course Area, which TCLF has designated a Landslide site. We are writing to express our concern with the articles you have published opposing the proposed redesign of the golf course. Many of these articles contain factual errors and major omissions. For example:
You claimed that Hiawatha Golf Club was “the first course in the Upper Midwest that allowed Black golfers to play.” This is untrue—not only was it not the first integrated course in the Upper Midwest, it was not the first integrated course in the Twin Cities.
You describe the course as located by “the adjacent Bronzeville neighborhood.” There never was any such neighborhood by that name in Minneapolis—the “Bronzeville” moniker was borrowed from a Chicago neighborhood who started the tradition of electing an honorary mayor.
You have in numerous publications [1][2][3] used misleading language to imply that “The Bronze” golf tournament was started at Hiawatha, when in fact it started at Gross in 1939 then moved to Wirth in 1940, only moving to Hiawatha for the first time in 1968.
You have not included Dakota voices. None of your articles concerning Hiawatha Golf Course acknowledge the fact that it is built on land that was stewarded by the Dakota people for thousands of years before it was stolen in violation of treaty law. Your page on Lake Hiawatha Park acknowledges the Indigenous history of the area, and the golf course encircles the other half of that same lake and shares the same history.
You have written uncritically about the Bronze Lehman proposal that an engineering review noted will “significantly alter the size, shape, and appearance of Lake Hiawatha which is also very likely to be considered part of the historic cultural landscape.”
In light of these issues with your reporting of this matter, we are asking that you pause your current course of action and reassess your goals for this site. The history of the Lake Hiawatha area and the current hydrological issues facing it are very complex, and we would be happy to provide any information you need to support a sustainable way forward. Proceeding in your advocacy with an incomplete understanding would be a disservice both to the history of this area and to your mission as a nonprofit.