11-03-2025
Devils Lake or Spirit Lake? In 1996, Mni Wakan Oyate voted to change tribe's name to reflect true translation
Mar. 11—Editor's note: Mni Wakan is spelled differently across sources. Some of the variations include Mne Wakan, Mni Waukan and Miniwakan. The Grand Forks Herald uses the "Mni Wakan" spelling in this story because that is how it is spelled by the Spirit Lake Tribe online.
SPIRIT LAKE RESERVATION — Whether intentionally or by mistake, it seems white settler misinterpretation of an Indigenous story is behind the "devils" named throughout eastern North Dakota, including the name of a city, the lake that borders it and, up until the 1990s, an Indigenous tribe whose reservation includes much of the lake.
The lake was named "Mni Wakan," which is Sacred Water in the Dakota language, because of the Unktehi (Water Spirits) said to be found in all bodies of water, according to Louis Garcia, designated historian for the Spirit Lake Nation, who wrote a piece about the subject that was
published in 2023 in the Devils Lake Journal.
"The Water Spirit wants to keep the water, and the Thunderbird wants to bring it up into the clouds and make rain," Garcia told the Grand Forks Herald. "It's just their Indian way of explaining the hydrological cycle — how fog and rain and ice and snow work, but they use this story and they make it so that it's sacred."
The Unktehi are said to be protective of the water, drowning those who try to take it. This is why they are sometimes referred to as water "monsters," or "the Terrible One," rather than the more neutral term of "spirits."
So when the Dakota people tried to explain to French explorers why the lake was sacred, the Frenchmen listened to the story and concluded instead that these Unktehi were monsters, and subsequently named the lake Lac du Diable, or Lake of the Devils, Garcia wrote in his Journal piece.
"There was a translation problem," he said.
The tribe later became known as the Devils Lake Sioux, though their Dakota name is Mni Wakan Oyate — which translates to something along the lines of "people of the Spirit Lake."
Pauline Graywater, a woman whose obituary says she lived on the reservation throughout her life before dying in 2020, was interviewed by a Grand Forks Herald reporter in the early 1990s. She said that when the white people came to the area, they twisted things around and, after naming Devils Lake, "they started naming everything about the devil."
Standing outside her then-place of work, St. Jude's Retirement Home, located outside of Fort Totten, Graywater told the reporter there was a 'Devil's Tooth' right down the road.
"They named it that, I don't know why," she said. "It's just a big rock — they say it looks like a tooth."
Graywater had been told by elders in the community that the story of the rock had to do with a young maiden who, with a baby on her back, left the camp where her group was having a gathering because she was angry with her husband. When he and another man followed after her, they didn't find her, but instead found what was later named the Devil's Tooth.
"They believe that she turned into a rock," Graywater said.
In Garcia's work gathering and preserving Indigenous history and stories such as the one Graywater shared, he said he didn't get the idea that most people were sitting down and analyzing the name of Devils Lake, questioning why it was that way — much like one wouldn't be expected to do so for any other location.
"Pick any town anywhere, they just pass off the name," he said. "(They say,) 'That's what we've always called it.'"
In 1996, tribal members voted to change their name to the Spirit Lake Nation, a decision that seemed natural — returning to a more accurate translation of the Dakota name, Myra Pearson, former tribal chairwoman and current executive director of Spirit Lake Tribal Housing, told the Grand Forks Herald.
An archival article written by Kris Halvorson, a staff writer at the Journal — presumably the Devils Lake Journal — says the vote for the name change was 265 to 125.
Pearson recalls working in the financial department at that time.
"We had to change everything — all the check blanks," she said. "Back then we didn't have all the technology we have today. It was quite a job back then, but they got it done."
It was a long time coming, though, and she remembers strong support for the change.
At the same time that then Chairman Elmer White brought the matter to a vote, a much more controversial matter was also being voted on.
"That was also the third time they brought the issue to the people to open up the reservation for alcohol," Pearson said.
Alcohol had been banned from the reservation since the 1960s,
as previously reported by WDAY.
Elders were angry with White, asking why he would allow the issue to be put to a vote for a third time when there was such strong opposition to it, Pearson said.
"The crazy thing was, there weren't a whole lot of elders, but somehow they always had that thing voted down," she said with a chuckle.
It seemed support for the change came largely from the reservation's younger population.
"I remember people saying, 'Well, it'll bring in more money,'" Pearson said. "But I also remember one of the chairmen saying, 'Money isn't the answer.'"
At the time, theirs was the only dry reservation, she said; this was something outlined in their treaty, and she couldn't imagine it changing.
"It's kind of the root of all evil that goes on here," Pearson said.
The subject was dropped for quite some time afterwards, but in 2019, the tribe ultimately voted in favor of allowing the sale of alcohol at its casino in St. Michael.
