Prairie Island Indian Community (Dakota: Tinta Winta) is a Mdewakanton Sioux Indian reservation in Goodhue County, Minnesota, along the Mississippi River, in and around the city of Red Wing. It was created in 1889, with boundaries modified after that time. Much of the reservation land was lost following construction of Lock and Dam No. 3 along the river by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to improve navigation. Later, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant was built nearby. The community has grabbed headlines because of the decision to store radioactive waste in above-ground steel casks. The main reservation lies within the city of Red Wing, but there are off-reservation trust lands both within Red Wing and in Welch Township in northern Goodhue County, as well as in Ravenna Township in eastern Dakota County which nearly doubles the size of the reservation's territory. The reservation had 199 residents as of the 2000 census, including its trust lands. Its total land area is 1.6689 sq mi (4.3225 km², or 1,068.1 acres). The tribe operates Treasure Island Resort & Casino near the Mississippi River north of Red Wing.
Famous quotes containing the words prairie, island, indian and/or community:
“The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:—”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)
“An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe. I have a fancy for building my hut on one. Even a bare, grassy isle, which I can see entirely over at a glance, has some undefined and mysterious charm for me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This Indian camp was a slight, patched-up affair, which had stood there several weeks, built shed-fashion, open to the fire on the west.... Altogether it was about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed, and I was carried back at once three hundred years.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every community is an association of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)