Visitors to Minnehaha Regional Park, a city park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, often pause to see the bronze sculpture created by Norwegian-born sculptor Jacob Fjeld, which depicts characters from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”
Hiawatha and Minnehaha first appeared as a plaster sculpture at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and was later cast in bronze and installed at Minnehaha Park in 1912. The sculpture depicts a fictional Ojibwe warrior Hiawatha carrying his Dakota lover Minnehaha. Over time, it became one of the park’s most recognizable landmarks—featured on numerous tourist postcards, and a place where visitors still take photographs.
Yet, the story behind the sculpture reveals something deeper about how narratives shape our understanding of history. Longfellow never visited Minnesota, let alone had personal familiarity with its Indigenous people. His poem drew inspiration from Indigenous stories recorded by geographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, but those accounts often blended traditions from various different Native nations, and were often fictionalized and embellished. Critics at the time even noted that the statue’s figures did not accurately represent the facial features of Native people. Still, the sculpture endured. Over time, the narrative it represented in Longfellow’s poem became more familiar than the histories of Indigenous people that it obscured.
This is the enduring power—and danger—of narrative. A compelling story can become so widely accepted that it begins to stand in for history itself. The romantic imagery of Longfellow’s poem offered Americans a vision of harmony between Native people and nature, even as the real history of the region was shaped by treaties broken, lands taken, and communities displaced. The narrative was beautiful. But beauty can sometimes soften the edges of truth.
We see similar dynamics today in how we talk about response to political crises such as the events of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. It’s important that communities step up to care for one another. But when these narratives become the primary story we tell, they can obscure the deeper work that must follow. Emergency response is not the same as justice. Mutual aid cannot substitute for confronting the historical and structural forces that created the crisis.
On March 19, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation announced that it would award its annual John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award to the people of the Twin Cities for their response to the 3,000 agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who were deployed to Minnesota earlier this year. The award, to be presented on May 31 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, honors residents who acted with moral clarity in a moment of fear and uncertainty to “protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation.”
That recognition matters because it is essential to acknowledge the ways communities banded together to resist Operation Metro Surge. But framing the response—as Thomas Friedman did in The New York Times—as simply an act of “neighboring” risks flattening a much longer and more complex history into what appears, from the outside, to be a singular moment of heroism.
The response to Metro Surge did not occur spontaneously. It was built on years of organizing, relationship building, and political education—work that intensified in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
The response to Metro Surge was neither spontaneous nor accidental. It emerged from networks forged through struggle, lessons learned through organizing, and communities already engaged in the long work of naming injustice and building alternatives. Black Lives Matter activists, for example, were highly visible in the resistance, while many of the mutual aid structures that developed in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd—including abolitionist bail funds, rapid-response networks, and community defense efforts—provided important models for collective action. Importantly, many of the churches that became central gathering places following George Floyd’s murder—hosting vigils, organizing protests, distributing resources, and creating spaces for difficult conversations about policing and racial justice—were reactivated during Operation Metro Surge. Once again, sanctuaries became staging grounds for moral witness and civic action, as clergy, organizers, and ordinary citizens drew upon relationships and practices forged during the uprisings of 2020.
In this sense, the response to Metro Surge reflected not simply a moment of solidarity, but the reemergence of a deeper civic and historical tradition rooted in collective struggle, public witness, and the ongoing pursuit of racial justice. To frame this moment solely through the lens of courage, without acknowledging that history, risks turning a sustained movement into a singular event. What was contested, collective, and built over time is recast as a more uniform and heroic response—one that is easier to celebrate precisely because it asks less of us. But in that telling, the deeper history—the organizing, the relationships, the hard truths that preceded the moment—begins to recede. And when that happens, so too does our ability to see clearly what justice still requires.
That is why the work of historical recovery—the effort to recover lost, buried, or overlooked elements of the past in order to promote recognition, accountability, and intergenerational healing—remains essential. Historical recovery insists that we look beneath moments of recognition and ask harder questions about the histories, relationships, and conditions that produced the present in the first place.What made this moment possible? What conditions required this response? And what remains unresolved?
Hiawatha and Minnehaha endures as a piece of art and cultural artifact. But it also offers a lesson. Narratives can inspire us—but they can also mislead us if we allow them to replace history. The challenge we face is not to reject recognition or to diminish acts of courage, but to place them in their full historical context.
Only by seeing the full weight of that history can we move beyond the comfort of the flattering story and commit ourselves to the harder work that justice requires. Because in the end, it is not the stories we celebrate, but the histories we confront, that determine whether justice is realized.