The full impact of Covid-19 on Indigenous communities in the U.S. is unclear because of racial misclassification and the exclusion of Indigenous communities from data sets and analyses used to make health policy decisions.
For millennia, Native American people traveled and traded on the Mississippi River. When colonial powers moved into North America, they quickly saw the importance of controlling transportation and the movement of goods on the river. In 1820, The United States government established Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers to protect American fur trade interests in the region and to gain a foothold in the western territory that would become Minnesota.