Monumental mines: Mine tourism, settler colonialism, and the creation of an extractive landscape on Minnesota's iron range

Through an analysis of three interpreted mines in northeastern Minnesota, this article illuminates how the region's public history is complicit in the ongoing process of settler colonialism. Largely controlled by iron mining interests, the region's public history and tourism industry is deeply invested in the future of mineral extraction, representing mining and white-ethnic mining culture as natural and indigenous to the landscape. This narrative erases Ojibwe presence in the region, ignoring both the role mining played in past environmental injustices as well as how it continues to threaten Ojibwe political and resource sovereignty.