Remembering With Dignity

Over the course of their history, Minnesota’s state hospitals were home to tens of thousands of people with disabilities or diagnoses of psychiatric conditions. Around 13,000 of those who died at these institutions were buried in cemeteries with only numbers to identify them. Remembering With Dignity is a group formed from members of Advocating Change Together and other self-advocacy organizations in 1994 with the goal of installing new gravestones in these cemeteries marked with names and dates in order to restore personhood to those denied it in the past.

In December of 1866, St. Peter Asylum for the Insane (later renamed St. Peter State Hospital) became Minnesota’s first institution built to hold the state’s “lunatics.” Less than one year later, the first inmate died. She and many others of the first deceased were buried in the city’s cemeteries. However, this soon became unviable, and St. Peter began burying the dead in a separate hospital graveyard.

Minnesota’s other state institutions followed St. Peter’s lead and buried their dead in separate graveyards. Wealthier families of some patients were able to either pay for a headstone or to have their loved one buried at another cemetery of their choosing. The 13,000 whose families could not afford this or who had no known family were buried at the hospital’s expense in plats with either a single number representing the order in which they died or nothing at all.

By the mid-1990s, when most of the state hospitals closed, some of these grave markers had deteriorated beyond the point of recognition or had been destroyed by vandals. Most of Anoka State Hospital’s first 145 wooden grave markers were destroyed by rot or grass fires. At Hastings State Hospital, this deterioration was so extensive that the site was unrecognizable as a cemetery by the 1980s, despite numerous efforts at repair by local volunteers.

In 1994, a group of disability self-advocates with the support of Advocating Change Together and other disability rights organizations based in the Twin Cities formed an organization called Remembering With Dignity. By checking available graveyard plats against state hospital obituary and burial records at the Minnesota Historical Society, they were able to create approximate indexes of who was buried in the cemeteries and when. In their view, recovering these biographical details is the first step to restoring a sense of personhood and dignity to those who died in institutions.

In February 1996, Remembering With Dignity made a first attempt to procure an official state apology for the forced labor, medical experimentation, sterilizations, shock treatments, and lobotomies endured by patients in Minnesota’s state hospitals. Senator Linda Berglin and Representative Betty McCollum, who sponsored the resolutions of apology, withdrew them after the Health and Human Services Committee removed all references to the cemeteries out of fear an apology might make the state liable for future action and funding commitments.

The group received state funding for the first time in 1997, which allowed it to order granite headstones with names and birth and death dates to accompany the numbered slabs. In 1999, it held its first dedication ceremony in Faribault in honor of the individuals buried there. This was the first of a number of dedications of new grave markers at Hastings, St. Peter, Anoka, Willmar, Cambridge, Owatonna, Moose Lake, and Rochester. In addition, Remembering with Dignity has hosted art and music shows to call attention to the unacknowledged personhood of patients and inmates of state institutions.

In 2010, Remembering With Dignity helped draft a new apology resolution sponsored by Representative Karen Clark that was approved and signed in June by Governor Tim Pawlenty. This was celebrated as a landmark in the acknowledgement of mistreatment and the human rights of disabled people in the state. However, enthusiasm was tempered for many by the fact that the apology coincided with extensive budget cuts to disability and mental health services.

As of 2020, Remembering With Dignity has installed approximately 8,000 gravestones in Minnesota’s state hospital cemeteries, leaving about 5,000 awaiting proper identification.