The game of football has evolved drastically over the past decade, but so have the sciences that find the lingering injuries dealing with the massive amounts of contact. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, isn’t just a professional disease anymore, in fact more than one in four high school student athletes develop CTE. I know from personal experience that the effects start sooner rather than later as I already experience memory loss, periodic ear ringing, and problems with slurring my speech.

 

Coming from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota: “symptoms of CTE including memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, suicidality, parkinsonism, and eventually progressive dementia.”

 

CTE is developed through consistent and repeated traumatic brain injuries. In my case it is caused through the consistent amount of minor and serious concussions that I experienced throughout my time playing football. 

 

Raising awareness among high school and college coaches and their players will help bring new sciences into the game, allow for the evolvement of the game, and the safety of future players. Having this awareness will bring notice to continuous concussions and make coaches and players realize the dangers that football players have if they continue to play while having a concussion.                          

 

The recent passage of S.F. No. 2227, which includes a reduction of $4 million in annual funding to the Minnesota Historical Society, is of great concern to me. This level of funding reductions would affect the level of services available to Minnesotans as well as local history organizations that work with MNHS. 

 

The staff at MNHS are following the standards for doing good history work as all public historians are expected to do. For most Minnesotans, Fort Snelling represents a military outpost. But for the Dakota, Bdote represents a place of cultural significance to their story. Through acknowledgement of Fort Snelling and Bdote on signage at this historic site, MNHS is not engaging in “revisionist history” or acting in a manner that is “highly controversial”. 

 

More visitors and program attendees to historic sites across the country have a desire to engage with a sense of place and to understand the historical record of place. To do this, public historians must acknowledge all narratives that place represents using existing scholarship as well as seeking new research material or reexamining primary sources that are available.

I strongly encourage our elected officials to support restoring annual funding for MNHS this session so that they are able to share these stories with all Minnesotans and visitors to historic sites across our state.