The U.S.- Dakota Conflict: The Past Is Alive Within Us | Documentary

(Diane Wilson) What I keep coming back to, what I keep hearing out in community is that people don't know the history. They didn't learn it growing up, they didn't learn it in school. That's both Dakota and non-Dakota people, and I think of all the priorities that are important is the need for education. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) We have very little knowledge of our past before statehood. And that's more than half the history of this place. (Franky Jackson) This was Dakota homeland without a doubt. We were connected and tied to this land, and I think that's the, that's the wonderful thing about the movement afoot now-- the reconnection to place. We had significant sites, prayer sites, burial sites, gathering sites. Those things all tell me that we had a connection to this part of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. piano plays softly I think we could do a better job on both sides, whether you're Dakota or non-Dakota, at trying to fully understand history from the other side. (Melvin Houston) We need to know our past to prepare for the future. It's a shared history-- it's not just one tribe; it's not just one family; it's not just one person it's happened to-- it happened to all of us. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) We do suffer from a sort of cultural imperialism, that everything that went before is irrelevant or we're just a story. (Katherine Beane) For us the war has been lasting for 150 years, and we deserve to speak to that and to address the situation so that we can heal. (female narrator) In November of 1862, weeks after a conflict sparked by a corrupt governmental Indian system in which between 400 and 600 white civilians and soldiers and an unknown number of Dakota were killed, 1700 noncombatant Dakota, primarily women, children, and elders were marched by force 150 miles to a concentration camp below Fort Snelling. They were assaulted along the way by angry civilians and soldiers. The approximately 1400 who survived the walk and the brutal winter that followed were exiled to a reservation in Crow Creek, South Dakota. In 2012 Dakota people again walked the forced-march route to remember and grieve the suffering of their ancestors. You want me to open that for you? (Judith Anywaush) We've been doing this in honor of our great grandmother, Wicanhpi O'ta Win. She was on the boat that went down the Mississippi to the Missouri. Missouri, yeah, and ended up in Crow Creek. Marissa here was in the first walk, and she walked the whole, all the way to Fort Snelling and... with three children. This is just one of 'em. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other one was in a stroller, yeah. It was really spiritual to me because it was, we were all one big family, and we were walking in honor of our ancestors. (narrator) Since 1862, few people have asked for the Dakota perspective of what happened that year. The history of Minnesota has been told from a largely white perspective. This program seeks to show how a 6-week-long war, 150 years ago, still causes pain today. This story represents important, unfinished work for all Minnesotans past and present. (David Nichols) In a sense, the Minnesota war is a microcosm of what was happening in America at that time. If we want to understand who America is and where we come from, it is a story that has implications way beyond the particular events. (Sidney Byrd) We need to build a bridge of mutual respect. I'm a person, you're a person, no less, no more. (narrator) The Dakota people lived throughout Minnesota at the time of the earliest contact with Europeans by the Jesuits in 1642. There are things here that are carbon-dated at 12,000 years ago. Over by the Black Hills and the Big Horns and that way, there's items that are carbon- dated at 10, 12,000 years ago, that are specific to us here as Dakota people. (Katherine Beane) One of the important things to remember is that we have a long history before the war. We have a strong connection to this land, and there's a reason why we wanted to stay here, because we have a responsibility to this place, to take care of it. We had our societies, we had our structure, for over 2,000 miles that we moved. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) Well as far back as we know, what today is Minnesota was the homeland of the Dakota, and they were highly respected by other tribes and known as particularly good hunters, good fighters, because they were so inaccessible in the center of the continent. They were protected from diseases that decimated many of the other tribes. When the first French traders came here, they were amazed at how bountiful the land was and how strong and prosperous the tribes were. The Dakota had begun to share the land with the Ojibwe by the 1700s. They thrived even as many tribes to the east were suffering serious decimation. Anyone who knows Minnesota can imagine what it was like before resources were stripped out of it, and of course, it was filled with every kind of wildlife and game you could imagine. (narrator) French explorers arrived at Lake Superior in the fall of 1659 and nearly starved over that winter. In the spring they were visited by a small group of Dakota who brought wild rice, corn, and other grains to them, eager to make trades. (Marisa Pigeon) Our family originated in Prairie Island, through the course of the uprising, going down through over into Crow Creek and then ending up in Santee. So my grandma, her mother, was born in a tipi in Peever, South Dakota. (Judith Anywaush) Her grandparents died at Fort Snelling. (Marisa) For me personally, it's just a matter of honoring and memorializing all of the people that were on that march and realizing that we all share that same history. Publicly, you know, maybe just some awareness that all this did happen here. (Matt Boisen) We're afraid, as the years go by, that this is going to be forgotten. There were grave injustices done; horrors that were visited upon the Native Americans. We are not, as settlers, ever saying that none of that happened. We don't want to say that; all we want to do is make sure our people are remembered as well. This is a newspaper article that was written in 1961 about our family history, coming here and the Dakota War. This is grandma, see how happy she is. (Jamie Erickson) My great, great, great grandma would bake bread and give it to the Native Americans. well, they would never take anything for free. My great grandma told me she was told that they would always give something back. So they built a really friendly relationship with the Native Americans on the prairie out by Norseland. (Carrie Zeman) What keeps me curious is the complexity of it, that the story really isn't what we've always thought it is because I don't think we've been asking the right questions. Historians by nature, write secondary sources because that's their job-- they boil down the story and that's what the public wants to consume. Until we start looking at all the nuances in those stories, start understanding how much of those stories we don't understand-- that's where all the complexities come from. (Franky Jackson) Growing up on a reservation that resides outside of Minnesota, you're told that you're from Santee, or you're placed at Crow Creek, or you're in Flandreau, because your ancestors were bad. That's what the history tells us. With the whole 1863 Dakota Removal Act, it's based off of the premise that you had good Indians versus bad Indians. We still have a law on the books that exiles Dakota people from Minnesota. You're disconnected from your sacred sites, your sacred places. When you're disconnected from your relatives and you're forced to create a new home, it will affect you in ways that are very hard to explain. All the white folks stand up. Now say you're sorry-- just kidding! laughter Go ahead sit down now. What does healing look like? I don't know. But I do know that the problems that our Dakota communities face, and a lot of minority communities throughout the United States face, is historical trauma that's a result of systemic oppression, colonization, blah, blah, blah. It's a multifaceted issue, so their approach needs to be multifaceted. But we're a sketch comedy group, we also do videos online. Who has seen a 1491s video online recently? audience cheers The result isn't just going to be on the individual level, it's also on the family level and on the community level, and for us as native people on a nation level. (Howard Zins) My wife's great, great grandfather was killed in an Indian uprising in New Ulm. Captain Dodd got shot outside the barricades and my wife's great, great grandfather and another guy went to rescue-- both of them got shot down there. So that's kinda how we're connected a little bit. They were starving, they didn't get their blankets, it was cold, and an Indian agent told 'em that he wasn't gonna pay 'em until they had the money. And so I understand why they did what they did. I think it's good that they remember the history; I think it gets lost a little bit with us. We did a lot of things wrong and so, that's probably why we don't talk about it. We all know that the history was brutal on both sides, and we have to understand it. There's nothing we can do to change that. (Howard) No. We have to get along, that's, that's the bottom line, we have to get along. But thanks for sharing that. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for letting us come here, enjoying our lunch, have a nice day. (Howard Zins) Hope you come again. (woman) This is Jacob Nix, he served as one of the defenders during the first battle of New Ulm. (Darla Cordes Gebhard) Each grave has been marked with a flag. The immigrants who were here at that time were from Germany, they were from Norway, they were from Switzerland, they were even from Italy. It's very sentimental for me and personal, because I know the descendants of so many of the people that are buried here. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) Until relatively recently, the focus had been on what was called at various times, the Sioux Massacre, the Dakota Conflict, and now most commonly called The Dakota War. The attention was on that moment in time, and what was missing was the buildup to that war. (narrator) As Europeans were expanding in the East, they were pushing eastern tribes westward. (Ramona kitto Stately) When I think about Fort Snelling today, I think about our creation story. And that is B'Dote, that is the place where the energy is. And I think of it as, um... where we came from and where we belong. But I think that also is a journey of coming to terms with that pain and what happened there because it was a concentration camp, and it was very intentional. We have to look at what is, what was the intention of the Governor Ramsey at that time, and that was to exterminate the Sioux Indians. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) The northern part of what is today the state, was home to the Ojibwe people and the Dakota primarily in the southeastern and to the west. There was plenty of sustenance for everyone here. Both tribes followed a seasonal round of hunting and gathering, so when Europeans came, they would say oh they're just nomads, but that wasn't the case at all. There were certainly hard years, there were starving times. For a number of years, scholars have looked at what are called borderland cultures, where two different societies come together. And what you get for generally a very brief of time is a melding of cultures. Hierarchies of race and class are very fluid, but almost always, this lasts only a moment in time until one group and in the North American context, it's always the Europeans/Euro-Americans, until one group achieves enough power to dominate the other group. And then what we see are very rigid hierarchies of race and class forming quite quickly. imitating a Native American ceremonial drum beat (Katherine Beane) Our history is simplified through this binary of the bad Indian versus the good Indian, the farmer Indian versus the Christian Indian, the traditional versus the nontraditional, long hairs versus cut hairs. To separate people into two and to say one or the other, that's not reality, and it leaves out the majority of the population who are in the middle. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) The Dakota were eager to establish trading relations with the Europeans. The Dakota were anxious to get really cool things like iron pots and knives, but most of all, guns, because all the tribes to the east of them were becoming armed, and no matter how brave the Dakota were, no matter how skilled they were as warriors, they wouldn't be able to hold their own against such superior weaponry. What makes Minnesota unique is that this borderland bicultural world lasted for 200 years. Because Minnesota was so entirely inaccessible, everybody benefited. It doesn't mean that they loved each other, but they coexisted. The traders and native people were intermarrying. You have 5 generations of people of mixed heritage. (narrator) A man who came to Minnesota originally to work in the fur trade was Henry Hastings Sibley. He would play a prominent role in the U.S.-Dakota conflict. (Rhoda Gilman) He first came here in 1834. There was already a fur trade, a small grungy fur trade post here at Mendota. He had a working knowledge of the Dakota language. They, of course, were his customers. He was able to make hunting trips with Indian guides. In 1840, he went off with a band of Indians for almost 3 or 4 months. A few months later his Dakota daughter was born. When her mother died, Sibley took the child and placed her with a farm family; she was raised as a white woman. Many of the Fort Snelling officers had mixed-blood children; the fur traders, nearly all did. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) He was this adventurous young man, he was going to come here, and he was going to make a fortune and then he was going to go back to Michigan with all these wonderful tales, and he would probably become a lawyer or a businessman or a politician like his father. When he arrived in 1834, the fur trade was already waning, and it was tough to make a profit. And the next thing he knew, he was in perennial debt and he couldn't get out of the business. (narrator) In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed The Indian Removal Act that would lead to The Trail of Tears. In 1841, the U.S. negotiated a treaty with most of the Dakota to share Minnesota with other tribes in the creation of an Indian territory. Congress refused to ratify, citing Minnesota as too fertile a land for Indians. This leads the way to the creation of the Minnesota Territory in 1849. Plans for white settlement began as quickly as those to secure the land from the Dakota. Leading treaty negotiations in 1851 was Territorial Governor and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Alexander Ramsey. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) Ramsey's different; Ramsey didn't have any preexisting relationship with the Dakota. Ramsey had his own agenda. He was a political hack who came up the hard way, you know, doing party business in Pennsylvania, and as a reward for being a loyal party man, he was offered the governorship. (narrator) Ramsey utilized all manner of bullying tactics to get the treaties signed. The traders were allowed to slip in a paper that paid off the Dakota debts to them without the Dakota having any input on what was owed or even a clear understanding of what they were being asked to sign. The Senate altered the promise of a reservation along the Minnesota River from in perpetuity to ...at the discretion of the president. Further threats of military force and the withholding of provisions forced the Dakota to agree. Sibley, along with many traders, made their fortunes in the 1851 treaties. Ramsey's Indian system became a well-documented way to wealth for white Minnesotans. (Scott Berg) The Indian system was built on a chain of patronage. I mean, we all know each other. Now, the Dakota don't know most of you, and there's not a lot of oversight. Transparency was not a word. You get to make the system how you want it and there's a lot of money involved in that system. Has that story kind of vanished from American politics? No, you know, not at all. Predatory lending was definitely alive and well back then. The government supported that system. I don't think it's any secret; I think it's well-documented. (narrator) The Minnesota Territory flooded with families looking for new beginnings, even before the treaty was ratified in 1853 and it was legal for them to do so. Some locations chosen by the settlers were across Dakota lines, but the disputes raised by Dakota remained unresolved. (Matt Boisen) Germany was not a very free civilization at that time, a free society, and I think that was why, like most immigrants, they felt they heard of a better opportunity. There wasn't any one specific agenda. I think they just wanted to come over and have an opportunity to better themselves. As far as I know, my great grandfather's family were small-town people; they were merchants. Germans are interesting people because I think-- it probably applies to other groups, but why did Scandinavians come to an area that looked like Scandinavia? That's what a lot of people think, is that Minnesota probably reminded them a lot of things. I think because of the time, the 1850s, the turmoil in Germany, also just happened to be when Minnesota Territory opened up. They knew about pine forests, they knew about forests in general, and there was a push, a promotion for Germans especially, before the Civil War, to homestead in the upper midwest. (Scott Berg) The word settlers is just very interesting. We don't really see what you would call settlers until right before the period, a few years at most before the Dakota War. And this is our family crest. It came over from Norway, and it dates back to 1549. In 1861 my family came from Norway and ended up settling out by Norseland, which is about 10 miles from St. Peter. This is family records that starts in 1865, I believe is the first year that we got together. When you were growing up, what were people saying to you? We never talked much about that. It took years and years for it to... why do you think that is? Just because people were killed out there? That could be. I don't know that I can really answer whether I think the settlers were innocent or not, because I think that they were both. I don't know that they were told the full story of what they were getting into when they moved here, but they knew the Dakota people were here. What the invasion of people was like on our land and what that meant for the resources, what that meant in regards to cultural miscommunication. In 1849 you had about 5,000 non- Indian people in this territory. Two years later, you had something like 55,000. (Scott Berg) To go from 10,000 to 160,000 in 10 year's time, that is dramatic change, and nothing that anyone, white or Dakota can adjust to immediately. There's a relationship to the new settlers that's very different than the old fur traders and missionaries. people sing in Dakota language (Trinidad Rangel) I really don't start hurtin' really bad until like after around like one, two. And that's when I sing, and that's when I sing-- gives me strength as well as others. So I'm thankful that I can share my voice. This one is different because I'm, I'm the one doing the singing, and in the past, at the stakes, it's been the women singing. (narrator) The walk is a spiritual and reflective experience. About each mile, prayer flags with the names of the families from the forced march are placed, with ceremonies respectfully not filmed. (David Nichols) Manifest Destiny we called it, that civilization was marching westward and would subdue the savages, would subdue anything in its sight. Going from the east to the west was the Great American Destiny. Mining in the west, the Homestead Act, which would give out land in the west and in Kansas where I live, that was terribly important, and above all, the transcontinental railroad. It's a story of great violence and great suffering throughout the western plains for many years to come. So the story of western development goes hand in hand with the story of the decimation of the tribes. They just are linked, there's no way we can unlink it. (Ramona Kitto Stately) I was invited to a prayer circle with women, and they were saying, We have honored the men, we have honored the 38. They had wives and families and we've not honored them. The purpose of the commemorative march for me is to be able to honor the suffering of the women and children and remember that the suffering of those women and children is really a major part of why we're here and why our culture was maintained. We forgot to honor them, and we forgot to give them a voice. And when you walk, we give them a voice. (Rev. Henry Campbell) When they first were planning this some years ago, some of the churches were notified along the route that they were going to take. Even 150 years ago, the churches in this area were a part of the brokeness that occurred. And I think the church needs to be part of the healing and the justice making, the peacemaking that's happening now hopefully. Wonderful to have the group of Dakota marchers with us today and tonight as you're on your journey. We appreciate the opportunity to share hospitality and a meal tonight. A lot of goodwill happens around the dinner table, bringing the two cultures together. guitar plays softly (narrator) An exploratory group from the German Land Company came upriver from Chicago to find a spot for settlement. They emerged where the Cottonwood River joins the Minnesota River and found an unoccupied Dakota village full of summer lodges. They moved in. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) Of course, the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and the Treaty of Mendota that followed immediately has been the focus of most attention because of course, that's when the Dakota were stripped of almost all their land. But it's really the Treaty of 1858, when half of what they had remaining was taken truly by force. They were told by the officials in Washington that if they did not give up half their reservation, they would be driven off altogether. Minnesota in 1863, after the Dakota War, is a fundamentally different place than it was before the Dakota War. It is, it's the start of the path that becomes the State of Minnesota. It involves very different cultures; it involves political, social, economic, spiritual. people sing in Dakota language (narrator) Contained on a reservation, surrounded by white settlement, the Dakota were manipulated into a more agricultural lifestyle. Those who quickly complied were given better treatment than those who resisted. Most say the divide-and-conquer tactics had begun. (Katherine Beane) It wasn't that Dakota people hadn't farmed before. We'd harvested natural wild vegetation. But it was the first time we actually learned how to plow the land and have a farming community that fit to the European-western ideals of what agriculture is. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) And of course, farming meant more than farming. It meant cutting their hair, it meant donning European clothing, it meant giving up their customs. It wasn't enough just to be a farmer. They were supposed to shed their culture in entirety. And so, of course, this creates enormous tension between those people who are intent on maintaining their identity and those who feel that the only way to survive is to give it up. (Carrie Zeman) Sisseton and Wahpeton people could continue their traditional life ways pretty much as they always had without interference because there were so few white settlers in their part of the state. But Mdewakanton and Wahpekute people were confronted by settlers every time they left their reservation. And the settlers were competing with them for the same game in the big woods that had always been theirs. The Mdewakanton people understood at the time they signed the treaties that they would be allowed to hunt in their traditional lands as long as they needed to, but at the time they signed the treaties, no one anticipated the rush of settlement in Minnesota. There was a lot of misunderstanding because settler people understood that the lands were empty and were theirs to settle, whereas Mdewakanton people considered it their land. (Darla Cordes Gebhard) The settlers thought that the treaties were just. These were recent immigrants; New Ulm was founded in 1854, so 8 years later, you have the Dakota War. Citizenship takes 7 years, so the majority of the settlers that came were German-speaking immigrants who didn't speak English. And for them to have a handle on government and politics, and then the majority of them being women and children who didn't even read and write-- where the boundaries should be or were payments being made on time, or you know, is this treaty being kept up the way it should be and are the goods being paid? I don't think they had any concept of that until they got here. And then perhaps started reading German-speaking newspapers that might be addressing this. And then what do you do? I mean, you have sunk your life savings into buying a piece of land that you feel is yours. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) For Minnesota, which had only become a state in 1858, the Civil War was a bit of a godsend. It was an opportunity to place our stamp on the national fabric, to be fully incorporated into the nation. (David Nichols) There was chaos in Washington. They started printing money, I mean what did they use for money in the midst of the Civil War? Money was scarce, and so it was both bureaucratic chaos in the midst of the war, the war was not going well, Robert E. Lee was making them look bad. The Capitol was threatened with Lee's forces only a little ways away. Nearly all of these agencies were surrounded not only by agent and his friends, but the traders who were usually relatives, contractors, everybody waiting for their money. So if they're not going to get their money, they're not going to give out provisions. It was both chaos of the war and larceny that was always going on in the Indian system. (narrator) In exchange for their land, the Dakota were promised gold annuity payments that quickly went to traders in exchange for goods. The 1862 payment was months late, with warehouses full of desperately-needed provisions. The traders refused to release them until payment arrived. Dakota men confronted agents at the upper agency near modern day Granite Falls, demanding their food. (Katherine Beane) Everybody chose what they felt was best for their family. It's not my place to judge them on what decisions they made because every single decision that each one of my relatives made brought me here today. I didn't know what it was like during extreme pressure to watch your children starving. (Darla Cordes Gebhard) There is a letter that's up at the State Historical Society. It was written by the citizens of Brown County to Ramsey. And in this letter they are saying, Please, make the annuity payments because the Dakota are suffering, the Dakota are hungry, and there's unrest at the Lower Sioux Agency, and our fear is that they are going to attack if they don't receive their payments. which they say in the letter, are justly due them. I think the letter was written perhaps 2 or 3 days before the attack on New UIm. This may have been, in some ways, a selfish economic viewpoint, because they knew when the payments came, commerce was good in New Ulm. Thomas Galbraith, the Indian agent, was not about to feed these starving folks without the money coming; he wanted his cut. (Mark Diedrich) There was discrepancies between things he wrote and things that other people had said. He misrepresented Little Crow. He claimed that Little Crow was very happy with the way things were going on. He claimed that Little Crow was interested in having a brick house built for him and he claimed that Little Crow was finally gonna give up his Dakota spirituality. He claimed that the Dakota were not starving. (Sheldon Wolfchild) When Little Crow went up to the agent, Galbraith, and said look, my people are starving at Lower Sioux, we need that warehouse open as well. And Galbraith said okay, I'll come down and do that. So when Little Crow went back to Lower Sioux, nothing happened. The military left Upper Sioux, marched back to Fort Ridgely. They didn't stop at Lower Sioux to make sure Galbraith would open that warehouse up. So the Sisseton Wahpetons, they broke into the warehouse a few weeks before that because that same agent, Galbraith, didn't want to give them food. (Mark Diedrich) You had a situation where in the summer of '62, the Dakota were getting no help from Galbraith, and no help from the traders, and they were left in a starving condition. (narrator) After the upper agency food was distributed, Little Crow spoke to trader Andrew Myrick at Lower Agency. We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry, they help themselves. Many say Myrick's famous response was If they were hungry, the Dakota could eat grass. (Franky Jackson) I made it a life mission, a life goal, to try to understand the personal struggles that our relatives had to go through during that time period. I'm still working on that to this day. I don't have all of the answers. (narrator) At Acton, Minnesota on August 17th, 1862, 4 young Dakota men killed 5 settlers. Back on the reservation, arguments ensued over surrendering the young men to white authority. Seeking a leader influential enough to sway councils, Little Crow was approached. He said he knew they'd be killed no matter what choice they made, but he was willing to die with them. We're standing in the cemetery at what was Ness Lutheran Church. I grew up in this area; the church that I was baptized in is just down the road a couple of miles. My great, great grandfather, Ole Halverson Ness, who lived probably 3, 4 miles from this site, came here with a small group to conduct an inquest. They'd heard from other people that something had happened in Acton. They came here to investigate. They found the bodies; they then took these dead people to Ness Cemetery and put them all in one grave. As a very small boy I'm coming out of the church with my mother, asking questions, What is that big monument there? The victims are on this side, Robinson Jones, Ann Baker Jones, Howard Baker, Viranus Webster, Clara D. Wilson. Because of my family's involvement in what happened here in 1862, I think it's had an impact on some of the decisions that I've made and the path that I've followed in my life. The traders were clearly the first target. And then the agency which is adjunct to the traders. (narrator) At dawn the next day, Little Crow and the Dakota warriors attacked the Lower Agency. A small group of Dakota fanned out over the area to attack settlers. The long-awaited annuity payment arrived that day in St. Paul. But by then, it was too late. The first request that comes from Minnesota is for the creation of a federal department to send federal soldiers, federal armaments, and federal money to take care of this. The answer to that is unequivocally, No! (David Nichols) Lincoln gets the first message from the governor of Minnesota that the Indian war has broken out. Lincoln and his armies were in difficulty; the outcome was anything but sure. Ramsey says we can't send you the 5,360 soldiers you say you need for the war. Lincoln wrote back, rather harshly to say, Attend to the Indians. Necessity knows no law. That was not an idle statement. Kill whoever you have to kill to put this down, we need the soldiers for the Civil War. I don't know any other way to interpret that. (Matt Boisen) The only direct personal account I have is of my great, great Aunt Cecilia, who was only 9 years old at the time, and wrote her remembrances many years later. She walked the 3 miles to this farm that she was taking care of, a bedridden woman, pretty much on the border of the reservation. She had seen a few Indians off in the distance and so she kind of ran. When she got to the Stocker's, all was well. Mrs. Stocker was in bed and Mr. Stocker had just come in from the fields, and they were going to sit down to their meal, and they saw smoke. (Jamie Erickson) When the Dakota War started, Indian chief and a warrior came to my grandparents' house on horse and pointed for them to go to St. Peter. And our family didn't know the language obviously. He looked off in the distance and saw some houses burning. And so he put two and two together and loaded up the family hooked up the oxen, and came to St. Peter. (Franky Jackson) The initial agreement to wage war at Birch Coulee and Ridgely separated a lot of our people at that time. History goes on to tell us that there were a lot of innocent women and children who were killed. And I think that's one of the important things about me working here at the Renville County Historical Society. When I examine the stories of, of those immigrants and some of the things that they experienced, it makes me stop and think. There were innocent lives taken on both sides, no doubt. One of the defining moments for the Dakota combatants, was the decision to, to take up arms against nonmilitary. I think that divided us even more at that time. (Matt Boisen) The number of settlers who didn't have guns, because that wasn't part of their culture. Germans were forbidden to have firearms unless they were in the military; that wasn't really a thing unless they were wealthy. People think of settlers as these, these, tall rangy men with their Kentucky longrifles, and that might have been true of Eastern United States, but not amongst most of the immigrants. (Franky Jackson) That utopic thought of being that staunch warrior, to stand and fight against the aggression and the oppression of the white man versus the reality of the situation for many people. You have those kinship ties and those responsibilities to your family. This was the family that was killed out here by the Native Americans in August, the same day actually that they came to Grandma and Grandpa's house. A lot of farmers had lost their house and their barns, the livestock were killed or missing. At my grandparents' house, the house was still intact, the barn was still intact, the livestock was, they were in the fence and there was water in the trough and then there was feed for them too, so they had, the Native Americans had kept them, you know, alive for my grandparents to come back. So there was some animosity towards my grandparents out in that area for a while, 'cause a lot of people had nothing and my grandparents still had everything. (Katherine Beane) If they had a family that they were close to that was a white settler family, they acted, as most people would with your neighbor. And a lot of people helped these families escape and helped them get out. At the same time, other relatives recognized that this was a time of war. They fully participated in battle. So people had different perspectives. (Carrie Zeman) The council to go to war was made up of people from the relatively small group of bands on the lower reservation. Most people on the Dakota reservation had no knowledge that the war was going to start. (Scott Berg) It wasn't some general leading 12,000 Dakota in one unified front. Little Crow had to contend with the wishes of the younger warriors in his own camp, and sometimes they didn't coincide. (Franky Jackson) And I can't help but think that's because they had those kinship and cross-cultural ties. For those families that have that mixed ancestry, it may not have been so hard to define your role and your actions as one might think. You would assume those roles today and I'm sure that's what our ancestors did back then. (Scott Berg) Why even were they attacking? Did some people have very specific reasons, where other people it was more an expression of some more immediate emotion. That gets translated by contemporaneous whites as savagery. Other words might get used is terms of anger or retribution or vengeance or desperation or-- the number of words we can apply to this are infinite, but each attack doesn't seem to have had the same purpose for each individual actor. (Franky Jackson) A lot of the violence was indiscriminate. So you had Dakotas and halfbreeds who were caught up in the actions of the time on both sides, very much like you do today. You have differing opinions, whether it's economically, socially-- amongst Dakotas. Thomas Quinn served with the Renville Rangers. They came together before the conflict and there was a group of Dakota men who were going to enlist to fight in the Civil War. (Darla Cordes Gebhard) Please stand at attention for the presentation of the colors and the laying of the wreath. (man) Forward, hut, hut, hut, hut, hut. (Gwen Christiansen) Our family came from Ulm, Germany, specifically an area called Erbach. We grew up less than a mile away from here, so this really is home to us. I believe it was 23 of our ancestors were killed by the Indians who were starving to death and fed up with the way the government was treating 'em. What they'd been promised wasn't forthcoming. Keith's birthday is August 19th, and we were usually pulling weeds. And as we're walking up and down the field, we'd talk about where this person happened to meet his fate. (David Geister) The subject of the painting is the ambush of a recruiting party that left New Ulm on the morning of August 18th, unarmed, with a band, with flags, drumming up soldiers for the Civil War. And as they reached the vicinity of a ravine, they discovered the body of a horribly wounded man. Well, the third wagon picked up this man; the two lead wagons dashed ahead. Can you point to the name of your great, great, great, great grandfather? That's right. (Walt Bachman) When I was a teenager, I spent two wonderful summers working side by side with my grandfather. And as we worked, he would tell me family stories. And one of the stories he told me has always stuck with me. It was about the killing of our ancestor. Right over there where the trees are, is the ravine where the Dakotas lay hidden. (David Geister) As the wagons began to cross the ravine, they were fired into by a party of Dakota warriors. The perspective of this painting literally and figuratively, is from the German white settlers of New Ulm. This painting is for the Brown County Historical Society Museum. The people who likely are going to visit the museum and see my painting, will be descendants of some of the folks who were actually there 150 years ago. So I guess in some ways it's appropriate that the painting is from that perspective. All the accounts put Dietrich, our ancestor, on the first wagon. One of the interesting reflections on this scene is that there's no question that the Dakotas who committed the killings in Milford would have continued on this road had it not been for the recruiting party. And there's also no question that the alarm was sounded in New Ulm earlier than otherwise would have been, because there were people with horses there who could race back and sound the alert. (Claire Bunda) One of our relatives found her husband near death. I think he was shot; he begged her to go into the woods and she didn't want to leave. The Dakota were there; she fled into the woods and she stayed there hiding out, coming out every once in a while to see if she could find any survivors. She thought the world as she knew it, the people that she knew were gone. Her brother actually found her 14 days later, didn't realize it was her 'cause she was so bit up with mosquitoes. We had 20-some ancestors that passed away, so with every one of those there's a story. These, of course, people were killed, but a lot of the, the other family members, when they left they didn't come back. They didn't come back. This isn't just, just stay here in Milford. This is, this is 6 weeks of conflict that changed many people's lives. On the American Indian side and also on the settler side. So it was two cultures that actually collided because they were listening to the government, if you will. loud canon fire and applause (Scott Berg) Over just the period of a couple weeks, several things happened to sort of change Washington's mind. A sense of the scope of the outbreak, that this wasn't a skirmish, this was a war. The sense that in fact, they were going to lose manpower. (narrator) Governor Alexander Ramsey appointed former governor Henry Hastings Sibley to lead the soldiers not yet deployed to the Civil War into battle against the Dakota. (Franky Jackson) It was a defining moment in our history. I've heard oral histories of how some of the scouts had to kill fellow Dakotas. That was a reality-- so you had Dakota warring against Dakota. (Jamie Erickson) We only learn in the history books that they killed the settlers and they were massacres and originally called The Uprising, and so there's a lot of animosity towards the Native Americans from this area. My uncle went to school here in St. Peter. I believe he's 50-something years old now and he told the story about how we were saved, and the teacher told he was lying, that that didn't happen. And so my grandma and my great grandma went into town and told that teacher no, that did happen and that that was true. (Jim Denomie) This is really a dark story to talk about. Normally when I paint about hard stories in my history paintings, I try to minimize the emotion with humor and color. But with this painting, I decided not to. I just said you know, this is really a terrible story and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Which I still ended up doing. I made it a more surreal image because you know, to kill somebody I think would have to be a surreal world. I just, I can't imagine that being a normal, comfortable thing to do. Andrew Myrick is in here 3 times. His famous quote was, Let 'em eat grass. As far as I'm concerned, they can eat grass. I just, I have a lot of disdain for this person and so one here, Let 'em eat grass, once on the ground where a day after the uprising started, he was found dead with his mouth full of grass. And I took it further, and I stuffed his butt full of grass too. And then he's in the wood chipper, which is a scene out of Fargo, and it's very, very difficult to, to paint some of these scenes. I get in touch with feelings that I was unaware of. This is definitely Dakota subject matter, but it's also public history. Not owned by the Dakota people, it's owned by everybody. The 1862 Dakota War Uprising is still an unhealed wound in Minnesota State history, and to heal from it it needs to be acknowledged and then reconciled. But like I said, first you have to acknowledge it. First you have to learn about it. (Rep. Dean Urdahl) It is an important step for us all, but while we must remember our history, we must move into the future and heal the wounds that are still open from 1862. I hear from people in the state from descendants of white settlers who say, Don't you dare say you're sorry, don't you dare talk about reconciliation, making comments like it wasn't me that did this. You issue an apology for my great, great grandfather, but not for me. There still is that out there about the words apology, reconciliation-- what do they really mean? (narrator) Between 400 and 600 white civilians and soldiers were killed, many taken captive, and many others fleeing the state, leaving Southwestern Minnesota largely depopulated. While the majority of Dakota people had little or no involvement in the war, their losses were only beginning. (Franky Jackson) History tells us that out of the 7,000 Dakotas that were residing on the reservation here, from Morton all the way up to Big Stone, about 500 participated in the war itself. We know too that through the recorded histories of the Dakotas from that time period, that there were atrocities committed against them as well. (Carrie Zeman) I think we've all inherited a master narrative of the Dakota War that says that Dakota people were a monolithic body of people who made a choice to go to war. But that master narrative comes out of the retribution we inflicted on them after the war. We needed some way to justify expelling them all from Minnesota. When you learn about Dakota history, when you learn about the Dakota War, for example, it's very easy to think about this as just a historical event that some people went through without thinking about the real repercussions of what this did to families. I think it's really important to have that human component. I have ancestors who fought in the war, and I also have ancestors who chose not to fight. My grandfather, Sid Byrd, taught me that our men were patriots. Teaching about Dakota history, you're not just teaching history. For a lot of these students, this is a very personal experience, and it's a very emotional experience. But first I want to ask, how many of you are from Minnesota? Those of you that are from Minnesota, how many of you learned about Dakota people in school? So I get Somali students and students from other countries coming up to me and asking, How do we keep our kids from losing our language? How do we keep our culture alive? (narrator) Today, Dakota people dealing with the impact of historical trauma are finding a wide variety of ways to strengthen their culture, from language camps to help overcome the loss of language to natural organic farming, to educating on the importance of place names for and access to significant sites. They are, in growing numbers, telling their own history in documentary form, and with humor. (Grace Goldtooth-Campos) Today we had our Sunktanka family fun day. Sunktanka is part of Dakota Wicohan, one of our youth programs. all exclaim speaking Dakota Today we hope that, we want to bring together intergenerational conversation, interaction between older folks, mothers and grandparents and fathers and their kids. If their families aren't involved in it, then it won't go very far within the home. (Dallas Goldtooth) We don't hear the language enough in our communities, and this is a great chance to not only hear it and use it, but use it in a fun way. singing in Dakota language We have 6 fluent speakers, and that's first language speakers left in Minnesota. speaking Dakota speaking Dakota (Dallas Goldtooth) Once we lose the language, that's a huge, huge part of our culture, who we are as Dakota-- Oyate. We don't have to be ashamed to express who we are. We don't have to-- no longer be afraid of expressing our culture, using our language. speaking Dakota If we all speak Dakota, then in the future, the grandchildren, in 7 generations from now, you know, they'll, they'll have these things, the Dakota language, the Dakota way of life, our traditions. (Jacob) Unkanna, grandpa. Kunsi, Kunsi, yeah, that means grandma. (Diane Wilson) Dream of Wild Health is a magical place, where kids and food and land come together. These are from the fields; it's like a mix of a tomato and a apple. These are Dream of Wild Health bees. They pollinate all the vegetables on Dream of Wild Health Farm. (Diane Wilson) There has been a great deal of harm done to what was an indigenous relationship with the earth, which was a way of nurturing and caring for plants and animals in a balanced way. And so what we're trying to teach the kids here is how to live that way again, but in a modern society. This is the market garden, so it's the organic vegetables that we take down to market in the cities. Mother Earth's creation, she's a beauty. These are beautiful! Thank you. We have generations of trauma, physical trauma, experienced through the lack of healthy food and access to what was an indigenous diet in medicines. So what we're trying to do here is teach the kids how to transform that trauma in their lifetime into a healthy lifestyle that does not include diabetes. (woman) That's a tall order. Yeah, um-hm, but we start here. We don't use fertilizer 'cause it can have runoff and contaminate the lakes and streams. I learned to think about what I'm putting into my body before I eat it. It gives us Native youth a chance to like open our eyes a little bit to how our people used to live. speaking Dakota Grandfathers, we thank you for this food that we are about to partake in, we pray that this food may strengthen and nourish our bodies. When you are eating food that's fast food or comes in a can, or it comes in sacks from a commodity program, you don't need those songs or ceremonies anymore. So that's where the issue of food goes far beyond physical health. (Ernie Whiteman) Ease their pain grandfather, those that are not able to have food today, grandfather, help them, we thank you. speaking Dakota (Diane Wilson) To see these small groups of kids in particular, each year, learn those lessons of what it means to be a native person and then go back out into the world, into their families, into their communities, with their friends, and I feel like we've done good work. (Katherine Bean) Lake Helen is a really important place in Dakota history and in Minnesota history. My grandfather Cloud Man, Mahpiya Wicasa, had an agricultural village there. It was a farming community. We really need to address a lot of the sites in the metro area, in the Twin Cities area, as being indigenous spaces, and we need to be able to tell those histories there so that more people know about it. man sings in Dakota language We're here at the Lake Calhoun, a lake that's called that by the citizens of Minneapolis, but by the nation of the Dakota people, it's called Mde Maka Ska. That means White Earth Lake. We're here to commemorate and honor the water with the youth of different nations. Our people have fished and lived, died, have given birth, to generations of children here. And these are our ancestors, the Dakotan Oyate, the Dakota nation. One village here in particular was called Mahpiya wicasa Wicoti. What that means is that this was the village of Cloud Man. We're gonna walk it up right here in this open spot. So we do that, then we'll wrap it around the rest of the poles. (LeMoine LaPointe) The lands are our very life. Our ceremonies, our language, is tied to those lands and has been for thousands of years. This event is organized for youth because of their representation of our future. It's really important for our children as Dakota children to have representation in this community. We should teach our children how to recuperate, how to innovate, and how to renovate our community in a transformative way. It is the quality of life that we should focus on, that will enable us to live more close or respectful to our Mother the Earth and our Grandfather the Sky. (Katherine Beane) John C. Calhoun was a senator from South Carolina. He was a staunch advocate of slavery. He helped create the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He wrote the first draft of the Indian Removal Act. These things are also important points to make when you're thinking about changing that name. (Franky Jackson) Coldwater Springs is a very significant site to Dakota people for several different reasons. We have creation stories that draw us to this location. There have been attempts in the past to nominate Coldwater Springs as a traditional, cultural property, and those have failed. Good morning, my name is Wanda Wells, I'm the tribal historic preservation officer for the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. I have a declaration that I would like to present to you that our chairman has signed, in regards, in accordance with Executive Order 13007, Indian Sacred Sites. Our tribe has declared Coldwater Springs a sacred site. I am James Westin, I'm from the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and the tribal preservation officer and here is our declaration. Interesting, in my career, I've been in cultural resource management for 30 years, and there was time when if you dealt with the 4 recognized tribes in Minnesota, you'd done your due diligence. That is changing; it's changed dramatically. (Franky Jackson) That was the outcome of our efforts that day, was to declare Coldwater Springs a sacred site, and have the park service accept that declaration. And they did, and we're pushing forward in a whole new direction when it comes to government- to-government consultation. I think it's important for people to understand the roles and responsibilities of sovereign nations to work with federal land managing agencies to create joint stewardship opportunities for not only use and access to those resources, but management of those resources as well. When I look at what's going on, I don't think that the end has been written yet, and I think we still have every opportunity to produce and generate our own clarities. I think we have that opportunity; I know we have the ability. It really comes down to about whether we have the will or not. Here's Bishop Whipple at... The documentary I'm working on, Star Dreamers, the Indian System, it is a process of truth-telling, which deals with the causes of the 1862 war. It's a 3-segment piece, but it's going to be a 2-hour documentary with 3 segments in it. Our story has never been really told, so when I come home, I thoroughly start researching everything I could. For almost 10 years I've interviewed our elders all over Minnesota, South and North Dakota, into Canada, our Dakota people, and preserve their orals, history stories and their spiritual understanding of going all the way back to our origin. And so during that research process, it came clear that our story needs to be told through our Dakota people. When we were kids we didn't have epods and iPods. Faces--, we didn't have that stuff. Now they're out there poking each other. (Dallas Goldtooth) We're so absurd, we're so full of ourselves, and we're so hilarious. For me, what you see on screen in our videos is basically processing what it means to be a man, what it means to be an Indian man, a Native man in the world today. Yeah, fixing the problems of Indian country. I like to pay attention to the men I've seen in my life, and I think that's where a lot of my comedy is just observing, observing the absurdity of my uncles or my fathers. Did you ever meet some folks and you're just like man, we need to work together, we need to do something with each other? That sounded good huh? Yeah, that was good. Ha ho, first up we would like you to actually do your sort of Indian stuff. Right? Cultural stuff, anything-- dancing; do you guys dance? loud whoop (Dallas Goldtooth) We're just saying, if you're going to see us like that, we're gonna make fun of it. Because after a while, our own people start believing it, and so that's, we're gonna make fun of them too. keyboard, bass, & drums play in bright rhythm (woman) Like a Seminole, Navajo Kickapoo, like those Indians, I'm an Indian too (Nathaniel Bobby Wilson) I don't know if we have an agenda necessarily, except to keep having fun and making more videos, collaborating with other people. Some of 'em are a little more outright than do have very clear message on what we're trying to say. (man) Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. I think slavery is wrong, morally and politically. I desire it that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate the whole union. Indians? Ah... let the bastards hang. Lincoln was a bleep What bothers me the most is the same thing that bothers me about every other white historic figure in U.S. history. They're a bunch of Indian murderers and slave owners that get totally like put up as these amazing heroes of the past. And it just bugs the (beep) out of me. laughs (narrator) Humor can help open us up to hearing other perspectives in ways that can bridge some of the hardest complexities of history. At the end of the U.S.-Dakota conflict, many Dakota fled north or west. A large party among the Dakota, led by Chief Wabasha and others, had taken possession of the white captives to return them to Colonel Sibley. Still others, trusting clemency offered to those who had only gone to war against soldiers, surrendered. Sibley's commanding officer, John Polk, a union general desperate to regain respect after being disgraced at Bull Run and banished to the Northwest, sent word to Sibley. It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so, and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year. Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains, unless, as I suggest, you can capture them. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made. Sibley quickly separated the men from the women and appointed a military commission to begin trials. (Walt Bachman) Only 29 trials consumed the first half of the time period, and all of the rest were tried in an equivalent period of time during the second half of the trials. Right up until the end of these trials, there were Dakota warriors coming in confessing-- those are the court's terms-- confessing to having fired shots in battles. In most of those battle trials, there were no independent witnesses. They just let the defendants talk, and as soon as they had the magic words, fired one shot, fired three shots. The court recorder had a little code. He wrote a letter down in the margin of the trial record. D was the code letter for death. That was to remind him that that was going to be the court's verdict. (narrator) Of 393 cases tried in just 6 weeks, 323 Dakota were convicted, 303 sentenced to hang. Despite the strong protestations of Governor Ramsey and other politicians seeking retribution, Lincoln reviewed the case files and reduced the number of Dakota to be hanged to 39. (David Nichols) I can't paper over the fact that he made a blood sacrifice. If he had pardoned all of them, all 303, he probably would have had some kind of violent rebellion in Minnesota. I'm not sure I would have wanted to walk in those shoes. (narrator) Just before the execution date, new evidence spared one more, reducing the number to be executed to 38. (Katherine Beane) No matter what he did he wasn't going to make everyone happy. That being said, to hang 38 warriors and to send to prison hundreds more-- he had to understand what that was going to do to us as a society, leaving our women without our men. (narrator) On the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men ascended the gallows in Mankato. The single rope tied to them all was cut by a man who had lost family members on August 20th. Nearly 4,000 people crowded the streets of Mankato to witness. The trials were unjust; they were not fair. Many of the 38 who were hung were innocent. That is my opinion. (Katherine Beane) Looking back at the way they handled themselves tells a lot. The fact that right before they were taken to the gallows, they got up and shook the hands of the men that were imprisoning them. The fact that they sang together, that they grabbed each other's hands and yelled out their names. These are all powerful things that speak to who they were. (David Nichols) Ramsey went to visit Lincoln at the White House after the election of 1864, which Lincoln won, and Lincoln, the politician, always the politician-- count his votes-- complained a little bit that he didn't get as much of a margin in Minnesota as he had in the first election. It was several thousand votes less, and Ramsey said to him, Well, if you'd let us hang more Indians, you'd have had your old margin. And Lincoln, I can picture him, took a moment and a deep breath and said, I could not afford to hang men for votes. (Franky Jackson) When I examined the actions that followed leading up to and after the trials of innocent Dakota who are placed in these prisoner of war camps, and the treatment that they had to endure and the kinship ties that were broken-- those are the things that don't allow me to reconcile his decision. (Katherine Beane) I think that people who portray them as villains and as murderers don't really understand who they were as men, as fathers, and brothers and grandfathers, as people, with emotion who were trying to protect their families, and who went to war because they wanted their families to live. (John Trudell) It was the largest mass execution in American history, and the removal is equal to The Trail of Tears and the Navajo long march that they had to make, maybe a little different form, but yeah, so this is not something, I mean, I can understand why America doesn't want it to, doesn't want to acknowledge it. (narrator) Six days after the execution, Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. When I was doing research at the Minnesota Historical Society, I remember coming across a newspaper clipping where it said Lincoln Frees the Slaves, and on the other side it said, Lincoln Hangs the 38. Our family was exiled. (narrator) The bodies of the men executed in Mankato were buried-- briefly. Typical of body snatching rampant in the mid 19th century, souvenir hunters and doctors, including William Mayo, dug them up and carried the remains away. Settler descendants can have that same argument that maybe they don't know what happened to some of their relatives' remains, but their relatives' remains weren't collected and used for study. Part of the healing process for us would be to be able to find out what happened to them and be able to have those ceremonies for them, and to protect their spirits. The primary reason we're here today is because these little guys, Chaske and Cuauhtli, they're Dakota, they're from Crow Creek, their ancestors walked this trail so I thought it was really, really important that my children be part of the walk. I want them to understand who they are in relationship to their history. I want them to know the importance of what it means to be Dakota. It was in 1969, I worked at the Historical Society, was asked to stay late, told to get a box, it was described to me as a black box with a certain number on it. Told to bring a crowbar with me to the photography section. There was a man who was introduced to me as a man from Flandreau, South Dakota. I opened the box up and inside the box was the scalp, the arm bones, and the skull of Little Crow. From what the man from Flandreau was telling me, Jess Wakeman, his grandson, had wanted Little Crow buried and had organized to have these pictures taken so they could prove that he still existed. I heard that story as I was physically taking out each one of these to be photographed, put aside, taking out the next one then putting them back and locking it up. That's when I determined that I would find out what happened to Little Crow. When I started, I did not believe I'd find anything. I did not imagine that they would have kept a record of all the details of all that stuff, and as I started to dig, I found record after record, documented a trail, what happened to him, of course, I found out details of how he was killed and what happened to him immediately afterwards. Little Crow's son was captured by Sibley's men around Devil's Lake towards the end of July. And all of a sudden it becomes understood that the man that was killed around Hutchinson was Little Crow. The remains of the body sort of took on a sort of a status once they realized it was actually Little Crow that they had killed. The scalp was kept in the office, presumably on display until 1868, when, for some reason I could never figure out, was thrown away and put in the trash. I found a record of a capitol janitor by the name of William Grubb, took the scalp out of the trash and donated it to the state Historical Society. So that's around 1868. The scalp, when it had been tanned, was finely secured in the Historical Society, but a number of holes were put around the scalp, and it was put inside of a hoop. Feathers and beads were hung upon it and the photographs were taken of it. And the photographs were sold-- these are those old-fashioned stereoscopic photographs-- and it was put on display. I think it's important to look at people, institutions, in the context of their times. There was the war; key players in the war were Governor Ramsey and Henry Sibley, both of whom were founding members of the Historical Society. (Daniel Spock) When you look at the history of our particular organization, you realize just how complicated our role as an organization has been. Our founders are the same men who negotiated the treaties, they're the same men who benefited financially from those transactions. Our organization is founded by these men in part to memorialize their achievements. electric motor whirrs How museums got items in the past is very different from how they come in today. And you can imagine, years when Britain was colonizing and going to India and going to Egypt, the same with the Civil War-- we have items in the collection that were picked up on battlefields, items from Minnesota are in Southern collections for the same reason. It is true that items came into the collection under the status of trophy. (David Beaulieu) In 1908 a stepsister of Jess Wakeman, a woman by the name of Ida Allen was at the Historical Society and saw that display. She, of course, then reported that to her brother. It was not until 1924 that he enters in the Historical Society library and sees it on display and tells the man there that he better get them off the display. He's going to go away and come back tomorrow with a lawyer. When it comes back the next day, they're out of display. They were, we're told they were put into a box and put into a room in the basement of the Historical Society. And I'm assuming that's the same box. (Stephen Elliott) Museum display of human remains, you know, it's one of those changing practices over time. Do I wish the Historical Society had not exhibited Little Crow's remains? Sure, today we cringe at something like that. It happened, we acknowledge it, we regret it now. The Minnesota Historical Society made sure those remains were returned to the family. (William Gilbert) This is the final resting place, the gravesite of Taoya Te Duta, Little Crow. I am a great grandson times 5 to him. He was brought back in a small copper box. Uncle Floyd identified the scalp, the wrist bones, some of the arm and leg bones that were in the box, and so he was the last one to see those remains and identified them as genuine. The day he was interred up here on the 27th, 1971, I was in 8th grade and my mother had, did a fall arrangement of gourds and pumpkins, corn, to symbolize feeding of the relatives and preparing a place for him, and preparing to send him off with the food. Uncle Floyd said a prayer in Dakota, and as he said that, coming up off the north hill at this point over this way here hundreds, and I mean hundreds of small blackbirds were circling. And we could see 'em, but as they came this way, they went up, circled around to the north and flew over us, dipped down and flew up, and they went back east over the Pipestone. This place was so quiet; everybody was watching that. The womenfolk were crying, and I noticed, I was looking at my uncle Floyd Heminger, he had tears. He was talking about how happy he was, that his grandfather was back amongst his Mdewakanton relatives. When they were finished up here, I remember standing back and watching as the cement truck came and they dumped 4 feet of concrete around that copper box. So I asked my uncle, I said, Why are they doing that? He said, If they want to take him again, they're gonna fight to get him. Tosta nici mate kte. I'm gonna die with you. He knew he was going die, he knew that this battle was going to have a final ending and a final outcome that was going to determine Dakota policy with the State of Minnesota, but he was willing to give his life in defending that homeland. I know who I come from, and I know what people I belong to. What it means to have him here in Flandreau, where his son lived and started this church, being displaced out of the State of Minnesota-- back then to them a boundary line was just a line on a map. It didn't have meaning to them; this was all Minnesota. And listening to those stories and rereading some of the documents that our family has, wherever they were and traveled, they were always home. (Katherine Beane) I do look at Little Crow as a hero. He was a leader, he made a difficult decision, he was a very important part in our history. At the same time, I also have a lot of respect for Wabasha, as well as our female leaders who were just as much leaders as any of these men and whose names don't get remembered in history textbooks. (narrator) At the end of the trials, the convicted men were shackled together and taken to a prison in Mankato. As they passed near New Ulm, a group of settler women, burying their dead, attacked. At least two of the men would die from the wounds inflicted. More would die over the winter that followed. Many of the families of those men, along with Dakota who had protected whites or taken no part in the war, were marched in the opposite direction, nearly 150 miles to the concentration camp below Fort Snelling. As they passed through Henderson, an armed mob attacked, wounding several. A baby was ripped from a Dakota mother's arms and slammed into the ground mortally wounding it. In speaking with elders, they told of people were throwing hot water on them, eggs, and what have you. (Harry Running Walker) My great grandma, her mother, she wanted to go to the bathroom but she went anyway-- she had to go here. And when she come back, one of the soldiers, they call bayonet, jabbed her in the stomach and killed her. And my great grandma saw her-- her mother got killed. From what I understand, a lot of them people didn't have shoes, didn't have coats, you know, they weren't offered a ride. (Ramona Kitto Stately) As we're walking through, especially those old roads and those backroads, I always wonder if my grandmother had the same view that I have. Did she see this land the same as me? Am I looking at the same tree that she looked at? I think of that all the time. My great, great grandfather was arrested. His name was Mazaadidi. He was one of the original 303 prisoners. His wife, Pazahiyayewin, she had 4 children. She had one on the night of the beginning of the war, so she had a brand-new baby. And she was rounded up and taken to Morton, Minnesota to the Lower Sioux Agency, where they brought all the women and children, then she was force-marched to Fort Snelling. It was very, very cold. They certainly weren't prepared for a walk. Many, many people died along the way. Our grandmother would have had to carry an infant baby. There's no setting a baby down; and then to have a 2-year-old beside. I saw one of the little people walking today, and her little legs were just going as fast as she could go. And I kept thinking, how could they do that? with much emotion How did they manage? (Ramona Kitto Stately) There's so many people in the community to greet you when you get into town. They don't have to do that, you know, they're volunteering. Thank you very much. Oh thank you, thank you. Take care. There's so many people that do so many things and just out of the goodness of their heart. (narrator) Over the long winter that followed, hundreds would die of disease, exposure, and malnourishment. The federal government knew their agenda for everyone interred at Fort Snelling. Their agenda was that they were going to exile them from Minnesota if they didn't die first. (narrator) The surviving women, children, and elders held captive at Fort Snelling, along with about 2,000 Ho-Chunk Indians who had no part in the war, but lost their reservation near Mankato, were loaded onto steamboats that would take them to the Crow Creek Reservation in present day South Dakota. The treaties were voided. Some of the money the government revoked was paid in reparations to the settlers. Punitive expeditions over the next year would see the massacre of more than one village in the Dakotas. The remaining condemned men were sent to a prison camp in Davenport, Iowa. (Sandra Geshick) They wanted to know were their relatives alright. Where were they? Were they still alive? Were they being taken care of? Because you know, it was the men that were the providers, and they took care of the women and the children. There seemed to be worry that they would never see their family, their relatives, uncertainty of their fate, especially after the assassination of then President Lincoln. There was always that worry that, you know, they could, because they were in prison, that they could be next. (David Nichols) By 1864, the Secretary of the Interior under Lincoln was saying, Concentration of the Indians on reservations is the settled policy of the government. You like to say well, we didn't have concentration camps, but they used that term. That's what a reservation is. (Mary Lethert Wingerd) That was when the forgetting began. We could craft a history of our past that erased native people from the landscape. (Kirsten Delegard) In the aftermath of the Dakota War, people didn't learn about the conflict by sitting down and reading history books. They learned about it through popular culture, most notably something called the Stevens' Panorama, which was produced, actually even before the war was over. It was sort of a precursor to a movie or a film. It told the story of the conflict using music, using very colorful dramatic, huge-scale images. The way Stevens retold the story of the U.S. Dakota War in this panorama was really a story of good and evil. He used some very, very disturbing accounts of survivors who described in horrible detail the torture of children, the rape of women, the massacre of innocent farmers. It ended with the hanging of the Dakota in Mankato and then the last scene in the panorama is this very odd-looking scene of this tree with babies falling out of it. And the idea is that the state is safe now for civilization. When you look at the past, you have to look at events from many different perspectives to come up with a sort of representative story of what happened. And Stevens did not do that. He told the story entirely from the perspective of the settlers. You can look through the collection at the Brown County Historical Society and see a number of the different buttons and badges and pins and different things that they made. There was a large souvenir economy that could come out of a celebration or a commemoration. There were parades from the late 1800s all the way through 1962. In 1962 there was also a pageant out at the fairgrounds. The pageant told the story of the Dakota War. It was all very celebratory; we were celebrating victory. Different businesses began appropriating the hanging image to sell their products with. So you have beer makers using the hanging image on their marketing material. Apparently there was a jeweler in Mankato who etched a very small image of the scaffold on a silver coffee spoon. Seeing these now, these images, just seem incredibly callous, but I think it's important for us to step back and to understand that the 40th anniversary of the conflict, that this image meant something very different to people then. From the middle of the 19th century, people started appropriating Indian iconography as part of regional identity, largely out of this infatuation with this romantic view of Indians that grew out of the cult of Hiawatha, this white man's sort of romantic Indian becomes incredibly compelling for people, especially in Minneapolis, which is laying out its streets at this point, and the city planners turned to the iconography and the names from the Hiawatha poem to fill out their streetscape. So we have Minnehaha Park, we have Hiawatha Avenue, we have Minnehaha Avenue, we have Nokomis Avenue. When I was a kid, Northern States Power had a little Indian figure with a feather, there's the Land O' Lakes Indian maiden. There's so many images of stereotyped cartoon character Indians that have been appropriated by Minnesota institutions that are just part of the fabric of everyday life in Minnesota. (men) From the land of sky blue waters I feel like obviously it's been a struggle for native people to make sure their actual voices are heard. (man) Have a Hamm's. Dakota people are very resilient. If we weren't, we wouldn't be here today. There's still a lot of racism, discrimination, and I always ask myself why, why is it, because we fought for what was ours? Should we have just give it up and said take whatever you want? It's in all indigenous people to give, to share, you know, what we have, and we were, we thought we were doing that and giving so generously, sharing the things that we had and we were taken advantage of. When they took our children, forcibly removed them from home, and sent them to boarding schools. And they weren't allowed to speak their language. They wanted to strip them of anything that they knew of their culture, you know, to be assimilated. We were forbidden to do our ceremonies. They had to keep them underground. But you know, we're still here. (narrator) As Minnesotans think of ways to heal the wounds of 1862, perhaps Mankato can serve as a model for what is possible. For more than a century after the war, it was a terrifying spot for native people. But that began to change in the 1970s because of a friendship. I grew up in Kasson, Minnesota and moved to Mankato. There was a marker downtown, Here were hung 38 Sioux Indians in 1862 the day after Christmas. I didn't know any Indians then; that was in 1956. And then in '58 I ended up going out fishing occasionally out at Prairie Island and that's how I met Amos. I liked his whole demeanor; I liked his take on spirituality. I just liked the way he approached, especially that subject. And it wasn't something he was going to push on you, it was that he just talked about his relationship to it. This is a pipe that Amos Owen made. He gave me a pipe bowl that had broken in two pieces and he told me if I would take that pipe that I could keep it and I should make a stem myself to fit the pipe, and that would be the bond between he and me, which was pretty... pretty powerful. Amos was the first Dakota person to tell me that when they come through Mankato, they drive through at night usually, because Mankato had this history that was negative to Dakota people. But I never, ever heard him talk disparagingly about non-Indians, and I'm around him a lot. Although he was unhappy with what happened-- he had an ancestor that was hung in Mankato as well-- but I think he represented what was good about the American Indian from the past. And all of a sudden the eagles came, 38 eagles came, and they circled overhead. This is a feeling that their spirits were there and the eagle brought it, see. drum plays; people sing in Dakota language (Bud Lawrence) The Powwow was created in 1972. Jim Buckley, the YMCA secretary at that time, or director, and I and Amos Owen-- that's the first time in 110 years he had Indians come in a group to Mankato since the hanging of the 38 Dakota in 1862. So it had tremendous meaning to them. In the neighborhood where we put on the first Powwow there was a lot of skepticism about it. The neighborhood generally thought the Indians were going to steal things. That never happened; I don't know if they were disappointed that it didn't happen, but it didn't happen. The Indians on their end of it, felt that this is going to be the same kind of Mankato that existed 110 years ago. But at the conclusion of the Powwow though, everybody felt good about it. As Powwows continued to occur, friendships developed and walls were taken down and there was more interaction and just a lot better reception on both sides. jingles jingling Hi guys. Good morning, good morning. Good morning to you sir. Your dad was, he was the key person. He came up with ideas, and everybody agreed with him. We never had any disagreements in those meetings. He'd ask my mom because he was deaf in one ear. That was that right ear, right? So people would talk to him, mumbles and he looks around, it's like what did they say? During the first Powwow I mentioned to your dad that it seems like we planned all this way back, and we didn't. And he said that's part of it. I see more of the bridge amongst our own people. Those natives that come from all different directions, you know, they're here, they're here for a reason. That is one of the things that I have seen that we've acquired that. drums play; people sing Nice having you as friends, that's for sure. And you know it Boss. A long time. Yep, you know it. Happy 30th! all laugh 29th! We still have a ways to go in reconciliation and I guess that'll always take place, when you look around the world today, like Amos used to say, I mean, we need reconciliation all over the world. And right today, I mean, there aren't many safe places to go. So reconciliation is a good word to say, but it's a hard one to practice. piano plays softly (Franky Jackson) Through my line of work in cultural resource management, whether I was doing an archeological survey along the Missouri River, or we were conducting a traditional cultural property survey in the Black Hills, I've always yearned to be in Minnesota. There's something that connected me to Minnesota. I think we all experience that as Dakota people. It's hard to explain, but there's something that draws us back to our aboriginal territory. When you look at the social situations on the reservations, we have twice the national average of youth suicide rate on Dakota reservations, and most recently we've been experiencing a high number of not just youth suicide, but suicide in general. On the healing side of things, we need to create opportunities that allow Dakotas to come back together and to rebuild those kinship ties. I'll track down some of the addresses. Okay, if you could do that, that would be great. drums play; men sing in Dakota language The original purpose for our event was not to reiterate reasons for the 1862 conflict. We wanted to focus more on the last 150 years of survival outside of our aboriginal territory. We wanted to do that by bringing all of those exiled bands together and to share our shared history. We're looking for unity. Bring the Dakota communities together, the Dakota people and the non-Dakota people together in a good, healthy way. And I think when you're talking about reconciliation and taking those first progressive steps towards healing, it has to take place at Pipestone, one of the most sacred and significant places to all native people. (Sidney Byrd) They would gather around the cooking fires, share their meager food supplies and have their devotion. They would pray together and sing. Sidney singing in Dakota language (Franky Jackson) That's why we had our event in Flandreau, was to try to bring some healing to that and to allow the coming together of Dakota people to celebrate all things Dakota, to speak about the tangible culture that still exists. man sings in Dakota language men sing in Dakota language cheering (woman) We're gonna do the family tree tomorrow. We came out to Flandreau, South Dakota today to help people digitize their photographs and family documents. This is Kinyanhiyaye, and he was in Davenport, in prison. We got married by the church, and they got baptized because they were in fear of their lives and they thought being baptized would help them. But at the deeper level, we knew that we wanted to bring people together to discuss issues of importance. We could get an idea from these meetings of what we can do to get back our identity. whinnying (woman) We talk about the horse and the teachings of the horse and what they can teach us. (young child) There she is. (man) We're about to get started. I have to ask all the media people to cut their cameras. (woman) What do you hope will come out of this event? Just awareness, just a continued awareness. We wondered if people would come. (James Weston) I've been dealing with a lot of older people and to be able to hear their words. It's good that they see that we're moving it forward, holding on. soft clomping of hooves (Franky Jackson) We wondered if there would be an interest from Dakotas alone to participate in something like this. (woman) I live in California. (2nd woman) You came from California for this? Yeah, yeah, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. (woman) Is it going to be emotional for, for you guys? Oh yes, our relatives are proudly looking upon us with much emotion and watching over us to keep us safe so we don't greet them. Happy they could go back home, happy that we can go back home to our homeland. piano plays softly (Franky Jackson) When we drove over the hill and we saw this large group of people, it was overwhelming. That sense of belonging, that sense of togetherness was very much alive and well that morning. When I saw the non-Dakota, holding up signs, welcoming home Dakotas back into Minnesota, that speaks to what we were trying to accomplish. Welcoming these people back to Minnesota is an important step to take as far as the healing process is concerned, which is, I think, where we need to proceed from here. It's not about me, it's about them; well it's about all of us. drum plays; people sing in Dakota language (Franky Jackson) What took place at the border with the grandmothers and that ceremony, meant more to me as a Dakota person than the actual appearance of the governor. I was a little upset that we knew the governor wasn't coming, but when those grandmothers came together at the border, it didn't matter if Santa Claus was there. When that sacred fire is there, there are just some things that belong to us as Dakota people. I was pleased when all cameras had to be turned off, if for no other reason the raw emotion that people felt comfortable displaying because they weren't on camera. (Mark Ritchie) I was asked by the governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, to read his statement on the U.S. Dakota War of 1862 and to share the proclamation that he's proclaimed for today. On September 9th, 1862, Governor Alexander Ramsey proclaimed, Our course then is plain. The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven beyond forever the borders of our state. They must be regarded and treated as outlaws. If any shall escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond our borders and our frontier garrison with a force sufficient to forever prevent their return. I am appalled by Governor Ramsey's words and by his encouragement of vigilante violence against innocent people, and I repudiate them. To honor the American soldiers, Dakota people, and settlers who lost their lives in that war, I order that all state flags shall be flown at half staff from sunrise to sunset, and I urge everyone participating in the events commemorating this 150th anniversary to practice not only remembrance, but also reconciliation, Governor Mark Dayton, Governor of Minnesota. Be it resolved by the Committee on Rules and Legislative Administration of the House of Representatives of the State of Minnesota, that deeply regrets the forced removal of the Dakota people and welcomes back all Dakota people to Minnesota, their original homeland. applause (Franky Jackson) Having the repudiation of Ramsey's proclamation introduced at our event by Ritchie and have the combined efforts of Erdahl, bringing Minnesota legislators together, regardless if the governor was there I think was very important. I think that speaks to the symbolism of commitment behind that statement, and I think it demonstrated to the Dakota people and non-Dakota people that there was a level of sincerity with this message. The Indian Removal Act of 1863 is still on the books. It is a federal law. It is a travesty that something like this exists, even if it has no practical effect today. Therefore, I support efforts to amend the Removal Act to welcome Dakota people back to Minnesota. applause There's work that needs to be done. We knew that it was cosmetic to a certain level with regards to the 1863 Dakota Removal Act. We knew that it would take much more time and energy to really have that law amended, but we're still working on that. That is still our goal, and I'm confident that we'll accomplish it. I've, I've walked just about half of all the miles and we, it's just fun and it just reminds me of their ancestors. drum plays; people sing in Dakota language (Caleb) This was their land earlier, and now it's our land. They should have more land than just what they have now. (Ramona Kitto Stately) It feels really, it feels like coming home when I come to this spot. And it took me a long time to be able to come here and not feel really sad and cry. But I come here a lot; I visit here a lot, bring relatives here, and so, knowing that this is a ceremony and knowing that this is where Pazahiyayewin was and all of the women and children, I was really proud to walk over the bridge and look down here and know what we were doing and that this was the end and that we have acknowledged their suffering. We've acknowledged what they went through to... during that walk, and we've honored them, and it felt really good. (Sandra Geshick) If there ever is going to be peace, you will want me to learn about your culture. Therefore, you should learn about my culture. Minnesota history without Dakota history is not history. man sings in Dakota language (Sidney Byrd) Our people are survivors of an American holocaust. People don't like to hear that word, but that's what it was. Bitterness does not solve any problems, it only intensifies them. Now is a time for long overdue reconciliation. People think if you just get all the facts you'll have history. But of course, you can never get all the facts. There are millions of facts about every event. History is an ordering and interpretation of the facts to try to understand the truth, so if you think of the facts as the little pieces of colored stone in a kaleidoscope, and depending on how it's turned, those colored stones make very different pictures-- and that's history. History really tells us more about who we are today than about the past. (Katherine Beane) One of the things I'm most afraid of this year is the fact that we'll say okay, we covered the war, now we're gonna move on. Acknowledgement is enough without making any sort of direct action, or any sort of follow-up, without moving forward. It's not a long time ago, the past is still alive within us. It's not something that had a specific beginning and a specific end. It's something that is continuing. Public opinion changes over time. One of the most important things is just being able to talk about these things and to not fight about them. Okay, what can we do now and what kind of steps can we take now in order to get where we want to be in 20 years? piano plays softly CC--Armour Captioning & TPT (woman) Funding for The Past is Alive Within Us: The U.S.-Dakota conflict is made possible by The State Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. orchestral fanfare

Channel: Twin Cities PBS

Views: 1,865,268

Keywords: U.S. Dakota Conflict, U.S.-Dakota Conflict, Native American History, Native History, Minnesota History, Indigenous Americans, native american history documentary, minnesota native american history, history of duluth minnesota, us dakota war, minnesota history of the land, history native american tribes, The Past is Alive Within Us, Us dakota war 1862, history native american, native american history in america, us dakota war facts, dakota conflict

Id: rwyFp_GsZOk

Length: 116min 42sec (7002 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021