Minesota Works on Forgiving, But Not Forgettin gIt's Native History

[Nanook]

Article from Indian Country Today.

Minnesota Works on Forgiving But Not Forgetting Its Native History




Konnie LeMay


December 26, 2012


On December 26, a memorial will be dedicated in Mankato, Minnesota’s Reconciliation Park near a white limestone buffalo that marks the spot where 38 Dakota men were hanged the day after Christmas 150 years ago. On a 10-by-4 foot leather-looking scroll will be listed the names of those men next to another scroll with a poem about the hangings and encircled by the phrase “forgive everyone everything.”

More: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwor...history-146502

[Nanook]

The Documentary move Trailer: Dakota 38 This Winter and every December for the past few years, riders take this ride in sub zero weather:

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/minnesota-works-forgiving-not-forgetting-its-native-history-146502

[Nanook]

This article is from today's Duluth News Tribune, which is a register to read so I will post here with credits & links to source and such.


On grim anniversary, riders seek to heal Dakota War wounds

They were Dakota warriors. They met their fates with courage 150 years ago today. By: Tom Lawrence , Forum Communications



They were Dakota warriors. They met their fates with courage 150 years ago today.The 38 condemned men, their hands bound behind them, rushed to the gallows specially built for them on the edge of the Minnesota River in Mankato. They danced in place as the rough-hewn nooses were pulled over their heads. All wore white muslin caps with flaps on them, pulled down to obscure faces adorned with ceremonial paint.
The 1862 Dakota War was coming to a deadly climax.
According to an eyewitness report in the New York Times of the largest mass execution in American history, most of the men on the scaffold sang a slow Indian death song. Some of the condemned, including a few of mixed blood who had embraced Christianity, sang a song of their faith. Several had worked their hands free, and clasped a final grip with the man next to him.
Meanwhile, about 4,000 people watched, monitored by more than 1,400 soldiers there to ensure the warriors died of hanging and not of a mob attack.
Just after 10 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 26, 1862, a drum was sounded three times. Capt. William Duley — who had been wounded, lost three children and saw his pregnant wife and two other children taken hostage in the conflict — stood ready with a knife. As the final drumbeat echoed, he severed the heavy rope on his second try, releasing the traps beneath the warriors’ feet.
They plunged, some dying instantly. Others writhed in agony as they choked to death. One man, known as Rattling Runner, plummeted to the ground, the rope having broken.
As he was brought back to the platform and a second rope placed around his neck, the crowd, and soldiers, cheered long and loud when they saw all 38 bodies swinging in the frigid morning air.
Dakota War
That mass hanging was the culmination of the 1862 Dakota War. The executions were held after weeks of attacks and battles between white settlers and soldiers and Indians angry about the loss of their homeland and being denied access to food. Hundreds of settlers died in surprise attacks.
“There’s no good about a war, but sometimes it has to happen,” Lyle W. Miller Sr., a Crow Creek teacher, said during a Dec. 14 presentation at the Mitchell (S.D.) Prehistoric Indian Village. “The little ones were starving. What do you do when you’re faced with a position like that?”
By 1862, the Indians had surrendered most of southwest Minnesota in a pair of 1851 treaties. Still more land was lost after Chief Little Crow and other Indians leaders went to Washington in 1858 to ask why they were being cheated.
In the 1850s, two reservations were carved along the Minnesota River from what was once the Dakotas’ land: the Upper Sioux Agency, based in Granite Falls, and the Lower Sioux Agency, based in Redwood.
The Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Dakota, also known as the Santee Sioux, primarily resided in the Lower Sioux Agency. They were angry about lower-than-promised annuities and the loss of land on which they previously hunted, and often felt cheated by the traders. With settlers pouring into the new state of Minnesota, once-cordial relations became strained. All that was needed for an inferno of violence was a spark.
Enter Andrew Myrick, a blunt-talking trader. During a dispute over a warehouse packed with food on Aug. 15, 1862, an argument broke out. With the Civil War raging, treaty payments were late again, and the traders were unwilling to extend credit.
“So far as I am concerned,” Myrick reportedly said, “if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
Blood is shed
The first bloodshed occurred on the night of Aug. 17, 1862, when four hungry young men, Sungigidan (“Brown Wing”), Kaomdeiyeyedan (“Breaking Up”), Nagiwicakte (“Killing Ghost”), and Pazoiyopa (“Runs Against Something When Crawling”) found a hen’s nest with some eggs in it on a farmer’s land.
“Don’t take them, for they belong to a white man and we may get into trouble,” one of the Indians reportedly said. In response, he was called a coward — a youthful boast that started a deluge of slaughter. The four young men killed five settlers that night, then returned to their village and explained what they had done. Some of their people were excited, while others said the murders would lead to disaster for the Dakota. The Indians asked Chief Little Crow, who was in his 60s and weary of battle, to lead them against the whites to reclaim their land.
He at first rejected the idea, telling the warriors that they were doomed, since he had seen the vast eastern cities during his trip to and from Washington four years earlier.
“Kill one, two, 10 — and 10 times 10 will come to kill you,” he famously said.
But he also knew many of the white men were away, fighting in the Civil War. He also realized the young men’s blood was up, and they were ready, even eager, for battle.
“You will die like rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon,” Little Crow said, and he then used his Indian name to inspire the warriors. “Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.”
There was one chance, he reasoned. The Dakota would need a swift victory, before the federal government could aim its forces at them.
The first battle of the war was an Indian attack on the Redwood Agency on Aug. 18, 1862. Among the dead was Myrick, the foul-tempered trader. When his body was found, his mouth and stomach were stuffed with grass.
“Myrick is eating grass himself,” several Indians said, according to numerous accounts.
On Aug. 19, former Gov. Henry Sibley was named commander of the American volunteer forces. Meanwhile, settlers in the area were killed as the Indians tore a bloody path through the area.
Many settlers headed for the town of New Ulm, where a small barricade had been set up. On Aug. 23, more than 600 Dakota warriors attacked New Ulm. Almost 100 settlers and soldiers were wounded, and 34 of them died.
The town burned, but as many as 2,000 settlers and soldiers huddled together as the attacks diminished. After two days, they fled to the north and headed for Mankato.
Meanwhile, Fort Ridgely was under attack from Aug. 20 to 22, and hundreds of warriors kept the fort under siege until Sibley and 1,400 troops arrived on Aug. 27.
On Sept. 2, Little Crow led his warriors to victory over Sibley’s troops in the Battle of Birch Coulee. It was the crest of the Dakotas’ success, and was followed by a series of small skirmishes and attacks.
The desire for war against the whites was not universally shared among the Dakota.
In the Upper Sioux Agency, most of the Sisseton and Wahpeton were against the war, and Chiefs Red Iron and Standing Buffalo said they would attack hostile Indians who encroached upon their area. When given a chance, they seized white captives and turned them over to Sibley.
As the tide turned, the soldiers gained their first major victory on Sept. 23, when they turned the Indians back at the Battle of Wood Lake. Three days later, Sibley seized the Dakota reservation and eventually 2,000 men, women and children were taken into custody.
The war was over, and hundreds of people — perhaps as many as 1,000 — lay dead. Towns and villages had been ransacked, farms destroyed and buildings burned down. A large crop remained in the fields.
Lincoln’s role
Sibley took swift action against the Dakota. On Sept. 28, he appointed a military commission to try 393 Indians for “murder and other outrages.”
The trials were, historians now agree, a farce. Some took as little as five minutes. The Indians were denied counsel, and some did not understand what was being said.
In the end, 323 men were convicted and 303 sentenced to be hanged. President Lincoln, urged by Minnesota politicians and newspapers, was asked to allow all to die.
But Lincoln, a skilled lawyer, was aware of the glaring injustices in the trials. He also was urged to show compassion by Episcopalian Bishop Henry “H.B.” Whipple, who traveled to Washington to lobby Lincoln for pardons.
Whipple said the Indians had been honest, friendly and trustworthy until they saw they were being cheated, starved and robbed of their land. He said there was a clear connection between the vile treatment they had received and the war they had launched.
Lincoln personally reviewed all the cases. In the end, on Dec. 6, he hand-wrote a letter to Gov. Alexander Ramsay, listing the 39 men who should be hanged — 37 men for killing civilians and two for rape.
Ramsey was outraged and told Lincoln that the reduced sentences would cost him votes in the 1864 election.
“I could not afford to hang men for votes,” Lincoln reportedly said.
Some observers today feel Lincoln was wrong to order any of the hangings, and say several of the men were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Miller said he understands Lincoln was under a lot of pressure.
“He was dealing with the Civil War,” Miller said. “I can’t imagine having that decision.”
But Miller said that while Lincoln has become a revered figure for millions of people, he is seen in a different light in Indian country.
“He freed slaves, but in the end he hung my people,” Miller said.

<I guess there is a limit to post length now so rest of story in next post>

[Nanook]

A devastating aftermath
What happened after the war further outrages Indians today.
About 1,600 Indians and people of mixed blood, called “half-breeds” by both sides at the time, were rounded up and marched to Fort Snelling, where they were imprisoned for the winter of 1862-63. Many Indians today, including Keeble, refer to it as a concentration camp. Conditions were inhumane, and between 130 and 300 Indians died, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Those who survived reported being assaulted and starved. Many had to sign over land deeded to them to get enough food and supplies to endure the winter.
In May 1863, the Indians were dispersed, with some ending up in South and North Dakota, and others in Nebraska and Canada. Where once 6,000 Dakota had called southwest Minnesota home, only a few dozen remained.
Some were taken to a new facility named Fort Thompson in modern-day South Dakota, where missionary John P. Williamson said of 1,300 Indians shipped there, 300 quickly died.
The Indian Wars came to an end on Dec. 29, 1890, with the slaughter of 300 largely unarmed and defenseless Lakota people, primarily elderly people, women and children, at Wounded Knee in what is now western South Dakota. With that massacre, open hostilities between the two races came to a bloody close.
Reconciliation
This month, dozens of American Indians and their supporters have ridden horses across South Dakota to Mankato to take part in a ceremony at the site of the executions.
Erinn Wilson, director of American Indian Affairs at Minnesota State University at Mankato, will attend Wednesday’s reconciliation ceremony, an event that goes back to the efforts of two Mankato-area men and fishing buddies. Amos Owen, a Dakota elder and pipe maker from the Prairie Island Mdewakanton Community, and Bud Lawrence, a Mankato businessman, started a conversation in the late 1950s on the need for healing. In 1965, they helped launch the first Mankato wacipi, or pow-wow, in almost 100 years. Since 1972, the three-day Dakota Mahkato Mdewakanton Wacipi has been held the third full weekend in September.
Wilson, who is of Cherokee origin, said she grew up attending the pow-wow and was always moved to see so many Indians gathered together.
Though she said some people on both sides in the New Ulm area “still hold grudges” over the war, she said the reconciliation ride is one positive development.
“I think it is raising the awareness of everybody to the true history of the area,” she said.
Miller agreed, saying he understands the riders will receive a great welcome.
“It’s about reconciliation and healing,” he said.
Tom Lawrence writes for the Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D.

Source:http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/253801/

[mountaingal]

havent read your posts nanook, however am curious about your interest in this cause...

[Nanook]

MG, I have always been interested in Native Culture. I live in an area with many reservations, have many long time native friends and my boss at the bead store is Native. Going to Powows is one of my favorite things, they are magical and very moving experiences. These times of fracking/mountaintop decapitating, and sulfide acid mining/tar sands and the list goes on... is turning many reservation lands as well as non reservation lands into a toxic waste cesspool. It is time to stop the wrongdoing that has thus far never stopped from day one. I became actively involved a couple of Summers ago when close to my my own back yard became a target which would devastate the tribal lands downstream, and the river that flows through it flows directly into Lake Superior. Grandmother Superior, if you will. our only hope is the Treaties be honored. My Great grandfather was from a reservation in northern Mn, and his Native father immigrated to the US from Canada.

The action in Canada is but the tip of the iceberg. In Wisconsin last year our rogue government went so far as to try to change the environmental laws as rewritten by the acid mining company from outside the U.S., though it would violate every aspect of the treaty. The treaties are our only hope for salvation, I fear, and have been waiting for this movement to start long time now. This is now everyone's fight, if we are to save the lands from corporate devastation.

[mountaingal]

MG, I have always been interested in Native Culture. I live in an area with many reservations, have many long time native friends and my boss at the bead store is Native. Going to Powows is one of my favorite things, they are magical and very moving experiences. These times of fracking/mountaintop decapitating, and sulfide acid mining/tar sands and the list goes on... is turning many reservation lands as well as non reservation lands into a toxic waste cesspool. It is time to stop the wrongdoing that has thus far never stopped from day one. I became actively involved a couple of Summers ago when close to my my own back yard became a target which would devastate the tribal lands downstream, and the river that flows through it flows directly into Lake Superior. Grandmother Superior, if you will. our only hope is the Treaties be honored. My Great grandfather was from a reservation in northern Mn, and his Native father immigrated to the US from Canada.

The action in Canada is but the tip of the iceberg. In Wisconsin last year our rogue government went so far as to try to change the environmental laws as rewritten by the acid mining company from outside the U.S., though it would violate every aspect of the treaty. The treaties are our only hope for salvation, I fear, and have been waiting for this movement to start long time now. This is now everyone's fight, if we are to save the lands from corporate devastation.

thanks for your answer, Nan. so many stories of injustice and oppression in the world. we have to be so vigilant and active. good luck with your cause.