Minnesota is celebrating its 150th anniversary of statehood, an event disrupted on May 10 as Native American protesters reportedly blocked the passage of a symbolic wagon train on its way to Ft. Snelling.
The protest was led by Clyde Bellecourt of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Police arrested at least three of the approximately two dozen protesting. The “violence” was caught on tape, and shows what appears to be nothing more than a misstep on the part of a Dakota man, which lead to the arrests. Those arrested include Waziyata Win (Dr. Angela Cavender Wilson), Steve Blake, and a woman called Flower.
The officers, who used truncheons to move the crowd so the wagon train could pass, were overheard to say: "I thought we came down to do some thumping." The officer’s horses reportedly almost trampled several small children, and a sheriff’s SUV also forced its way through the protesters, imperiling several.
The Native Americans were carrying a mock gallows with 38 nooses to symbolize the hanging of 38 Dakota (Eastern Sioux) males after the War of 1862. The group was protesting what they describe as a culture of lies, genocide, land grabs and political chicanery surrounding the Dakota since the first white settlers arrived in Minnesota. The hanging itself was the largest single mass execution in U.S. history.
Historians paint varied pictures of the events in Minnesota in 1862. The truth itself is a shameful example of Manifest Destiny in action.
Before settlers began arriving, in about 1851, all the land in Minnesota was occupied by either the Dakota (in the south and west) or the Ojibwa (in the north and east). Incoming settlers chose the rich, Minnesota River bottomlands over the rocky, sub-fertile northern territory. The Dakota, knowing they were being squeezed between their traditional enemy, the Ojibwa, and the unfamiliar western prairies, acknowledged that they were no match for the whites and reluctantly agreed, in 1851, to a treaty. This resulted in a reservation, confining the Dakota to a 20-mile wide strip about 100 miles long on the banks of the Minnesota River in exchange for money and yearly annuities in the form of cash, food and supplies.
After the treaty, the U.S. Senate deleted an article, and most of the promised compensation was never delivered to the Dakota . What did remain fell into the hands of unscrupulous Indian agents who claimed the Dakota had run up exorbitant debts. This occurred not only with the initial payment, but with all subsequent payments, leaving the Dakota both landless and hungry.
In 1858, the Dakota were forced to cede the northern half of their reservation. They also lost their rights to the sacred Pipestone Quarry. Failed by treaties that would have provided a little money and a modicum of “white man’s” food (usually rotten pork and weevily flour) – and no longer allowed to hunt outside the reservation (which had been depleted of deer by white settlers) – the Dakota peaceably settled in to starve.
The 1861 annuities were even more meager as a result of the U.S. focus on the Civil War. Also, many of the male settlers were absent fighting that war, which emboldened a few righteously angry Dakota into believing they could win a war of their own. Still, nothing happened until the summer of 1862, and then only as the result of two poor choices – one about efficiency and the other involving words
Eventually the goods arrived, but the money did not. The government was nearly broke funding the war effort. Thomas Galbraith, the recently appointed Indian Agent, determined it would be more efficient to hold the goods until the money arrived. Distributing the annuities required calling the role of every Dakota male over the age of 18, a time consuming process which Galbraith did not want to perform twice.
Galbraith was a political appointment, and had no experience with the Dakota or their imminent starvation. When violence broke out at the Upper Sioux Agency, Galbraith reluctantly released provisions to the northernmost bands of Dakota . He refused to do so the same at the Lower Agency, on the advice of Andrew J. Myrick, a trader, who said; "So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung."
On August 17, the starving Dakota revolted. First to die was Myrick, who was found with his mouth stuffed with grass. Reports on the number of settlers and soldiers killed cite numbers as high as 800 and as low as 200. No count was made of dead Dakota . By September, the revolt was squelched. Many Dakota fled west, but those who remained surrendered themselves at Camp Release.
In mock trials, 303 Dakotah were convicted of crimes and sent to a prison west of Mankato. The women, children and men who had not taken part in the uprising were force-marched to Ft. Snelling, stoned and beaten along the way by white settlers. The winter of 1862 took its toll of the Dakotah at Ft. Snelling, who were held captive in conditions that even modern detainees at Guantanamo would find appalling.
At the last minute, President Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but 40. 38 of these were hung at Mankato on December 26, 1862. The other two were sent to a prison camp at Davenport, Iowa. The U.S. government annulled all treaties, and in the following spring most of the Dakotah were removed to the Crow Creek Reservation. In all, more than 1,500 Dakotah were shipped like cattle aboard steamships or force-marched to their new reservation, whose defining features were alkali water, a treeless landscape and barren soil. Three hundred died along the way.
There, the rations for all 1,200 surviving Dakota consisted of 10 pounds of flour and 4,000 pounds of beef. In 1863, and again in 1864, grasshopper plagues wiped out the few crops the Dakota managed to nurture. These plagues also consumed all the wild vegetation the Dakota might otherwise have eaten to prevent starvation, including berries. By late summer of 1864, Dakota women were picking half-digested kernels of corn and other grains out of horse manure and boiling these for soup.
That was then, but this is now, and the racial bias in Minnesota against Native Americans remains, especially among the police. A few years ago, a friend of mine who lives in Minneapolis reported seeing a band of Native American doing nothing more than walking along Oak Grove Street, near Loring Park. Minutes after they appeared, a police car drove up, blocked the band at an intersection and started harassing them, both verbally and physically.
A Twin Cities lawyer, Larry Leventhal, admits that the long history of actions taken by Twin Cities police against Native Americans (whom he often represents) is “brutal and out of proportion”. Leventhal cites the 1996 case in which two Native Americans were locked in the trunk of a police car. One suffered serious injuries and later successfully sued the department
If 1862 was an abject lesson in the fact those with nothing left to lose have little to fear, the inevitable riots to come – arising out the Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down racial profiling by police departments – will be a lesson in how quickly blood can be spilled, and how uniform it looks regardless of skin color.
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