Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

Each year on the last weekend of September, the Dakota host the Mah-kato Powwow for all nations at Dakota Wokiksuye Makoce, the Land of Memories Park, just south of Mankato, Minnesota. For three days the singing groups drum and sing on the side while the people dance in an eternal circle. Between dances, elders and whole families step forward to host meals for all participants in honor of one of their members, to record a family event, or to thank the assembled people for some favor.

The event focuses on family and community ties. It is a time for socializing, good food, good music, flirting, catching up on gossip, or comparing new camper vehicles. In some regards it resembles a family reunion in the South, an ethnic festival in a Northern metropolis, or Cinco de Mayo in San Antonio.

Despite these similarities, the Mah-kato Powwow is more than a people’s celebration of themselves. The deeper significance impressed itself clearly on my mind a few years ago, when the weather turned unseasonably cold even for a Minnesota autumn, and a stormy rain alternated with light drizzles. It was the kind of day that drives picnickers and football players inside. By any measure, the weather was both too wet and too cold for any outdoor activity, much less a dance. Women carefully folded their embroidered shawls. Men put away their delicate moccasins and feathered bustles. With great disappointment the children had to put away their headdresses and wash off their face paints, which smeared in the rain. The visitors and onlookers who wanted to watch the colorful dancing packed up their minivans and station wagons to drive home.

The Mah-kato Powwow had been rained out. Something persuaded me to wait and not go scurrying home after such a long drive to get there. I huddled in a small shed around a kerosene heater with a handful of other folks, and in silent boredom we watched a man repair a pair of moccasins made from elkhide by his grandfather.

After everyone had put away all the valuable and delicate Indian clothes, they returned to jeans, flannel shirts, heavy sweaters, bowling jackets, boots, and tennis shoes. A man found a large plastic sheet and spread it over the drum. The sheet proved large enough for the young singers and drummers all to huddle under it around their drum, and they began to beat the drum in unison and sing.

As the pounding beat spread out over Dakota Wokiksuye Makoce, the dancers slowly returned from the sheds, campers, and cars where they had taken refuge. They brought out other large sheets of plastic and held them high so that a line of five or six people could share it as they slowly drifted back toward the drum and began to dance again. Soon people had filled the muddy arena. Old ladies danced beside their granddaughters, men beside their wives or children, and teenage “fancy dancers” twirled and stomped in the rain without a plastic sheet over them and without the colorful swirl of their traditional costumes.

Not a feather could be seen at that powwow as the dancers continued for hours in their everyday clothes. I realized then that the colorful costumes—bright fancy-dancer feathers, somber traditional feathers, elk’s-teeth dresses, and embroidered shawls—and all the other props were not the heart of the powwow. The essence of the powwow lay in the beat of the drum, the high-pitched men’s voices, and the dance itself. The essence of the powwow was in the ephemeral acts and not in the permanent objects that accompanied those acts. The powwow was the dance.

As I watched the dancers moving beneath opaque sheets of plastic and the steady rain, I saw that this moment could just have easily been a hundred years ago or a hundred years in the future. The Dakota had always danced, and in repeating the identical motions for generation after generation, all the Dakota merge in one continuing dance for a thousand years into the past and a thousand years into the future.

The people came there to dance, and they would not leave until they had done so. They had not come there to dance for entertainment or fun, but for a serious and even sacred purpose. They had come to Land of Memories Park to remember and to dance in honor of the thirty-eight Dakota patriots hanged there by the government of Abraham Lincoln on the day after Christmas in 1862. No matter how cold the wind or how persistent the rain, they had come to honor their fallen warriors.

In Mankato the United States hanged thirty-eight men in the largest mass execution in North American history. To heighten the drama of the executions, the government constructed a special scaffold for all thirty-eight gallows. After the guards covered the condemned men’s heads with hoods, the cutting of a single rope released all thirty-eight trapdoors and thus hanged all the Indians simultaneously. The sight of so many bodies dangling in the air made a dramatic display to show all Indians what would happen to them if they gave the United States government any trouble while it was fighting its war against the Confederacy. To stress this point, newspapers throughout the frontier regions reproduced engravings of the mass execution on their front pages, and pictures of the event were posted all over Indian territory.

For the memory of those men who died in Mankato, the Dakota must dance. In addition to honoring those thirty-eight men, the Mah-kato Powwow also honored other Indians who have fought and died in war. The United States flag occupies a central place at the powwow, and every part of the powwow begins and ends with honoring ceremonies for that flag. This may seem contradictory to many people who cannot understand honoring both those who died fighting against the United States as well as those who fought for it, but the people at the powwow honor the bravery and sacrifices of all of their warriors.

Every powwow I have ever attended in any part of the United States also flew a special black flag to honor the prisoners of war and those missing in action who never came home from Vietnam. A quarter of a century after that war ended, the native people still remember and mourn those who never returned. They never forget a service done or an honor owed.

It is not only the Indians but all Americans who owe a debt to these fallen warriors. The debt of modern North America to the Indian warriors derives not merely from the large number who died in service to the United States and Canada in overseas battles, but also from the military tactics that the army learned from the Indians. The Indians taught the colonists how to fight a guerrilla war, and its knowledge proved to be the decisive factor that allowed the thirteen small colonies of only about three million people to wrest their independence from the largest and best-armed empire in the world.

The colonists recognized from the time of the first settlements that Indians fought differently from European soldiers. The Indians did not line up in formation and march onto a large field to meet a similarly organized group. As described by one of the Jamestown colonists, the “Savages” came “creeping on all foure, from the Hills, like Beares, with their Bowes in their mouths” (Leach, p.2).

The natives of America often fought wars in the same way that they hunted, stressing strategy and technique more than technology. Traps, lures, decoys, and calls were used as effectively in warfare as in hunting. A particularly effective lure was to set out a small party of warriors as bait to attract the attention of the enemy. As the enemy pursued the smaller party, a larger group encircled and attacked the enemy from all sides. This strategy was very similar to luring deer or caribou into a surround and then slaughtering them.

Both the fur trade and the wars over it depended on Indians. The Indians did the trapping, and when it came time to fight competing colonial powers, the Indians did the fighting. The Indians allied with the Dutch fought against the Indians allied with the English. When the English took over the Dutch lands, the Indians who had been allied with the Dutch then fought for the British against the French Indians. The colonial powers soon divided the Indians into two major factions. The six nations in the League of the Iroquois lived in the area of New York State and maintained a long neutrality that ended in an alliance with the British. The French in Quebec, along the St. Lawrence River, depended mostly on an alliance with the Hurons.

The insatiable European market soon depleted the furs of New England, the St. Lawrence River, and all the lands of both the Iroquois and the Hurons. By 1660, within forty years of their first shipment of furs from New England, the Puritans had exhausted the beaver supply in their area (Cronon). The animals died because of overhunting and because they lost their habitats as European settlers chopped down the forest to plant crops and make pastures for their livestock.

Each Indian group had to move deeper into the continent by heading west. This quest for furs set the Hurons and the Iroquois into direct competition for these new lands. By the 1640s the Iroquois had reached a state of near-permanent hostility against the Huron, who controlled a fur-trading empire across southern Canada and the Great Lakes.

During the spread and growth of the fur trade, warfare became as much a part of the business as trapping and trading. War became big business for the Indian tribes, whose members accepted large payments and trade concessions in return for alliance with one or another of the European powers. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the French showed greater success at obtaining Indian allies than did the British, but the British moved in a steady stream into New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The French therefore encouraged the Indians to make war on the English colonists.

From this phase of colonial history we acquired the image of the Indian as the bloody savage attacking bucolic cabins by surprise, killing the men, women, and children except for a few taken as prisoners for a life of hell.

Often the settlers’ scalps were sold to the occupying European power that had offered a bounty for them. Scalptaking had a long history in native America, but it also had a narrow, prescribed position. The Dutch at New Amsterdam became the first to offer bounties for scalps, and from the Dutch the practice spread to other Europeans and to Indians who had not previously taken scalps.

Scalping is a modified form of headhunting, and people have practiced headhunting on every continent, including Europe. The ancient Celtic warriors of Europe chopped off heads and strung them on their steeds like a gory necklace when they returned from battle. Of course, by the time the European colonists arrived in America, the tribal practice of headhunting had already died out in Europe.

The taking of heads and using them for religious purposes seems to have arrived late in North America, but it certainly arrived before the Europeans did. Evidence suggests that head taking became more widespread in the southern and eastern part of North America at the same time that a whole complex of Mexican images, including that of the feathered serpent, moved around the Gulf of Mexico and north up the Mississippi River.

Archaeologists today refer to the similar sets of items found across the area as “the Southeastern mortuary complex” or “the Southern ceremonial complex.” The largest cache of artifacts associated with this complex was found in Spiro, Oklahoma.

Among the most intriguing motifs in artifacts found in the Spiro mounds are the frequent portrayals of heads. As distinct from the simple portraits and silhouettes found among the Hopewell artifacts mentioned earlier, these faces frequently show bared teeth and often have eyes or mouths that appear to have been sewn shut. One such striking piece, a jar found near Paducah, Kentucky, stands only sixteen centimeters high and is made in the form of a head with the eyes sewn shut to mere slits. The mouth was not sewn, but the lips seem to have shrunk, revealing the teeth clenched in an expression of apparent pain. Another jar, found at Fortune Mound, Arkansas, has a closed mouth with lips sewn together. Such depictions look very much like trophy heads gathered in war.

In the southern United States, such trophy heads appear in shell and ceramic artifacts. Sometimes they were engraved on round shell gorgets; others were carved from shell. They often occurred with drawings of human bones, which were sometimes themselves incised with designs.

From the Spiro mounds, a sequence of engraved conch shells depict what appear to be dancing warriors, shamans, or gods. In their hands they carry trophy heads, usually held by the hair. Sometimes the dancers appear to be holding snakes or to be wrapped inside a large figure of a snake. In addition to these two-dimensional representations of head-taking, a sculpted pipe depicts a warrior, dressed in full regalia and wearing large earspools, severing the head of a man with a large curved blade. The objects found around Spiro and related sites include a large number of monolithic ceremonial axes, ceremonial flint knives, and maces or batons. Skulls were often found in the graves of high-status individuals. Such graves also contained the skeletons of infants.

In at least some of the native languages, warriors used the word for head rather than scalp in discussing what they did, and in the Iroquois pictographs used in wampum belts, the symbol for scalp was a headless body (Axtell).

Even in the early colonial era, the emphasis remained on taking heads from enemies rather than mere scalps. As early as 1637 the English colonists of Connecticut offered the Mohegans a bounty for every Pequot head delivered to them; the Dutch of New Amsterdam made a similar offer for Raritan heads in 1641. Soon the commercial flow of heads reached such a level that the colonists needed to simplify it; they could not handle so many heads. The simplification seems to have been inspired by the fur trade. We find that by 1675, during the time of King Philip’s War in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the colonists no longer paid a bounty for heads; instead, they offered the Narraganset a bounty merely for the “Head-Skin” of their enemies (Axtell).

The simple expedient of substituting the crown of the scalp for the entire head permitted a sustained commerce in scalps over longer distances and longer periods of time. Heads had to be delivered fresh, before they began to rot and stink, but a properly treated scalp could be preserved for months or even years. After the transition from head bounties to scalp bounties, the colonists commissioned campaigns that penetrated deeper into enemy territory, making the short raids for heads into ever-longer scalp-hunting expeditions.

The colonial powers quickly transformed a gruesome but infrequent act of war into a whole industry. After eliminating enemy Indians around the European communities, the colonists then offered bounties for the more distant allies of other European powers. By 1688 this escalated another step when the French offered bounties not only for the scalps of the Indian allies of the British, but for the scalps of Englishmen themselves. To stop British colonization of New England, they offered ten beaver-skins for every settler’s scalp. In 1696 the British responded with a counteroffer for French scalps (Axtell).

As long as the native warriors took heads in combat, they only wanted the heads of other warriors, but the trade in scalps ignored age and gender. The scalp of a young girl could bring as much on the French or British scalp market as that of a seasoned fighter. The scalp market essentially destroyed the distinction between warrior and noncombatant, an unfortunate development that plagued European-Indian combat for the next two centuries.

As the American frontier pushed westward, the practice of scalping spread quickly before it. Indian nations that had never practiced scalping learned it as they acquired other parts of the newly emerging frontier trade. The scalp trade became as much a part of the West as the sport of buffalo hunting, the commerce in furs, and the spread of corn liquor.

The accumulation of scalps in colonial settlements presented a problem. In the early years the colonists eagerly displayed the scalps in public squares or in public buildings. But in time this practice came to be considered distasteful. In 1785 the village of Salem, Massachusetts, stopped displaying scalps when it built a new courthouse. Many scalp collections ultimately passed into the hands of museums and local historical societies.

In their wars against the Indians, the settlers of New England and Virginia quickly learned that the only way they could avoid Indian traps was through the use of Indian guides and scouts who would help them (Leach). To defeat the Indians, they had to be able to think and act like the Indians. When the colonial armies stood in ranks on the battlefield, the Indians stood behind trees and slaughtered the exposed and brightly dressed soldiers. Since the Indians refused to stand in formation, the colonial soldiers had to learn to take refuge behind trees.

The French learned the lessons of Indian warfare faster than the English, and put those lessons to good use in the protracted imperial wars in America between the two nations. The turning point came when the British drillbook general Edward Braddock tried to take the French-held Fort Duquesne, which guarded the convergence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers into the Ohio at what is now Pittsburgh. Because Braddock had the superior fire-power, he went to battle with great confidence that his men could easily bombard and then seize the fort. On July 9, 1755, before his army could reach the fort, the Indian allies of the French slaughtered Braddock’s army in the woods.

After this bitter defeat, the British authorities recognized what the colonists already knew—that they had to change their European fighting style in America. Benjamin Franklin pointed out that “the manual Exercise and Evolutions taught a Malitia, are known by Experience to be of little or no use in our Woodes …” (Leach). Similarly, General John Forbes wrote, “[We] must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians …” (Leach).

In the following year the colonists began wholesale training in Indian styles. Robert Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Virgina, wrote to George Washington urging him “to teach them as much as possible Bush fighting.” In the same year the British Parliament created a regiment of “Royal Americans” to specialize in forest warfare. In New Hampshire, Robert Rogers organized a troop of rangers skilled in Indian techniques of warfare (Leach).

Having learned the techniques of Indian warfare while fighting the French, the colonists applied these same lessons to their ensuing struggle for independence against the British crown. When the colonists decided to launch a strong public protest against the British tea tax, they chose to dress in Mohawk clothing and stage attacks on cargo ships carrying tea. The rebels darkened their skins, carried tomahawks, marched in single or “Indian” file, and even communicated among themselves with phrases and sign language from unidentified Indian tribes. The most famous such “tea party” rocked Boston Harbor in December 1773, but rebels throughout the colonies undertook similar protests. They always dressed as Indians to do so. This was not done haphazardly or by chance; the colonists had already begun using the Indian as a symbol of resistance to authority and as an icon of liberty (Johansen and Grinde 1989).

In South Carolina, Francis Marion, a Berkeley County plantation owner, first learned about warfare in successive campaigns against the Cherokee in 1759 and 1761. The importance of what he had learned did not become evident until after a series of defeats of colonists by the British in the War for Independence. After the fall of Charleston to the British in May 1780, and the fall of Camden in August, the fledgling American army in the South seemed on the verge of annihilation. At that point Marion took what men he could find into the swamps and attacked the British in surprise raids. His men hit loyalist strongholds and harassed the British supply and communication channels, but in the style of guerrillas, they usually avoided full battles against a much larger and better-supplied army. Francis Marion and his men lived off the land without expensive supply lines, and he became known as “the Swamp Fox” for using essentially Indian-style tactics against the British. In recognition of his success with this style of warfare, the Continental Congress promoted him to brigadier general in 1781.

In Vermont, Ethan Allen organized his Green Mountain Boys to fight against the British and to push for Vermont independence. Like Francis Marion, Ethan Allen had also learned many of his fighting lessons in the French and Indian wars.

The American Revolution did not achieve the scale of guerrilla war that we associate with twentieth-century wars such as the protracted struggles in Algeria against the French, in Vietnam against the Americans, or in Afghanistan against the Soviets. For the most part, the colonists fought a traditional war using a regular army in the European style, but guerrilla warfare often made the crucial difference in cases where the Americans lacked a regular army. Indian-style fighting probably tipped the balance in a war between a small and disorganized group of colonists and the premier military power of the world.

In the nineteenth century, Indian-style warfare continued to be important to the struggling United States against European powers. The United States had to use these tactics in the War of 1812, when Britain controlled the seas and again invaded the United States with an army strong enough to capture and burn the new capital at Washington, D.C.

During most of the nineteenth century, however, the United States grew and built an army and navy largely following European models. If guerrilla warfare was the native influence of the eighteenth century, then fighting on horseback proved to be the major influence of the Indians on the developing American cavalry in the nineteenth century.

Ironically, it was the Europeans who introduced the horse to the Indians, but the Indians of the northern frontier, the Southwest, and the plains invented a new style of fighting on horseback. They adapted their traditional style of bush or guerrilla fighting to horseback, and the resulting armies of Indians probably resembled the ancient equestrian fighters of Central Asia and Arabia more than they did the European models derived from Roman cavalry technology and tactics.

It might be historically more precise to consider the arrival of the horse in European ships as a reintroduction of the animal, since the horse originally evolved in America and wandered to Asia, before becoming extinct in America during the Pleistocene era. From Asia the horse spread into the Middle East and Europe. Every great conquering empire of Asians or Europeans relied heavily on the horse. The Arabs who conquered North Africa and Iberia introduced some of the fastest horses and some of those best adapted for warfare. These Arab and Moorish horses formed the basis for the Spanish steeds brought by Columbus and the subsequent conquistadors of the Caribbean and then the Mexican mainland.

The repopulation of the horse in North America began from the Mexican coast, where Cortez and his men landed. Despite Spanish efforts to keep the horse out of Indian hands, the Indians quickly learned how to handle the animal. The launching of Spansh exploration into the north by Coronado and others introduced the Indians of the southwestern United States to the horse, which quickly became a highly valued and rapidly traded commodity in a market well beyond the power of the Spanish authorities. Horses thrived in the lush grazing lands of North America, and their herds grew so large that many escaped and formed new wild herds that proved an open resource for anyone, including Indians, who wanted to capture and tame them.

Early in the eighteenth century, the horses burst upon the open plains of the modern United States, which provided grazing territory matched only by the vast plains of central Asia. By 1722 the first horses reached the northern plains and the Dakota people, who had just suffered a great loss of land to the Ojibwa, who themselves had been pushed westward by the expanding Atlantic colonies.

The horse dispersed northward from Mexico during the same years that the gun traveled westward from the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes area. The acquistion of these two items by plains tribes in the 1730s produced a whole new culture.

The Indians who lived on the plains, and the neighboring tribes who lived on the prairie and on marginally agricultural lands, quickly adopted the horse and, in doing so, changed their traditional subsistence base. The horse allowed them to pursue the buffalo, rather than hunt it only when it passed through their homeland in its seasonal migrations.

Hunting proved so lucrative and easy compared to the older farming-and-foraging life-style that whole tribes, such as the Cheyenne, gave up growing crops and turned to hunting almost exclusively. When they needed food, tools, or other goods that the buffalo did not supply, they traded their vast harvest of buffalo meat and hides for what they needed.

Riding their fast horses on the open plains gave the Indians their first real chance to resist the onslaught of white settlers from the East. Throughout the nineteenth century, great nations of horsemen—Dakota, Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Assiniboin, Comanche, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Kiowa, and Apache—used the horse as the basis of their struggle against the invaders. The horse allowed them to strike deep into white territory at designated targets, and the horse provided quick and easy flight for warriors and their families from the white armies (Crosby).

Along with the Arabs and the horse tribes of central Asia, the Indians became some of the best horsemen in history. Unlike these other groups, however, the Indians used the horse for hunting and not for herding. The Indians borrowed some of the Arab knowledge and horse technology brought by the Spaniards to America, but they also had to invent much of their own. They operated largely as self-taught horsemen.

Pioneers encountering the Plains Indians adopted horses from them. The English and German settlers arriving in America had little experience with horses beyond the workhorse that pulled the plow or wagon. The use of horses in European combat had been mainly the privilege of the aristocratic elite, and the knowledge of how to handle such animals did not come over to America with the peasant farmers. They knew relatively little of the swift fighting steeds of the Indians, and they didn’t bring with them the rider-warrior mentality of nomadic hunters.

The new settlers and the soldiers sent into the plains quickly recognized the superiority of the Indian horses for speed and agility in long-distance travel as well as combat, and they began adopting the Indian mounts. The appaloosa, with its mottled brown and white coloring, its blotch of white hair on the rump, and its vertically striped hooves became one of the best-known breeds of so-called Indian ponies in the American west, but the settlers adopted many other breeds as well. Cavalrymen and cow-boys both depended greatly on Indian horses.

The increasing numbers of the whites and their steadily developing technology allowed them eventually to defeat the plains warriors. In the end, the train, more than any other weapon, defeated the Plains Indians. The United States cavalry and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police never became as skilled or quick in handling the horses as the Plains Indians, but the train enabled them to transport large armies of men and horses faster and farther than even the fleetest Indian band on horseback.

The railroads also disrupted the migrations of the buffalo and permitted their wholesale slaughter. Without their source of food, the hunting tribes became hungry and filtered into mission stations, Indian forts, and finally reservations, where they could find food. Hunger delivered the final blow to the Indians of the plains.

In a long sequence of campaigns during the nineteenth century, the United States honed the cutting blade of its army on the Indians. The ultimate results could not be in doubt to anyone. By 1890 the practice was over. The army had done all it could to the Indians, but by this time the United States no longer needed the Indian for practice; it was ready to use its army on the world stage.

In the twentieth century the American Indian community again offered great service in the defense of the United States. To forestall any attempt by the enemies of the United States to try to make alliances with the native people, the Navajos reaffirmed their allegiances to the United States and denounced Adolf Hitler, whom they called Man-Who-Smells-Moustache. On June 3, 1940, a full year and a half before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Navajo nation passed a resolution asserting the independent and democratic culture of the “First Americans” and proclaiming their willingness to fight against all foreign invaders who threatened the United States.

Coming from such a small and seemingly unimportant nation as the Navajos, the resolution might have seemed farcical to some people of that time, but the Navajos were to play a unique and often overlooked part in the struggle against the Axis powers. At that time even the Navajos themselves did not know what they were about to accomplish.

The small Navajo nation alone sent a relatively high number of 3,600 men and 12 women off to fight in World War II, including 420 Marines with a unique function. Spread across the Pacific, these men were responsible for encrypted radio communication among American forces. Rather than devise a special new code, the United States Marines depended on the Navajo “Codetalkers” speaking in their own language, which they encoded in special ways, so that for example, “dive bomber” became ginitsoh, which meant “sparrowhawk,” a bird that could swoop down quickly like a dive bomber (Iverson). Through a long list of such word substitutions and word associations, the Codetalkers created a code that the Japanese never broke.

The spirit of men like the Codetalkers and other veterans of the two world wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as the wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, still live in the powwow. The native people do not forget these warriors, and it is for them that the people of today must continue to dance.

On the night of October 30, 1987, a small group of people gathered beneath the Mendota Bridge over the Minnesota River, directly beneath the flight pattern of airplanes into the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. It was only a month after the Mah-kato Powwow, and the early cold that had bedeviled the powwow had intensified and the rain had hardened to become a driving snow.

The Dakota minister Dr. Chris Cavender and Mdewakanton Dakota spiritual leader Amos Owen opened the ceremonies with traditional and Christian prayers. Only about a hundred people could endure the cold darkness, and many of these were elderly Dakota women and their families. In a ceremony reminiscent of the powwow, but distinct from it, they had come to honor the Dakota women and children interned on that spot during the winter of 1862-63, when the Dakota warriors were held and then executed at Mankato.

In 1862 the United States Army erected a civilian internment camp on the banks of the Minnesota River, just below Fort Snelling. The military authorities wanted to hold the women at least a day’s journey from the men as hostages to ensure the good behavior of the captured men. The army also held them in fear that the women might strike back and somehow incite their warriors to fight again.

The men marching to Mankato and the women dragging their children to Fort Snelling had to pass through many small Minnesota towns and settlements where the townspeople lined up to form a gauntlet of hate. Fifteen of the Dakota women received serious injuries from the attacks of the settlers, and the settlers snatched one infant from the arms of its mother and smashed it to death. Exhausted and abused, the Dakota women limped into the camp that was to be their involuntary home for a year.

The black-and-white photographs that survive of the internment camp show a stark image of hundreds of seemingly identical tepees set up to house the 1,600 civilians. The uniformity of the arrangement seems almost too modern for the picture to be from the nineteenth century. At first glance, a viewer might easily mistake the rows of tepees for a Boy Scout encampment or a modern survival camp. But the high wooden stockade around the camp reveals a more sinister intention. Ice covers the river beside the camp, the trees stand bare against the winter, and the thick, hanging smoke that covers the camp indicates the deep cold.

Those old photographs have an eerie quality. The tepees seem so traditional, yet the identical appearance of the tepees, neatly arranged within an enclosure, offers a strange glimpse of a form that was to haunt the twentieth century. The pictures show us the birth of an institution, the beginning of a whole new social practice of concentrating innocent civilians into an area and imprisoning them for protracted periods without charging them with any crime. The British used the same type of camp to intern Boer women and children during their war in South Africa. By the middle of the twentieth century, the concentration camp had spread virtually around the world. The French used them in Algeria, the Germans constructed them in Europe, and the Russians built them in Siberia.

The Americans had chosen to build their fort at the strategic spot where the Minnesota River flowed into the Mississippi. The Mdewakanton Dakota, however, had a different vision of that spot. For them the confluence of the rivers was where their ancestral grandmother and grandfather first emerged from Ina—their mother, the Earth. Mendota marked the sacred place where human life was created.

The weather in the old photographs seems as cold as the night we all gathered on the same spot, 125 years later. Rose Bluestone, Naomi Cavender, and other elders rose one at a time to tell what each knew of her own ancestors who survived and some who died at the internment camp. Bundled in heavy coats and kerchiefs tied tight against the Arctic wind, the women spoke softly and slowly in English mixed with Dakota. The whining automobiles on the bridge overhead and the buzzing airplanes sometimes drowned the women’s voices, but they persisted late into the night. They had come to speak, and they had come to stay the entire night in honor of their ancestors.

They spoke of hardships, such as that of the mother who buried her baby and then saw it again the next day, in the jaws of a starving dog who dragged it through camp. They spoke of the grave injustices of the government against the women, such as the reduction of their food rations, and they spoke of the little injustices and insults to human dignity, such as the soldier guards who urinated on the womens’ tepees during the night. They spoke of great kindnesses, as when townspeople brought food and blankets. They spoke of great achievements, as when the interned women quickly and laboriously taught one another to read the Dakota language using an adapted Latin alphabet and orthography devised by missionaries. The men learned the same system at Mankato, and thus the men and women in families that had never before been separated could still communicate with one another by writing letters, copies of which Dakota people still cling to today as memories of the most trying episode in Mdewakanton history.

As each woman finished speaking, she asked the Mazakute Singers, huddled around their drum, to play an honor song in memory of a grandmother who survived the camp, a grandmother’s sister who died there without children, and the other women who died without anyone to remember their names.

At each request the men sang out loudly, as though determined that the Dakota voice would again fill the valley, no matter how many cars and airplanes might fight to stifle it. As they sang, the old women climbed slowly down from the small podium and shuffled around in a slow dance of honor on the frozen earth. After completing one circle alone or leaning on the arm of a family member for support, each old woman’s descendants and other relatives came out one by one to dance behind her. When they had completed another circle, friends of the family joined them, and finally other people who simply wanted to add their dance of honor for the women of Fort Snelling. The dances seemed to be as much for the old women who led them around the arena as for the long-dead ancestors to whom the honoring songs and dances were dedicated.

Throughout the night, as snow occasionally drifted through the trees, the women continued their speeches and dances of honor while the men drummed and sang. Finally the airplanes stopped landing and taking off, and the cars ceased to pass overhead as commuters all reached the safe warmth of their homes, and the cities went to bed. The women danced on, and when they had said all they had to say about their ancestors, when they had read the names of all the people they knew who had been interned there, they gathered in the still, tight darkness of the sweat lodge to purify themselves for the next morning, when they would smoke the sacred pipe and sing a Dakota hymn.

The Dakota women were making peace, seeking to restore the balance and harmony of the world, to reconcile a history of pain. They danced to bring peace to the people who died there. They danced to bring peace among themselves as well as peace with the white society. They danced to make peace with Ina, the Earth Mother, whose act of creation at the confluence of the two rivers had been desecrated by the internment camp built upon it.

America has learned much about fighting from the ancient Indian warriors, but we have barely begun to learn the elders’ lessons for making peace.