We were told not to be who we are. Don’t be Dakota. Be somebody else. We don’t care who we are, but don’t be Dakota. Don’t speak the language. Now in the year two thousand and twelve we’re asked, “Who are you?” It’s like being put on a pause on a VCR. All of a sudden, somebody pushed the play button.
—Glenn Wasicuna (Lecture, January 05, 2012)
When the Conflict and Remembrance J-term ended, I talked to four Dakota people both closely and loosely associated with the course—Gwen Westerman, Wa Duta Winyan (Pamela Halverson), Sheldon Wolfchild, and Waziyatawin. Each told me a different story about getting involved in a commemorative project in 2012 that sounded promising in terms of truth-telling or social justice, but then pulling out or being excluded once things drifted toward white balance. Long-established institutions produced the projects they spoke of—the Minnesota Historical Society, Twin Cities Public Television, St. Lucia College, and the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS).
Glenn Wasicuna’s metaphor of the VCR gives some idea of the cruel prospects Dakota people face whenever a U.S.-Dakota War anniversary rolls around, having been put on pause for decades by whitestream Minnesota, and then being put on play only to see their people’s trauma set on scales already tipped toward white victimhood. In this, I suspect many well-meaning white educators embark on projects underestimating the continuing ripple effects of the white ontological shudder, the ((gasp)) handed down from 1862 that Dr. Lenz performed in interview. Perhaps they remain susceptible to sensational stories propagated by the early histories and their anti-Indian sublime discourses (Silver, 2008), not really knowing whether they’re true but being inclined to believe them because they seem to come from authoritative sources. Perhaps they underestimate the degree to which they will be lobbied by regional lay historians working to counteract social justice education on the war. Regardless, I heard various messages of distrust, cynicism, and bitterness across these post-J-term conversations when I asked more about the high-profile sesquicentennial projects these Dakota speakers told of. Wa Duta Winyan and Wolfchild emphasized self-promotion and profit as especially divisive factors, Wa Duta Winyan flatly telling me that whites use the sacrifices of the Dakota people to make money (Interview, March 20, 2012).
In The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Frantz Fanon writes of the “Who am I in reality?” question that resounded throughout Glenn Wasicuna’s lecture, taking different trajectories toward the Dakota self—“Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?” Fanon tells that the question arises and repeats among people not simply dominated by a colonial power, but among people racialized in the process of colonization, people rendered nullius, made into “natural backdrops” for the enhancement of the privileged white identity (p. 182). Told in the previous chapter, Wasicuna had a clear answer to the “Who am I?” question, but it came with the well-founded sense that nobody in whitestream Minnesota was really listening.
On the surface, today’s Minnesota is not the brutal regime of 1862, nor is it like the French-Algeria Fanon once wrote of. If there were something like a million or more Dakota people living in Minnesota today or just across its western border seeking return of their homeland, it likely would be. At the same time, I argue that Minnesota still is the white “citizen factory” public commemorators defined it as in Mankato during the 1912 U.S.-Dakota War semicentennial (“Outbreak of the Indian War,” 1912). A rich state with a relatively high quality of life for whites, the state ranks near the “worst” in the nation on racial disparities (Gee, 2016; Jones, 2019; Wagner, 2017). One of those nearly “worst” measures regards the opportunity gap in education (Shockman, 2019). Its licensed K-12 teaching force currently stands at 94% white (“Race/ethnicity of licensed staff,” 2019). The brutal killing of George Floyd in May 2020 recently put the state’s violence against people of color where it appropriately belongs, in the international spotlight. It should come as no surprise, then, that many Dakota people spoke plainly about racism against their people in 2012. Just as with the state’s history of genocide, there is much evidence to support these claims by statistics alone.
At various points, J-term participants insisted that what they were learning about was still happening. White audience members browsing the Conflict and Remembrance panels in March 2012 asked students why the conflict was still happening (Interview, April 26, 2012). Tom, the most likely to speak in defense of settler society, told me “there’s still this perception no matter what that Indians are drunks. Even now, like 150 years after our conflict, we still- like you still see people walking around saying that Indians are nothing but drunks and that they’re stealers and thieves and lazy. Why is that?” (Interview, January 09, 2012). I don’t necessarily doubt this claim, but I never once heard slurs like these when conducting my research. Glenn Wasicuna’s VCR image suggests something more subtle is going on with today’s “systematized negation of the other” (Fanon, p. 182). This book has sought to locate where systematized negation operates in everyday interactions and how. Ultimately, I hope it has helped explain why many Dakota people continue to be “paused” or turned off despite efforts in 2012 to include their voices in high-profile commemorative projects.
Rather than straightforward slurs, white racism found expression in 2012 through a seemingly endless stream of white-justice-as-fairness discourses that routinely reconstructed the state’s citizen-scholar as superior to Dakotas when it comes to special skills for attaining neutrality, objectivity, fairness, and balance. Empowered white commentators continually reassured themselves and fellow white citizens that they share an enhanced capacity for remaining reasonable when considering perspectives from 1862. They claimed to stay clear of political agendas even as their works proceeded to politicize the war by failing to acknowledge their own politics (Giroux, 2000). They carried out sophisticated neutralizing work by leveling the interests of “all” to states of sameness, past and present. They obscured white agency in a history of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They elevated slave-owners and Indian killers to hallowed status for once having believed in their respective causes. They defended white property across time. Until white producers of public knowledge recognize the racially divisive practices involved in taking up the dominant discourses of white justice as fairness, their speeches, books, exhibits, and teachings will continually reopen the living wounds they speak so solemnly about and sometimes say they hope to see healed.
Below, I want to take one last look into what transpired when historical societies, schools, and mainstream media outlets hit the collective play button on the U.S.-Dakota War in 2012. This conclusion revisits the J-term to imagine building solidarity for a similar-looking museum exhibit, but one that would engage critical-social-justice education and promote collective intervention in a situation of injustice. I base this imagining not simply on how I think I might have done it had I been the instructor, but rather on what students told me they would have done had they been able to speak from the heart as critical Dakota speakers had advised them to do. Finally, this conclusion takes a brief look into what has happened regionally since the collective pause button was pushed again in 2013, summarizing the state of the broader white public pedagogy after the sesquicentennial, at least as I have experienced it living in Mankato.
Imagining Empowered Student Knowledge Workers and the Unwritten Exhibit
Obviously, I have aimed a lot of criticism at the Conflict and Remembrance exhibit and the teaching methods behind its production. As one who has taken seriously Waziyatawin’s titular question from 2008, What Does Justice Look Like?, it would be tempting to suggest that such a project should never have taken place at all. Indeed, the institutions involved seem incorrigibly colonial.1 It stands to reason that the knowledge they produce will protect their historic interests, especially on a topic so integral to their founding. Yet the public does need to know about the U.S.-Dakota War. Hundreds of people learned from the lecture series, including me. Thousands have seen the exhibit. My answer then is not that the project shouldn’t have happened but simply that students’ critical prior knowledge should have been honored, nourished, and made central to the exhibit writing process.
Understanding that to withhold trust, limit inquiry, and erase agency for students is to engage in oppressive educational practice (Freire, 2010), I can only conclude that Stephanie should have been supported in presenting subaltern perspectives and modeling her panel after work done by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, as she told me she had wanted to do late in the J-term—“I think that what happened with the Native Americans is really very similar if not exactly the same and there’s no way- no one wants to do that and get into that” (Interview, January 24, 2012). Jennifer should have been encouraged to go deeper into the frontier press and find ways to deconstruct settler innocence for the implied white audience, carrying off the “far more scathing review of what went down” she had originally planned (Interview, January 18, 2012). Sarah should have been pushed to develop a panel about decolonization, as she told me she initially wanted to do (Interview, January 26, 2012). Lori should have been urged to speak out against the divisive effects of cutting Dakota history off at 1863 so that she could “show respect for them [Dakotas] as people,” a failure in her exhibit that she was telling me about on the last day of the J-term (Interview, March 27, 2012). Such desires went beyond J-termers highlighted in this book, with Monica wanting to agitate for taking down Fort Snelling and critique whites for glorifying themselves and failing to educate the public about 1862 across time (Interview, January 23, 2012).
For such a critical museum exhibit to take shape, dominant white-justice-as-fairness discourses and their relation to white identity and white property would have to be examined with students rather than simply repeated uncritically in the classroom. Since J-term students were required to actively engage in public pedagogy on the war, it would seem only right to take on its politics with them, reading and interpreting not only past but current examples together as literature. This would help demystify the threat of white political savagery and prepare students to respond in critically educative ways should it arise. In reading examples of anti-Indian-sublime discourses from the early white sources and analyzing how they directly impact “low” but influential forms of literature on the war being produced today in self-published booklets, newspaper columns, letters to the editor, and online chatter, students could develop strategies for disrupting the commonsense white supremacy circulating around them. This would be a way of helping students learn who the audience is and what the audience knows rather than creating unnecessary dilemmas for them, assuming a general childlike public on one hand while fearing the wrath of white “ancestors” on the other. Central to all such work would be teaching how to unpack white double standards that continue to plague commonsense regional narratives, especially as told through “balanced” products that take input from carefully selected Dakota people and seem appropriately multicultural for having presented “perspectives.”
These recommendations mainly concern methods that could drive a badly needed critical pedagogy on the war for whitestream Minnesota. They are about reframing ways of knowing, the epistemology engaged in teaching and learning. But what about ways of being, the white ontology that could develop around such work? How could white teachers and students build a different sense of we than the one that developed during the J-term where a heightened sense of shared reason eventually betrayed its true interests by defending white property when faced with controversy? Clearly, sitting and listening to Dakota speakers did not do the trick, as important as that work was. More is needed to break the cycle of perpetual white superiority and forgetting; namely, creating conditions where white citizen scholars can go beyond their passive positions as “listeners” and repeaters of dominant discourses to engage independent thought and interpretive moral judgment on 1862.
If experiences like the Conflict and Remembrance J-term are about learning academic language and acquiring literacy in public-history practices, as professional educators have it, then focusing on the retention of learners’ own voices throughout the history-writing process is essential to growth (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Vygotsky, 1978). Only this way will learners come to develop critical consciousness with the material, bringing it into conversation with prior critical knowledge they already carry about the past (e.g., slavery, genocide against Native peoples, racial segregation, the Holocaust) and the present (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, crimes against humanity carried out in the name of “homeland” or “national security,” etc.)
Regionally, the biggest challenge in this work is getting white teachers and students through the ontological shudder of 1862—the ((gasps))—with their critical-thinking skills still intact. While an important starting point for this is resisting the banking concept of education (Freire, 2010) witnessed in Chapters 3 and 4 that assumes everyone to be equally ignorant about this particular history,2 doing comparative work with other early histories across America’s “Indian wars” and proceeding to build cross-racial solidarity with critical Dakota educators are key. This last point would require avoiding forms of tokenism that seem pluralist but actually privilege uncritical Dakota voices. Leveraging critical Dakota voices was a desire sometimes expressed by more vocal students like Steven and Jennifer. Like Steven who said he hoped some people would “get pissed” by the exhibit, Jennifer said, “I think that I would give voice to people that are pissed off,” when asked to imagine a panel truly hers (Interview, January 18, 2012). Although the problem of who wields the power to “give voice” still resides in such a statement, the sentiment nevertheless reveals an untapped desire to enact a critical pedagogy on 1862 by crossing the racial/political divide.
In context of the fearful white public pedagogy I describe, however, all of these imaginings sound inappropriate, radical, and unfeasible for being overly idealistic. Yet the unwritten panels proposed by students would have been wholly in line with other “controversial” presentations and activities taking place at the St. Lucia College social-justice conference the very day the Conflict and Remembrance exhibit was unveiled to the public. Alan, Jennifer, and Sarah had all helped plan that conference in 2012.3 Sarah told me its purpose of making people uncomfortable and moving them to take action for social change (Interview, January 26, 2012). She related the conference’s overwhelming success in recent years and laughed at the white disapproval it always seemed to bring, noting a certain elderly couple who attended the year before and complained to the College’s Director of Diversity that “‘This topic is not appropriate for a Caucasian school’” (Interview, January 26, 2012). If planned differently, I argue that the Conflict and Remembrance course could have gone this same way with white resistance rather than Dakota resistance rendered inevitable and broad support summoned to handle that resistance constructively.
I don’t know what would be appropriate to say, you know, what do you do? You know, do you say go ahead and do something more radical and then screw St. Lucia? Screw anything else from ever happening in the future? You know, screw any kind of exhibits like this? Screw any kind of education? Huh? What’s right? I have no idea. If it was my way, you know what I would do? (Interview, January 18, 2012)
Jennifer proceeded to tell me about needing to place more responsibility on white society. Her remarks struck me as an almost apocalyptic response induced by the white public pedagogy, as if producing any other kind of exhibit than the politically safe one taking shape would have resulted in white backlash so terrible that nothing like it on the U.S.-Dakota War would ever be allowed to happen again.
But Jennifer’s extreme response made perfect sense in light of the cautious pedagogy enacted by her teachers daily. Her fears and perceived lack of alternative approaches to the history fit little moments like when Harwell made sure to note he wasn’t advocating Bob Dylan’s perspective by playing “With God on Our Side.” It fit big recurring moments as well like when Dr. Lenz marginalized Waziyatawin and her book What Does Justice Look Like? As mentioned, Dr. Lenz had a reputation as an esteemed scholar in Women’s Studies and the Holocaust. Holly and Christina had taken classes from her before. Across interviews and focus-group discussions, they described her as a critical educator who assigned books pertaining to gender, feminism, and colonial histories, holding students to a high standard interpreting them in the classroom. She incorporated critical theory into her teaching and expected her students to write thoughtful pieces on gender, race, and oppression.
As witnessed, Dr. Lenz took a different approach in the fast-paced J-term and the difference wasn’t always so easily chalked up to a time crunch. On the second day of class, for instance, she told students to “be wary of applying twentieth-century feminist values” to Ella Deloria’s Waterlily without explaining why. Jennifer expressed confusion about this in focus group later that week—“I just feel like every other culture is under scrutiny for how they- for how women are treated, you know? And so I just- I mean, I didn’t understand. And I mean, I respect that and obviously, you know, she’s probably got a reason for why she wants us to stay away from that, but I don’t know” (Focus group, January 6, 2012). The reasons for not interpreting remained a mystery and left students to speculate, one telling me St. Lucia had probably told the instructors to take special care not to stir public controversy because it could lead to bad PR for the College (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012). In interviews, the instructors assured me this was not the case, but the effect of interpretive caution suggested extraordinary institutional (ideological) pressures were in play.4
- Holly:
I wish we’d gotten to discuss Waterlily more. Just because like- like we’re both English majors and like ((addressing Christina)) I’m used to like close reading a book and then discussing every little detail in class. A lot. And so it was really weird because-
- Christina:
To kind of skim over it.
- Holly:
Yeah. And professor Lenz’s like my advisor and I had her for an English class this past fall semester. So like to have her assign us a book and then just kind of like skim over it, it was like “Whoa! What are we doing?” (Focus group, January 13, 2012)
I mean I’d still want to focu- like, I’d still want to- I know what I’m interested in like as (2.5) °as a person° like I told you I’m interested in the Holocaust and sexual violence and learning that kind of stuff, and I’ve seen a lot of like- we’ve talked about it in class, and the 38 who were con- you know, who were convicted for hanging were because they were involved in rapes or this and this and this so that element was really interesting and that’s something I would have been interested in (1.5) portraying, but I don’t know if it’s (.) um. (Interview, January 20, 2012)
The moment where Christina pauses and lowers her volume to note her personhood just before explaining the interpretive orientation Dr. Lenz had helped her develop strikes me as one similar to when Alan stopped himself short of independent thought, lowered his voice, and switched to we while commenting on the creation of a linear exhibit in Chapter 2. I find it reminiscent as well of the times Jennifer erased subjects from her sentences when coming close to naming the source of the demand for balance. In such moments, students weren’t merely marking tensions between their individual voices and the collective voice taking shape in the group project, they were also marking contradictions between critical orientations they had learned at St. Lucia and ideological demands suddenly placed on them when helping the same institution craft a public transaction with fellow whites over the U.S.-Dakota War, an endeavor that always seems to compel citizens to suspend both judgment and their socially situated selves.
As noted, Christina identified as non-white in this same interview. She brought up her minoritized status for the first time in class the following final week (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012). Again, when doing so, she said she had found it hard to position herself in the class. I read her participation as a form of hard labor carried out in southern Minnesota’s white citizen factory.
I feel like- I mean- you know, that’s some- not something people want to talk about in general in our society. In the books that we’ve read, sexuality is not addressed. The feminist perspective isn’t, you know, shou- shouldn’t always be applied because it’s not, you know- (Interview, January 20, 2012)
She didn’t finish the thought. Christina and Holly’s cases show that positioning students as having “essentially started at zero” in the J-term was no easy matter of the instructors telling them they had little to no prior knowledge about this specific war. It required instructors making numerous discursive moves daily, inducing students to accept for the time being that their critical prior knowledge did not apply. Student faith and trust in authority played decisive roles in this co-construction of the zero point for purposes of managing everyone’s moral judgment. When commenting on Dr. Lenz’s warning against interpretive engagement, Jennifer said, “I respect that and obviously, you know, she’s probably got a reason for why she wants us to stay away from that.”
Like with Stephanie, Sarah, Jennifer, and Lori’s unwritten panels, Christina should have been encouraged to write a panel about the rape discourses circulating around the post-war trials. After all, there was a panel theme labeled “Trials and Hanging” on the syllabus with no directive information about what angle to take. Bibliographic information instructors compiled for this panel and provided to students listed sources containing information on rape discourses—Mary Wingerd (2010), John Bessler (2003), William Green (2007). As it turned out, Rachel and Tracy’s panel, “A Bitter End,” states, “In total, 323 Dakota were convicted of crimes ranging from murder of civilians to simply being present at a battle with U.S. troops.” Accusations of rape that so strongly drove the first phase of the trial process are not mentioned anywhere in the exhibit unveiled in March.
- a.
student prior knowledge,
- b.
critical sources included in bibliographic materials,
- c.
critical Dakota voices, and
- d.
objectives written into the course syllabus “to study the ‘linguistic turn’ in history,” and to “raise awareness of the treatment of indigenous people in the 19th century.”
Listening carefully to students, trusting them as competent knowledge workers, and incorporating their critical voices into the project rather than editing them away could have produced a more socially just exhibit advocating for regional social change.
Hitting the Pause Button Again: The Reproduction of White Ignorance
Sheldon Wolfchild carried three books with him when he visited the J-term classroom, Vine Deloria’s God Is Red (1973), Roy Meyer’s History of the Santee Sioux (1967), and David Nichols’s Lincoln and the Indians (1978). The last two volumes were tattered and stuffed with papers he used to mark important passages. Telling the class both were out of print, he added, “As a Dakota, you have to wonder why.” He opened to the first page of chapter four in Meyer about the treaty system, turned the book around and held it out so that everyone could read its title— “The Monstrous Conspiracy” (Fieldnotes, January 16, 2012).
Removal was fundamentally racial segregation. In the minds of whites, it did not differ essentially from the already well documented separatist attitudes whites expressed toward blacks in American life. Race, rather than behavior, was the foundation for categorization and removal just as in segregation. (p. 189)
Yet in 2012, it sounded perfectly reasonable to treat removal as an inevitable outcome of a corrupt treaty system, rapid settler migration, or a clash of cultures, all without discussing race.
Conclusions like those above from Meyers and Nichols almost have an old-fashioned, simplistic feel to them in the context of today’s white public pedagogy. Regionally, public discourses promoting the notion that the war is so “complex” as to defy interpretation repeatedly imply without saying in so many words that race is only one equally valid lens through which to make sense of events from 1862. Academic discourses often do this as well. After considering the importance of whiteness and identity construction in The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity Literature (2009), Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola moves on to analyze complex multi-ethnic relationships and perspectives from the 1860s, writing at one point, “The war’s significances can only be approached through a range of texts whose words endlessly spar with each other but do not ultimately reach any overarching truth” (p. 28).
In all the complexity, it is both easy and convenient for whites to lose sight of white supremacy’s one-way ideological trajectory as settlers wrested the fundamental social good away from Dakota people. I would never argue that the U.S.-Dakota War is not complex, yet its complexities wither in comparison to other histories of race such as in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue (Haiti) where race hysteria led experts to make 128 racial categories of people ranging from the supposed pure white, through various strata of “quarterons” and “maribous,” etc., to the supposed pure black, all of them of course being fictive constructs. As C. L. R. James writes in The Black Jacobins (1963), “the sang-mêlé with 127 white parts and 1 black part was still a man of colour” (p. 38). Complex orientations in Saint Domingue included free blacks who opposed the abolition of slavery and, the unthinkable in Minnesota, a white leader who fought against whites because he thought the black rebels were upholding ideals of freedom and equality better than the planters. Despite all this, James manages to keep the core issue in view while telling the history of the Haitian Revolution—race not as the reason but as the justification whites used to seize land, generate wealth and prestige, and defend property at the expense of people they dehumanized.
* * *
Effects of the regional call for an ignorant white public to educate itself during the sesquicentennial have been mixed. Since 2012, some white support has backed a number of successful movements led by Dakota and other Native people to push for socially just forms of public commemoration in Minnesota. Among these have included relocation and recontextualization of racist nineteenth-century paintings misrepresenting Dakota people inside the State Capitol in St. Paul (“Reconciling history,” n.d.); restoring the name of Minneapolis’s Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska (Otárola, 2020); and the ceremonial burial of artist Sam Durant’s reconstruction of the 1862 Mankato hanging scaffold at the Walker Art Center sculpture garden in Minneapolis (Cascone, 2017; “Following sculpture garden controversy,” 2018). The first two of these outcomes came after long political struggles tenaciously resisted by advocates of the white Minnesota’s Heritage discourse community discussed in previous chapters (“Local historians urge Capitol,” 2015; Stenzel, 2015; Prather, 2018; Kersten, 2019).
Similar high-profile controversy has affected the Mankato region as well with current debate centered on renaming (Henry) Sibley Park which once served as a concentration camp for Dakota prisoners prior to the 1862 hanging (Meyer, p. 129). This movement has been instigated too by Native activism (Anti-colonial Land Defense) and publicly resisted by Dahlin (2020) and fellow “Family and Friends of Dakota Uprising Victims” on their Facebook page. Yet, something more troubling than this has been going on, I think, with white resistance applied since the sesquicentennial, a negation confirming Glenn Wasicuna’s VCR metaphor where white producers of public knowledge have worked to see that the collective pause button has been pushed again.
In its weekly “Glimpse of the Past” series featuring research from regional county historical societies, the Mankato Free Press churned out 50 articles in 2013 demonstrating how little had been retained from 2012’s commemorative activities (Lybeck, 2015, pp. 404–406). Of over 200 people mentioned in these pieces, only 3 were indigenous. Sixteen of the 50 articles gave biographical portraits of historical figures, none of whom were indigenous. Eleven of the articles touched on the 1862 war, 8 merely mentioning it to enhance the entrepreneurial spirit, benevolence, or bravery of whites being featured. Of the other 3 articles focusing primarily on an aspect of the war, 2 did so to emphasize white benevolence or bravery. Only 2 of the 50 articles featured people of color, one to promote a book written by an 1862 white-settler descendant. “Glimpse of the Past” articles often serve as a form of boosterism, providing historical context to upcoming events like county fairs, music festivals, Minnesota Vikings football training camp, etc. Yet on the week of the 2013 Mahkato Wacipi (powwow), readers learned about the historic bridges of Blue Earth County. On the last day of the Mahkato Wacipi, readers learned about men from Faribault County recruited to fight for the Union in 1862 and who ended up dying in a Confederate prison. Two articles occurred around the somber anniversary of the December 26 hanging, one on how Blue Earth County residents celebrated the holidays in 1885, the other on the history of shopping at a renowned department store in Waseca, Minnesota. Six county historical societies contributed to this body of articles. Two had won national awards for their work on the U.S.-Dakota War the previous year.
Knowledge production like this shows an important way systematized negation of the other takes place, even where high-profile “progressive” movement seems to be underway. Looking back on the public call for citizens to learn more about the U.S.-Dakota War early in 2012, the “remarkable” lack of public knowledge does not seem so remarkable after all (“Dakota-U.S. War history,” January 10, 2012). Rather than a naturally occurring phenomenon, public ignorance comes from a sustained desire to ignore (Giroux, 2000). Forgetting functions this way as well. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “Like the noun ignorance, which shares its etymology with the verb to ignore, forgetting is not a passive condition. To forget, like to ignore, is an active verb, an act from which one turns away. It is an achieved state” (Stoler, p. 141; emphases Stoler’s).
I hope my writing has helped explain the repeated forgetting of the U.S.-Dakota War as a racializing or whitening phenomenon. Following the thinking that prevailed in 2012, normative white citizens owed it to themselves to learn how their white-man’s state was made, a purpose seemingly designed for enhancing the historically unscarred individual’s sense of educated citizenship (“Dakota-U.S. War history,” January 10, 2012). But during the year, these citizens revealed various ways they actually “owed it” to others as well, namely, fellow whites and white ancestors both real and symbolic. For whites, exercising this kind of educated citizenship meant taking up objectivist stances on 1862 and making payments that depleted their personal critical funds, all while striving to meet intergenerational demands placed on them by settler society’s age-old social contract—white justice as fairness. With this sense of mutual obligation engaged, Minnesota’s citizen-scholar temporarily suspended moral judgment in 2012 and set to the task of fashioning new commemorative artifacts that would obscure whites’ roles in a history of genocide for generations to come.
- 1.
Historical society representatives are well aware of this fact and readily own the white heritage that drives their work. As former Minnesota History Center Director Daniel Spock states in the 2013 Twin Cities Public Television production The Past Is Alive Within Us: The U.S.-Dakota Conflict, “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 are the same men who benefited financially from those transactions. Our organization is founded by these men in part to, you know, memorialize their achievements” (1:19:58).
- 2.
Dr. Lenz made a point to teach students explicitly about the privileged colonial attitude that encourages treatment of disempowered people as blank slates. When discussing Ella Deloria’s Waterlily, she read a passage from the book’s Afterword (pp. 237–238), quoting a letter where Deloria once described her mission: “To make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them. I feel that one of the reasons for the lagging advancement of the Dakota has been that those who came out among them to teach and preach, went on the assumption that the Dakota had nothing, no rules of life, no social organization, no ideals. And so they tried to pour white culture into, as it were, a vacuum, and when that did not work out, because it was not a vacuum after all, they concluded that the Indians were impossible to change and train. What they should have done first, before daring to start their program, was to study everything possible of Dakota life….” (Fieldnotes, January 4, 2012). I found the juxtaposition of teaching students about the problem of the banking model of education (Freire, 2010) while simultaneously positioning them as starting out from zero suggestive of a profound separation between theory and practice in instruction (Fieldnotes, January 4, 2012).
- 3.
Many possibilities for a critical J-term project on 1862 were suggested in St. Lucia’s 2012 social-justice conference. For example, in one event, Alan spoke out powerfully against the genocide of Native people to a large audience gathered in the campus chapel with the national anthem playing in the background. In another, on the same stage where Corrine Marz and Gary Clayton Anderson had recently delivered racially divisive lectures, John Trudell addressed an audience by saying, “I want to talk to you as one human being to another you know, dealing with this race thing as a human being […] I am the outcome of genocide […] but I know I am a human being […] We’ve been imprinted to believe and not taught to think. We’ve been imprinted to believe that believing is thinking but we’re not taught to think. The best educated people are imprinted to believe that believing is thinking but not truly taught to think” (Lecture, March 10, 2012). The only J-term public speaker who received as enthusiastic an ovation as John Trudell was Dr. Gwen Westerman who had talked straight about genocide, as recounted in Chapter 6 (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012).
- 4.
There is of course the issue of cultural difference that would need to be addressed when bringing forms of white feminism to bear on Waterlily. Yet, as I witnessed it, institutional pressures warning Dr. Lenz and everyone else off critical interpretation began with questions at the Mankato history conference in 2011 like “What do you plan to do about students simply passing judgment on people of the past from their modern perspectives?” (Field journal, September 22, 2011). Such pressures continued throughout this collaboration with Harwell and others who were networked with the regional historical societies. Regionally, county historical societies work very hard to avoid “presentism” on matters of race, an important example coming after publication of Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle’s The Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota in 2013. In a Free Press article discussing Hatle’s new book (Dyslin, 2013), three historical society representatives were interviewed. “Area historical societies said, for the most part, the Klan gathered to socialize,” the story reported. “‘They did burn a cross in St. James,’ one representative noted, ‘(But mostly) it was a social club.’” Another representative said, “It was kind of a little bit different organization then. It was more of a patriotic organization that kind of sprang out of World War I. …A lot of folks are going into this with a present-day attitude (about KKK violence and terrorism), and it really at that time probably wasn’t that.” The director of the Blue Earth County Historical Society added, “the group truly believed they were promoting what was right and just.” It all seemed to be okay because, as Hatle told the reporter, “In Minnesota, we just didn’t have many black people.” The story failed to mention however Hatle’s observation that “Closer examination of what occurred in Minnesota is long overdue regarding the Ku Klux Klan and the damage it did to communities here, even destroying some individuals’ lives in the process” (p. 14), a statement based on violence and terrorism carried out by the KKK in Minnesota against both blacks and whites as Hatle’s book reveals.