“Official Perspective”
For white Minnesotans working in historically colonial state institutions, suspending moral judgment about the U.S.-Dakota War rose to the level of an urgent collective need in 2012. Whether balancing perspectives from points of no perspective or presenting “the facts” so that majority-white audiences could decide for themselves what happened in 1862, empowered producers of public knowledge routinely modeled ways of remaining neutral on a situation of injustice and, thus, choosing the side of the oppressor.
We’re not going to get into who was right and who was wrong. We’re trying to stay as neutral as we can. (in Ojanpa, 2011)
—Jessica Potter, Blue Earth County Historical Society, December 22, 2011
There is no great benefit in trying to weigh who was more at fault during the times that led up to and during the conflict. […] Learning and discussing the facts, as best they can be found and as fairly as possible, should be the goal in this sesquicentennial year. (in “Dakota-U.S. War history,” 2012)
—Mankato Free Press, January 10, 2012
There’s still a lot of people looking for the villain here. But if we can move a little bit closer to recognizing that nobody came out of this well, everybody lost something, then I think we will at least have moved a little step in the right direction. (in Picardi, 2012)
—Kate Roberts, Minnesota History Center, July 10, 2012
I hope what people get out of this is there are lots of different perspectives. That doesn’t make someone right and someone else wrong — people just have differing perspectives about the same events. (in Krohn, August 12, 2012)
—Ben Leonard, Nicollet County Historical Society, August 12, 2012
We are not looking at this from the perspective of who’s right and who’s wrong, but simply what happened here. (in Ojanpa, 2012)
—Darla Gebhard, Brown County Historical Society, August 19, 2012
***
In January 2011, the Mankato Free Press printed an editorial “thumbs up” to a project going on at North Dakota State University (“Dakota Translations Welcome”). Retired Dakota Presbyterian ministers Clifford Canku and Michael Simon were translating selected letters written in 1863 by Dakota men originally sentenced to hang in 1862 but who had received pardons from President Lincoln. Prior to their eviction from Minnesota, these 265 men sat detained indefinitely in a Mankato prison. Approximately 120 of them ended up dying not long afterward in a prison in Davenport, Iowa (Meyer, 1967, p. 144). Canku and Simon’s work has since been published by the Minnesota Historical Society as The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters (2013).
But let us not forget that those wonderful letters that were translated were written with Latin letters brought by white Christians. They would not be here today if not for those kind enough to have taught writing or transcribed the words spoken to them. I guess some people just tend to forget that when writing about “a terrible moment in Native American history.” (Gray, January 28, 2011)
In going back to the original Minnesota Public Radio News story about the translation project that had provided the Free Press occasion for its thumbs up, I learned of disappearances of Dakota prisoners who would not convert to Christianity and of rapes of Dakota women at the hands of white prison guards (Gunderson, 2011). Gray’s letter seemed to cast all this as part of a larger humanitarian effort.
The day this letter ran, I happened to be reading British professor Brian Street’s book Literacy in Theory and Practice (1984), an important text in Literacy Education, my field of study. In that volume, Street critiques the “autonomous model” of literacy where the capacity for abstract reasoning in a group of people is supposedly best evidenced by their development of alphabetic technology for Western-style reading and writing practices, what anthropologist Jack Goody once called “the technology of the intellect” (Street, p. 65). As Street points out, such cultural conceits have historically led to a failure among researchers to identify literacy practices already present among the allegedly “pre-literate” people they have studied.
Street’s book shows how Eurocentric notions of literacy tend to go hand in hand with other white conceits about civilization, Christianity, reason, and race that regularly cast nonwhite people in terms of their alleged deficiencies. Reading Gray’s letter to the editor on a morning when I was just beginning to absorb Street’s analysis made me wonder about the subtle ways old colonizing beliefs about race and literacy might still be circulating around me. On one level, the letter’s racism was easy to see. I didn’t need a doctorate to know that the “white side” to colonization had not been ignored in white American communities like Mankato. Growing up in Marietta, Ohio, a town that boasts of being the “first settlement in the Northwest Territory” despite its founding on an ancient village or “earthworks,” I had learned at an early age that the opposite was the case, that the Indian side to colonization had literally been graded over and its people all but erased from the official white public narrative. As I have come to understand more deeply, literacy provides some of the most powerful tools of conquest, a point underscored by the locations of the public libraries in my two hometowns—Marietta’s elevated on an ancient “Hopewell” mesa (White & White, 2004) and Mankato’s positioned at the hanging site.
The intersection of Street’s book and Gray’s letter invited me to consider white supremacy on more subtle levels, however, connecting it to aspects of literacy previously benign to me like the alphabet. Not even in my former days as an English teacher in the Minneapolis public schools had I really been urged to think this carefully about the relationship between race and letters. Finding it stated so starkly in the newspaper sparked curiosity for me in multiple directions. If I continued to collect pieces of public discourse about the U.S.-Dakota War as I studied, would other connections emerge as rich as this one? Was the literacy-racism link circulating among people seemingly more reasonable than Gray? On what felt like an entirely different front, why would the newspaper even bother to run a letter like Gray’s? The editor probably received racist letters and e-mails all the time, or so I figured. Why would he run this particular one just then, designed as it was to spread salt on the wounds of 1862? Put another way, why would the editor seem to take those wounds seriously in Saturday’s edition only to turn around and subject them to denigration the following Friday? This question grew more troubling to me as time passed. No further columns or letters were printed on the subject. Gray got the last word on the Dakota prisoner-of-war letters in Mankato.
The remainder of this Introduction chronicles the early part of my work actively pursuing these questions while witnessing high-profile commemorative events unfold during the sesquicentennial in Mankato. In the process, I continue to characterize the regional white public pedagogy on the war as one strongly urging citizen-scholars to take up “neutral,” “objective,” “fair,” and “balanced” positions indicative of those listed in the “Official Perspective” framing this Introduction. Analyzing more examples from the pubic pedagogy will enable me to identify two competing senses of justice in play: (a) critical social justice which is equity oriented, seeking educative redress and material reparations for ongoing injustices forged by the U.S.-Dakota War, and (b) white justice as fairness which is equality oriented, asserting notions of sameness or “balance” in the here and now and seeking no concessions of either the white psyche or white property, thus serving to uphold the unjust social status quo. Theorizing the two senses of justice will help me contextualize teaching-and-learning moments analyzed later in the book’s chapters where instructors and students negotiated choices between critical social justice and white justice as fairness and ultimately reconstructed racial dilemmas and divides historically rooted in both regional and personal white identities.
Getting Involved with the J-Term Course Conflict and Remembrance
Continuing to think through relationships between David J. Gray’s letter and Brian Street’s book on literacy, I began collecting everything I could find being written and said publicly about the U.S.-Dakota War. As a Mankato Free Press subscriber, I began clipping out everything relevant to 1862, amassing over 100 articles and letters printed between 2011 and 2013. As the largest daily newspaper in south-central Minnesota, the Free Press provided stories and reports on commemorative activities and upcoming events held not only in Mankato but in surrounding communities also affected by the war like New Ulm and Gotland 1 where I eventually conducted my fieldwork. The paper also features a weekly “Glimpse of the Past” series to which six regional county historical societies contributed articles during the period in question. At the same time, I combed the internet, capturing articles from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, and regional newspapers like the Redwood Falls Gazette, New Ulm Journal, and Le Sueur Herald, printing or bookmarking over 60 pieces relevant to war-related themes like healing, reconciliation, balance, neutrality, and perspectives emerging in my primary focus on the Mankato paper. I captured Minnesota and National Public Radio stories, accessed oral histories published on the Minnesota Historical Society website, and viewed documentary films. In cases where transcripts were not available from radio stories or films like Dakota 38 (2012) and The Past Is Alive Within Us (2013), I transcribed segments related to my emerging themes. In addition to this work, I attended public lectures and commemorative events like the public discussion on reconciliation at the 2012 Mahkato Wacipi and the arrival of the Dakota 38 + 2 Memorial Riders every December 26 in Mankato, taking notes in field journals. I even went so far as to attend a drama in a local church basement where the war and Mankato mass hanging were reenacted by a Mankato children’s theater company, “Lincoln’s Traveling Troupe” (Kent, 2012).
In my efforts to learn as much as I could about white orientations toward race and literacy in context of the U.S.-Dakota War, I attended a regional History conference held in Mankato in the fall of 2011. There, I sat in on a workshop and panel discussion concerning a course on the war being developed at St. Lucia College2 in nearby Gotland, Minnesota. Course designers, Dr. Judith Lenz, Professor of English, and Mr. John Harwell,3 Director of the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS),4 presented their working syllabus and discussed instructional approaches they planned to take in just a few short months.5 Unknown to me at the time, I would be joining the course as well, following its daily proceedings as a researcher taking field notes, collecting artifacts, and interviewing everyone involved.
As explained at the workshop, Lenz and Harwell had spent more than two years designing this one-month, January-term (J-term) experience titled Conflict and Remembrance: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. In this course, students would engage with the community in a kind of service-learning project aimed at educating the public about the war. The instructors had arranged for St. Lucia to host a widely advertised six-part lecture series featuring Dakota and white historians, authors, and educators. They had lined up three field trips for students, including stops at the Mankato hanging site6; Fort Ridgely and the Lower Sioux Agency historical site near Morton, Minnesota; Fort Snelling and the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. In addition to reading six books7 and hearing from guest speakers in the classroom, the students would produce a traveling museum exhibit to inform the region about this little-known and often-neglected war.
The conference presentation that day was organized according to an approach emphasizing the importance of listening to and representing multiple perspectives. As explained in subtitles printed in the conference bulletin, Dr. Lenz would tell about “Creating the Course from the College Perspective”; Mr. Harwell would speak on “Creating the Course from the Community Perspective”; and fellow panelist Anthony Morse, curator of the Lower Sioux Agency Historical Site, would speak more generally about “History from a Dakota Perspective.” Already, this configuration reveals signs of racial and political divisions central to upcoming chapters of this book. First comes the broad separation of Dakota perspective from the implicit yet overwhelmingly white perspectives of “Community” and “College.” The Gotland community represented by Mr. Harwell, for example, reports 90% white and 0.6% Native populations (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015). U.S. Census Bureau estimates show an even starker contrast for the county his historical society serves—94.6% white and 0.4% Native populations. Student demographics at St. Lucia College reflect those of the surrounding community: 86% white and less than 1% (unspecified) American-Indian populations.8
Next come perceptions of unity and division for the respective racial groups represented. College and Community perspectives appear in the definite singular form (the perspective), positioning Lenz and Harwell as speakers of white consensus. Dakota perspective appears in the indefinite singular (a perspective), suggesting the existence of differing Dakota perspectives that would go unrepresented. Mr. Morse, who publicly acknowledges having little firsthand experience with Dakota culture,9 would only speak for one individuated Dakota perspective—his own. Handed down from a regional history telling of a largely unified white-settler collective eager to champion “friendlies” and spurn “hostiles” while gaining ground from a divided Dakota society, this configuration provides an early glimpse into a defensive form of pluralism (Bernstein, p. 336) that unfolds gradually over the course of this book, a pluralism only able to go so far in seeking out perspectives, often resorting to tokenism in the meantime and ultimately granting privilege to uncritical voices, both Dakota and white, as it strives to teach the public about the war.
The [beliefs] and habits of the Indian must be eradicated; habits of industry and economy must be introduced in the place of idleness … the peaceful pursuit of home life must be substituted for the war-path, the chase, and the dance; and more than all, the hostility of the Indian opposed to this policy must be met on the threshold.
The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men … If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Dakota.
Dr. Lenz proceeded to cover parts of the syllabus containing language suggestive of a critical approach to the war. The course description, for example, mentioned the Mankato hanging as occurring “the day after Christmas, 1862.” It went on to say, “The bloodshed and its aftermath left deep wounds that have yet to heal. It also resulted in the eradication of much of the heritage of the Dakota in this land. What happened here continues to matter today.” Among course goals, students would “understand the context in which St. Lucia College was founded in 1862.” They would also “study the ‘linguistic turn’ in history,” a phrase indicating that relationships between language and ideology would be examined. The purpose of the museum-exhibit assignment stated, “The hope is that this exhibit will raise awareness of the treatment of indigenous people in the 19th century as white settlers poured into Minnesota.” In addition to the syllabus’s epigraphic quotes emphasizing ethnocide and white double standards, the list of texts included Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (2008), a book arguing that settler society perpetrated genocide against the Dakota people in the 1860s as genocide is currently defined in international law. Dr. Lenz happened to have much expertise in this area having researched, taught, and published for many years on the experiences of women during the Holocaust.
What do you plan to do about students simply passing judgment on people of the past from their modern perspectives?
How can you keep students from falling into paralyzing guilt over the state’s history?
Do you plan to teach the course from a neutral perspective?
(Field journal, September 22, 2011)
Among the panelists, including Mr. Morse, only Dr. Lenz resisted expectations of suspending judgment, saying she didn’t think there was such a thing as teaching this history from a neutral perspective.
Soon, a man sitting by the door near the back of the audience stood up and took issue with Dr. Lenz’s references to genocide when discussing What Does Justice Look Like?
“Are you going to have your students read Richard Fox’s book, Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle?” he asked.
“No, that’s not on the syllabus,” Dr. Lenz replied.
With some intensity, the man proceeded to explain that a book like Fox’s would teach students something important that seemed to be missing altogether from the course plan, the fact that Dakota warriors had mutilated the bodies of their fallen enemies on the battlefield believing they would enter the afterlife that way, incapacitated and unable to do battle there.
“Are you going to have your students learn about that?” he asked.
Silence ensued. Dr. Lenz thought for a moment before saying she wasn’t planning to include that on the syllabus and didn’t see how it would be relevant. The session chair looked uneasily around the room as if waiting for someone else to speak on the matter. No one did. The Q & A continued and the man left.
I stopped this man between conference sessions the next day and asked if I could speak to him. I told him I was researching the U.S.-Dakota War and thought he had made an interesting point the day before. I wanted to learn more about why he felt it was important. Although he didn’t introduce himself, his nametag told me he was a professor at a regional state university (Field journal, September 23, 2011). He said he thought Dr. Lenz didn’t seem to know very much about the history of the war since she was omitting a whole body of knowledge related to the settler experience. Specifically, that experience included fears in the aftermath of the war that the Dakota would band together with other tribes out west and return to Minnesota with the intention of sweeping whites out of the state for good. He asked me in a friendly, rhetorical sort of way whether I knew what it was like to live out on the prairie. I told him I didn’t. He quickly said that he did. He said he came from a small town in western Minnesota and that he had “walked that ground,” the settlers’ ground, many times before. He explained that theirs was an uncertain and tenuous existence on the frontier and isolated families were vulnerable to attack. Most settlers owned guns but few really knew how to defend themselves in combat. Fear of mutilation was part of their daily experience.
I have come up empty checking Richard Fox’s book for details about Dakota fighters mutilating their fallen enemies. The book, Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: Little Big Horn Reexamined (1993), shares what the title suggests, an archaeological analysis of the battle site in Montana that does not highlight such practices among the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people who went to war against Custer’s troops. Fox devotes only a single paragraph of his lengthy book to mutilation, telling first that accounts vary among Indians and whites as to whether mutilation occurred at all. He points to other scholars’ archaeological evidence in concluding that it did happen, but adds, “Acts of mutilation were, in part, a result of anger and were a practice not restricted to one or another group” (p. 221). That is all. Fox is simply not interested in mutilation as a potential contributing factor to the panic and terror experienced by Custer’s troops whose tactical unity disintegrated in the chaos of combat. Interestingly, Fox uses archaeological evidence from the battle site to challenge “white beliefs” and “hearsay” (p. 241) about the soldiers’ gallantry under fire, refusing in his discussion to shy away from their likely lack of gallantry, or “psychological debilitation” (p. 228).
In the body of literature covered for the present volume, I have read mutilation-of-the-fallen tales in a number of works both antiquated and modern, among them Charles Bryant and Abel Murch’s A History of the Great Sioux Massacre by the Sioux Indians (1864) where they are included in selected military reports, Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861–1865 (1890), where they come in the same type of documents, and Duane Schultz’s Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 (1992) where the practice is referred to without reference to a source (p. 60). Considering the frames these works set for telling mutilation tales—the first two establishing them as proof of barbaric acts committed by “savages” (Bryant & Murch, p. 219) and “red devils” (Minnesota Board, p. 544), and the third as cause for terror in a novelistic history—the prospect of locating reliable information from prominent sources close at hand is not good. Rather than any plausible picture of Dakota “savagery,” what emerges from early U.S.-Dakota War historiography, examined further in Chapter 6, is a long procession of graphic images symptomatic of what historian Peter Silver (2008) calls the anti-Indian sublime, that is, formulaic scenes of murder, torture, mutilation, and rape used throughout the history of American “Indian-war” literature to make readers suddenly forget the causes of violence. Long indebted to the age of sensibility when white-settler conquest coincided with a gothic trend in literature designed to stir strong emotions like terror among readers, America’s anti-Indian sublime, as Silver explains, provided colonizers an “unanswerable” political rhetoric (p. 85), making white conscientious objectors look insensitive to the sufferings of “the people” (fellow whites) living on the frontier.
Regardless of the offended professor’s dubious conjuring of settler fears, most important for my purposes is the socially symbolic act (Jamseon, 1981) he performed at the conference session, an act designed to address and perhaps even try to resolve the unresolvable contradictions white-settler identity poses to its devotees—settlers as innocent victims versus settlers as exterminationists. Taking a slightly calculated risk that no one would have read a marginally related and somewhat obscure history like Fox’s, the professor established authority to speak on a specialized topic he only seemed to know from a biased point of view. But even this is not necessarily what aligned the act with its ideological heritage. By ignoring the long history of mutilations whites have exacted upon their “enemies,” from taking heads of the fallen back to the English king for proof of success in battle to the ritualized public dismemberment of lynching victims well into the twentieth century,10 the professor established a double standard suggesting that the practice of mutilating bodies on the battlefield belonged solely to indigenous fighters. Reports of mutilations carried out by whites against Dakotas are, of course, easy to find in the sources as well and indicative of the multidirectional violence that occurs in wartime (Bessler, pp. 65; Clodfelter, pp. 160–161; Heard, pp. 177–178). Disturbingly, the day before I eventually made a presentation to the Conflict and Remembrance students about the Mankato hanging—an event that involves whites desecrating Dakota bodies before, during, and after the hanging (Lybeck, 2015)—an international story broke about U.S. Marines filming each other urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan (“Afghan leader Karzai condemns,” 2012). By raising the specter of Dakota “savagery” even as whites’ allegedly more civilized methods of warfare raged abroad in 2012, the professor’s socially symbolic act of protest to critical teaching can be said to fit an illuminating definition of racism put forth by scholars Karen and Barbara Fields in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), a definition this book makes recurring use of, namely, “the theory and practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry, and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard” (p. 17). Identifying strongly with white settlers, having “walked that ground” in western Minnesota and strongly imagined if not sensed the fear of mutilation himself, this ideological descendant felt obliged to remind everyone of a neglected form of knowledge that would presumably counterbalance talk of genocide against the Dakota people. Like with David J. Gray’s letter to the editor, most troubling for me was that no one in the audience or on the panel, not even the Dakota spokesperson, seemed prepared to contest the assertion in the moment. This of course included me. While some may well have identified the double standard to themselves, no one raised it in an effort to challenge the claim.
It did not help that the conference workshop took place in the Blue Earth County Public Library auditorium. The building partially covers the 1862 execution site and the auditorium itself must be situated very near where “the exact spot” of the mass hanging was retrospectively determined in 1911 by a group of white military veterans, key members of the local business class, as they prepared for the U.S.-Dakota War’s coming semicentennial (Andrews, 2010; Lybeck, 2015). The monument they dedicated in 1912 quickly became a source of controversy for the way it flaunted execution by hanging with the bald inscription, “HERE WERE HANGED 38 SIOUX INDIANS.” Historically carried out through hangings, the death penalty had been outlawed in Minnesota only a few months before the monument committee first took up its work.
Mankato Hanging Monument with paint (ca. 1970)
(Source Image courtesy Blue Earth County Historical Society)
Whether or not participants of the Conflict and Remembrance conference session were fully aware of the site’s contested history, the offended professor’s challenge to Dr. Lenz and her fellow panelists felt palpably congruent with many white-descendant public letters defending the monument I had been reading in local archives, some of which I analyze in Chapter 7. While only Mr. Harwell pointed back to this moment in my subsequent interviews with the instructors in 2012, and then only to tell me he too had learned that mutilations did not occur to the degree the professor had suggested (Fieldnotes, January 6, 2012), I nevertheless took the exchange as a formative one establishing a cautious tone for the instructors whose attempts at neutral and balanced pedagogy especially on the topic of genocide provide focus for much of what follows, Dr. Lenz’s pedagogy in Chapters 3 and 4, and Mr. Harwell’s in Chapters 8 and 9.
When Lenz and Harwell wrapped up the conference session, I immediately approached them requesting permission to follow the course as a participant-observer. After meeting with them later that fall to discuss my purpose and potential role in the J-term, that of an educational researcher embedded with the students using ethnographic methods to research questions pertaining to literacy, language, and social power (Field journal, October 10, 2011), they graciously welcomed me to the course.
White Justice as Fairness and Critical Social Justice
I developed my thinking on white justice as fairness after reading and witnessing many instances where whites’ sense of justice about 1862 encountered disruption during the sesquicentennial, the offended History conference professor and David J. Gray providing two memorable examples. Throughout my study, I have grown increasingly aware that when settler-friendly speakers angrily call for balance, or even when they more quietly attempt to stake out neutral zones for presenting multiple perspectives on the war, competing senses of justice are in play. On the one hand, there is critical social justice which operates in ways suggested by the Conflict and Remembrance course syllabus presented at the History conference workshop. This sense of justice, which would, for example, encourage straight talk about genocide and ethnic cleansing in Minnesota, involves engaging moral judgment in efforts to reveal the unjust workings of race and social power, the purpose being to educate for anti-oppressive social change. On the other hand, there is a countervailing sense of justice not so easy to name for its many iterations across a broad spectrum of white responses, from uncertain caution like that I participated in with audience members at the majority-white conference workshop to the certain backlash performed by the angry professor reenacting defensive notions of settler identity. I will refer to this sense of justice as white justice as fairness, borrowing most of the phrase from political philosopher John Rawls’s (1993) theory of justice as fairness, which I will explain below in greater detail and historicize further in later chapters. Quickly here, this sense of “justice” encourages citizens to temporarily suspend knowledge of social inequalities when interacting in public spaces so that the sense of mutual trust needed for transacting can prevail, an effect that simultaneously enables status-quo social arrangements to pass unquestioned. In this section, I discuss aspects of each sense of justice—critical social justice and white justice as fairness—in relation to U.S.-Dakota War commemoration in order to provide context for understanding the white public pedagogy that Conflict and Remembrance course instructors and students were facing in 2012.
Informed by theory from a long line of critical educators that includes Paulo Freire (2010), Henry Giroux (2006), Sandy Grande (2004), Kevin Kumashiro (2015), Peter McLaren (2018), and many others, the critical social justice I refer to aims to reveal often-hidden or naturalized ways of thinking and acting that can make social hierarchies seem common sense. The hope here is that sustained counter-teachings against dominant commonsense narratives will make it possible for historically oppressed people to find emancipation. Beyond mere equality in a fundamentally violent settler-colonial state, critical social justice demands more humane social systems that will afford the personal and collective freedoms needed for everyone to realize self-determination. In the case of indigenous peoples, this would entail the freedom to exercise sovereignty free of racist torment, capitalist incursions, and imperialist domination. It would require non-Natives practicing solidarity with historically dehumanized and dispossessed people whenever and wherever they are seeking redress through land restoration, repatriation, and compensation for debts accrued over the history of their exploitation.
Ongoing histories of oppression continually demonstrate that critical social justice does not push back against mainstream white ways of knowing simply for the sake of “criticizing” in the negative sense the word “critical” often suggests. Aligned with linguist James Gee’s (2011) description of what it means to be “critical,” critical-social-justice teachings examine whose interests are being helped, disregarded, or harmed by any socially symbolic act be it carried out through speaking, writing, (re)enacting, commemorating, and so on. Again, the aim of this kind of “critical” teaching is to expose ideology, or society’s commonsense ways of knowing and being that keep reproducing social hierarchies on a daily basis, thereby serving to “justify” social inequalities. Behind critical-social-justice activity lies a tenacious hope for social change, that by identifying contradictions and double standards in oppressive words and actions, or by advocating for greater diversity of voices in creating less-partial visions of the past, present, and future, people may work together toward a more just social order.
One of the strongest and most sustained expressions of critical social justice going on with 1862 commemoration in recent years has been the Dakota Commemorative March (Wilson, 2006). Begun in 2002, this roughly 150-mile walk retraces the route taken by U.S. military in November 1862 when soldiers forcibly marched approximately 1,700 Dakota noncombatants, mainly women, children, and elderly, from the Lower Sioux Reservation near Morton, Minnesota, to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling, near St. Paul. This event followed a kangaroo war-trial process where white officials had taken Dakota men into custody and condemned 303 to death by hanging. Although the purpose of the Commemorative March has been variously defined by participants interviewed since its founding, its intent of “challenging the colonialist representation” of 1862 events, as Waziyatawin explains in her 2006 volume In the Footsteps of our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the 21st Century, gives powerful evidence of critical social justice as a living practice in southern Minnesota. In 2012, for example, march co-leader Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan told a reporter about the ongoing history of persecution she and fellow walkers sought to draw attention to that year, saying, “we are still dealing with a lot of social justice issues that are the legacy of the internments” (Steinmann, 2012). While it’s beyond the scope of this writing to name and cover all such activities, readers will find critical social justice influencing Conflict and Remembrance teaching-and-learning moments at various points across coming chapters, for example, in public addresses delivered by Gwen Westerman, Sheldon Wolfchild, and John Trudell, as well as in interviews conducted with the J-term students who brought considerable prior knowledge of critical social justice to their learning experiences.
Before discussing white justice as fairness as a contradictory sense of justice that might move one to ask what about the suffering of the settlers? when considering the Dakota Commemorative March, just as it might move one to proclaim white lives matter! or all lives matter! in the face of Black Lives Matter activity, I should note that settler-friendly notions of justice regarding 1862 are not always espoused by white people alone. Nor do I mean to imply that critical social justice is a sole discursive domain of nonwhite speakers. Keeping in mind James Gee’s understanding of what makes anything “critical,” white speakers have occasionally shown the ability to see through official forms of 1862 commemoration to expose their double standards and locate the true powerful interests they have long represented. Examples captured by the local press include renowned criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow commenting on the 1912 hanging monument while visiting Mankato in the 1930s—“I can’t make myself believe that the people of a civilized community would want to commemorate such an atrocious crime” (Marker at hanging site,” 1937). They include historian Roy Meyer intervening in local monument debate in 1962, calling white victims of the war “the beneficiaries of a vicious system,” adding, “The Uprising was a direct result of the treaties of the Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, by which the Sioux were cheated out of their ancestral homes to fill the pockets of speculators and appease the land-hunger of European peasants pouring across the Atlantic” (Meyer, 1962). Examples also include many lesser-known whites like Rob Swart, a Mankatoan who wrote to the press in 2012 advocating for the repatriation of Dakota people to their homeland. A self-described descendant of a white Minnesota soldier injured in 1862, Swart commented, “The horrendous conditions that have been endured by every generation [of Dakotas] in the barren lands of South Dakota are/were an intentional form of genocide. The misery and poverty of 150 years needs to stop. We, the Americans who still hold the power, should act this year to stop punishing every generation for acts of those living in 1862” (Swart, 2012).
Conversely, Native speakers occasionally agitate for forms of “social justice” that essentially grant empowered white interests a pass. In recent years, this has taken place through quasi-critical commemorative activities led by Natives in the name of “reconciliation,” a dominant yet slippery regional discourse that sometimes calls on settler society to redress past wrongs but often allows normative white ideology to go unexamined, much less disrupted. For example, the film Dakota 38 (2012) which chronicles the 2008 38 + 2 Memorial Ride to Mankato highlights Lakota ride-founder Jim Miller’s vision of reconciliation as an internal process—“We’ve gotta strive for that reconciliation. Let’s go home and reconcile our families, our differences. Let’s go home and hug our children, tell them that we love them.” According to this conception, reconciliation only makes demands of the colonized rather than demanding material reparations from whites and white institutions that continue to benefit from colonization. As Miller says in the film, “We don’t have to blame the wašicu-s [whites] anymore. We’re doing it for ourselves. We’re selling drugs. We’re killing our own people. And that’s what this ride’s about. It’s healing.” A proponent of critical reparative social justice, Dakota historian Waziyatawin explains that this type of internal reconciliation—what others have called “realist” reconciliation (Dwyer, 1999)—has understandably developed in response to white institutions’ persistent refusal to meaningfully acknowledge their own complicity in colonizing Dakota homeland or to adequately curb oppressive practices like championing white community builders from the nineteenth century who also happen to have been ardent exterminationists (Wilson, pp. 130–131).
Another recent 38 + 2 Memorial Ride leader quoted in the film Dakota 38, Peter Lengkeek, casts reconciliation as an external process of mutual forgiveness and healing between Dakotas and whites, saying, “We’re trying to reconcile, unite, make peace with everyone.” Lengkeek brought this message to local media in 2013 during a screening of the film in New Ulm, a town that proudly enacts a white “defender” identity in its 1862 commemorative activities. A regional reporter wrote, “Along the way Lengkeek said he’s had ‘healing’ conversations with descendants of settlers killed during the war and even descendants of President Abraham Lincoln” (Dyslin, 2013). In line with this quasi-critical form of reconciliation as mutual healing, Vernell Wabasha, a Dakota elder from the Lower Sioux Community, endorsed the message “Forgive Everyone Everything,” at least according to the Mankato Free Press,11 including the phrase in a design for the 2012 Mankato monument she envisioned to honor the 38 hanging victims (Linehan, March 4, 2012). The newspaper heavily endorsed this message, emblazoning it across the front page the day after the monument dedication ceremony. Coverage of the December 26 proceedings included mayor Eric Anderson’s proclamation of 2012 as “the year of ‘forgiveness and understanding’” (Krohn, December 27, 2012).
Mato Nunpa says most of the “reconciliation” he’s seen between whites and Dakota Indians has been a superficial exercise. “We eat together, everyone is nice. We put on our feathers and dance for you, entertain. The white man feels good,” Nunpa said. “There’s more to do than that. There are things that need to be done.” (Krohn, 2013)
Among the things Mato Nunpa mentioned needing redress are “the taking of land, bounties put on Dakota scalps in the 1860s, ‘concentration camps’ at Fort Snelling and elsewhere, and the attempt to kill and banish Indians from Minnesota. Then a returning of lands and payments for violated treaties” (Krohn, 2013). Similarly, Waziyatawin’s writings reveal an acute awareness of whites’ eagerness to promote uncritical forms of “justice” that offer no challenges to whites’ legitimacy as landowners or occupiers of Dakota homeland. In the previously cited volumes, Waziyatawin (2008; Wilson, 2006) disavows realist notions of reconciliation for their tendency to suppress calls for restorative social justice, especially repayment for what whites have gained at Dakota expense (Wilson, p. 130). As seen in Chapters 3 and 4, discussing Waziyatawin’s proposals in the isolated context of the U.S.-Dakota War can quickly distort her vision, pathologizing what is a well-reasoned, evidence-based argument for equity seen in many contexts across American life including in my field, Education (Ladson-Billings, 2006).
Part of my aim with this book is presenting a better understanding of white justice as fairness as a coherent, countervailing sense of justice that routinely poses barriers to critical social justice. To arrive at this better understanding, my re-examination of the U.S.-Dakota War dives deep into face-to-face teaching moments that reveal the persuasive power of dominant discourses like “objectivity,” “balance,” and “neutrality” and how they serve collectively to uphold a common sense of justice as “fairness” to whites, past and present. Central to my close analyses is the directive nature of white-justice-as-fairness discourses, not merely how they persuade people to withhold moral judgment about 1862, but how they teach people to do so, thus the white public pedagogy of my title. What this book most often analyzes then as discursive work performed in Conflict and Remembrance classroom teaching moments must also be analyzed at the community level for the phrase white public pedagogy to have effect. To this end, this volume offers recurring analyses of white justice as fairness working beyond the J-term experience. Below, I would like to investigate one high-profile example from the 2012 sesquicentennial showing how white justice as fairness functions as a public pedagogy (Sandlin, Malley, & Burdick, 2011), rising to direct the public away from critical social justice and the perceived threat it poses to the white social order.
White Justice as Fairness , White Property, and “Appropriate” Commemoration
Dakota 38 Monument (2012) with park bench
(Source Author’s photo)
The Balfour poem emphasizes the hypocrisy of a supposedly Christian people who would carry out a mass execution the day after Christmas, one of their holiest times of the year. Equating Mankato’s early citizen-settlers to Christ killers, the poem includes the following lines:
Within four days, a new poem had been written by Katherine Hughes, a white descendant of a former Mankato State University historian, tentatively accepted for replacement by the City Council, and reported on by the newspaper (Linehan, March 8, 2012).
But the city park, owned and maintained by the city, is named Reconciliation Park for a reason. The park, containing the buffalo statue across from the library, is to be a place where blame and judgment about the 1862 war can be set aside while Native Americans and area residents focus on commonality and learning more about each other. (“The goal is to reconcile,” 2012)
The directive phrase “is to be” carried a powerful message to the community, namely, that the newspaper in its alignment with the authority of the City of Mankato reserved the right to define the discursive parameters within which Dakotas and whites could congregate in the park, presumably to avoid either renewed racial conflict or, perhaps worse for local officials, a cross-racial solidarity that would seek critical social justice. On the contrary, Reconciliation Park was to be a space for seemingly apolitical gathering, where “judgment,” something presented by the editor as separate from “blame” (moral judgment), would be suspended. According to this separation, “judgment” must mean something close to discernment, as in the following dictionary definition: “the mental or intellectual process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning or comparing” (Gove, p. 1223).
Understood, then, as an appropriate text to fill Mankato’s commemorative neutral zone, Hughes’s replacement poem, “Reconcile,” now engraved onto the reverse side of the monument, exudes an equality mindset that could easily say “I think there’s blame on both sides […] but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” as Donald Trump did in the wake of 2017’s fatal Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (Keneally, 2017). With line numbers added to facilitate analysis, the poem reads,
According to the poem, the balanced moral judgment of today, i.e., the supposed equal assigning of “innocent” and “guilty” verdicts to both sides (lines 1, 4), will hopefully give way to a new kind of “balance” in future (line 15), one where forgiveness has rendered notions of guilt and innocence (moral judgment) obsolete. This process will unfold by casting off today’s judgmental acts of remembering. But with the future erasure of judgment comes an obvious contradiction in what it even means to “remember” or hold “memories” (lines 4, 14). Indeed, for the future balance to be achieved, a great deal of forgetting of things known through judgment (discernment) will have to happen, for instance, that the white-supremacist “times and attitudes / That brought dishonor” (lines 7–8) significantly contributed to the violence, or, to take it further, that white settlers’ hunger for land and their duplicitous treaty system cheated the Dakota out of their ancestral homes, as historian Roy Meyer put it in his 1962 letter quoted above.
Problematically for the poem’s resolution, anything known about 1862, any facts assigned to memory were originally constructed and can only be processed today through judgment in all of its inseparable workings, including both discernment and moral reckoning (Lybeck, 2018). Setting its spiritual tone aside and reading “Reconcile” as a political text mediating white justice as fairness, this contradiction of remembering by forgetting needs to be pursued precisely because what needs to be forgotten are the unfair relations that led to the violence of the past and produced the unfair socioeconomic relations of the present, knowledge of which could lead to either renewed racial discord, as mentioned, or a cross-racial political solidarity that could pose even greater threats to the white establishment. According to the white-justice-as-fairness view, knowledge of unfair relations in 1862 and today must be temporarily suspended or cast behind what political philosopher John Rawls once called a veil of ignorance so that a sense of fair dealings, mutual respect, and civic unity may prevail.
Features of the two senses of justice
(Source Author)
Taken as interpretive moves symptomatic of a justice-as-fairness mindset, one can see ideas like the original position and the veil of ignorance at work early on in the “Reconcile” poem, not just in its socially-abstracted voice and balanced composition but in its imagining of Dakotas and whites killed in 1862 as equally agentless in their relation to power, “victims of events they could not control” (line 3). This would include, for example, white and so-called mixed-blood traders who carried out unfair dealings that drove many Dakota people into debt to the point of their utter dependency on them for food, basic provisions, and annuity monies promised in the treaties. Rather than acknowledging how the violence was socially produced, the poem assumes a shared original position, balancing out what was a complex hierarchy of racialized identities within the categories “Dakota” and “white”—a strange, ahistorical imagining considering Native peoples’ historic exclusion from the white social contract (Mills, 1997; Seth, 2010). Nevertheless, in its explicit final call for balance (line 15), the poem urges today’s citizens to cast all such details about complex identities, foremost among them powerful white identities, behind a veil of ignorance so that the public may follow through with the mandate to “forgive everyone everything.” It is in such socially symbolic acts where this book argues that injustice or “the assault on truth” is done, where empowered white speakers leverage what I call white-justice-as-fairness discourses like “balance” to mask white power and teach the public to suspend moral judgment about social injustices either committed or condoned by fellow whites, past and present.
Katherine Hughes told a Free Press reporter that she penned “Reconcile” in an effort to be “objective” about the U.S.-Dakota War. In the same article, she dismissed the Balfour poem, claiming that “It wasn’t in the spirit of reconciliation” (Linehan, March 8, 2012). In light of her poem, one notes two things in these remarks—a narrow concept of “reconciliation” that must level calls for restorative justice to the original position and a willful dispassion toward those who would advocate for truth-telling such as in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the official end of Apartheid in the 1990s (Waziyatawin, 2008). Hughes’s “objectivity” could only seem to ask what do these people want? when faced with the demands of the dispossessed (Spivak, 1993, p. 265). Equipped with its effective toolkit of white-justice-as-fairness discourses, this privileged perspective riddled southern Minnesota’s regional public pedagogy on the war in 2012, from the Minnesota Historical Society’s attempt to produce a “balanced” 1862 exhibit at the Minnesota History Center (Picardi, 2012) to the county historical societies’ collective push for “neutrality” shown in the examples of Official Perspective above, but going much deeper than this to include low-profile events like the aforementioned children’s theater production in Mankato that enlisted white actors, many of them youths, to play Indian and reenact scenes from 1862 in an effort to satisfy the playwright’s quest for “the respect of truth of objectivity” (Kent, 2012).
Throughout this book, my project will not involve tracing the origins of discrete discourses like “objectivity,” “balance,” or “neutrality.” Rather, I will look carefully into the political work these terms perform together in keeping moral judgment and critical social justice at bay. Although I delve at times into the local histories of some of these discourses, the roots of old-settler “objectivity” in Chapter 7, for example, it should become clear that speakers using these terms do so without necessarily thinking of their distinct etymologies or political genealogies. What concerns me is the collective function these discourses serve in both obscuring settler-colonial power and maintaining that power by reproducing the common sense of white justice as fairness.
As I will argue in my analyses of the museum-exhibit writing work carried out by Conflict and Remembrance students and instructors, this sense of justice gains further purchase through a small set of conventional narrative strategies, including heavy use of an authoritative passive voice closely associated with the local newspaper’s “…is to be…” proclamation. Here, in more academic (re)iterations of white justice as fairness in public-history writing lies a colonial white identity that exudes what Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez refers to as the hubris of the zero point—the epistemological conceit of the “neutral seeker of truth and objectivity who at the same time controls the disciplinary rules and puts himself or herself in a privileged position to evaluate and dictate” (Mignolo, p. 162). Indeed, in the picture emerging of empowered whites attempting to persuade one another to remain objective and simply provide perspectives on 1862 in neutral or balanced ways, normative aspects of the zero point should already be coming into view. As my analyses unfold, elements of my project will include: (a) investigating how white educators and students variously resist, negotiate, and take up white justice as fairness and its thinly veiled politics of race, (b) tracing the ties that bind this sense of justice to local white-settler ideology and to settler-colonial history more broadly, and (c) making the social contingencies behind original positions (white ways of being) and zero points of representation (white ways of knowing) visible. Again, this work comprises an attempt to develop answers to questions posed early on by Waziyatawin and Sandee Geshick—what does justice look like? particularly to empowered whites as they teach and learn about Minnesota history, and why does racial discrimination persist against Dakota people in the region?
White Justice as Fairness : Polite and Vulgar Forms
In comparing the measured voice of the monument poem “Reconcile” with David J. Gray’s letter to the Free Press, one sees how demands for fairness in “balanced” perspective-providing can take various tones against critical social justice, from polite expressions packaged as appropriate for the general public to more vulgar white-supremacist interventions. Following my discussion of the Conflict and Remembrance conference workshop, I proposed a corresponding range of white orientations that uphold the common sense of white justice as fairness, from uncertain caution among audience members to the professor’s certain backlash. For the uncertain—those who perhaps feel they don’t know enough about 1862 to say anything in public—suspending judgment while collecting information and considering multiple perspectives sounds perfectly reasonable. Indeed, this is both a commonsense approach to making sense of complex problems and a Common Core method for teaching History in the nation’s schools (Zwiers, 2014).15 For the certain—those who have spent a good deal of time gathering information especially from the privileged early or primary sources—urging the public to continue suspending judgment in fairness to white settlers comes as an obligation handed down from the war’s first historians, writers who consciously reproduced anti-Indian sublime tales (Silver, 2008) that sensationalized white victimhood in order to convince white readers that the actions of Minnesota authorities were just (Lybeck, 2018).
I owe it to the whites of that time, who suffered such horrible, barbaric, and unnecessarily cruel treatment at the hands of the Dakota […] Truth Recovery is a term and concept which has become popular in some circles these days. I agree wholeheartedly that truth recovery is so very important as the discovery and then recovery of truth has often become a casualty in the politically correct world we live in. When political considerations come in one door, the truth is forced to leave through another door. (pp. 12–13)
However resistant this way of knowing is to facts about, say, the white production of red “barbarism” or the multidirectional violence of colonial aggression (Rothberg, 2009), this settler politics of resentment is nevertheless a social fact one must adjust for when going public with the U.S.-Dakota War.
So, when a spokesperson from the (Joseph R.) Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm tells the media, “For us, it’s got to be balanced” (Fischenich, 2012), the message is not one of fifty-fifty Dakota/white representation in his museum’s exhibit but rather a message expressing an urgency to (re)tell stories of white victimhood because that “side” is presumably being forgotten with all the attention paid to the suffering of Indians in recent decades. Thus, the title of the Brown County’s 2012 exhibit on the U.S.-Dakota War titled Never Shall I Forget, words taken from a fifty-year-old woman who vividly recalled seeing and hearing fellow whites in agony during the attacks on New Ulm when she was a ten-year-old girl. The exhibit features video of her account and others like it from white survivors only. Visitors witness this while sitting in a mini theater fashioned as the cellar of Frank Erd’s store, holed up as the fighting rages outside. Images are intimately projected onto a white flour sack that strongly resembles a pillow. They sit close to a powder keg, the premise being to blow themselves up should Indians come crashing through the door (Field journal, November 6, 2012).
In Mankato, such demand for white fairness and balance found expression in sensational letters to the editor written against the proposal to erect the new monument to the hanging victims in spring 2012. In the spirit of full disclosure, I contributed to public debate, submitting my own letters against equal white representation at the hanging site when the monument’s fate seemed unclear (Spear, 2012). Letters written promoting white balance bore titles such as “38 Murderers Don’t Deserve Memorial” (Gray, 2012); “A Blond Scalp is Worth Remembering Also” (Mueller, 2012); and “Dakota Got Trials; What Did Their Victims Get?” (LaBatte, 2012). Arguments conveyed in these pieces commonly invoked family history and the anti-Indian white hysteria of 1862. The second letter listed, for example, engaged rape discourses that circulated wildly during the post-war trial period (Dean, 2005)—“If another monument is put up, maybe you could hang that nameless girl’s scalp on it. I’m sure her death was a lot more complicated than a drop from the gallows” (Mueller, 2012). In this political climate, to tip the scales toward “imbalance” by teaching for critical social justice could mean to incite face-to-face controversy with modern-day defenders.
The Chapters to Come
As I hope has become clear, I have not only taken sides against white-supremacist “truth recovery,” I have also taken sides against whites who politely refuse to take sides based on commonsense notions of what is appropriate and professional. After reading the nineteenth-century sources on the U.S.-Dakota War as well as modern histories and critical works about race and settler-colonial violence, I do think white settlers perpetrated genocide against the Dakota people in Minnesota. At the same time, my purpose is not to write a history making that case. Others have already done so (Mann, 2005; Kiernan, 2007; Waziyatawin, 2008). My investigation of the regional white public pedagogy and the various ways its dominant discourses shaped community-wide teaching and learning in 2012 unavoidably entails analyzing how Conflict and Remembrance instructors and students grappled with genocide having fundamentally shaped their state. The J-termers I sat in class with daily talked a great deal behind the scenes about regional genocide and how the experts and professionals around them either treated it as an unresolved question or dismissed it altogether. As I demonstrate, much of this grappling had to do with a racist politics of descent—both genealogical and professional—that routinely reconstructed racial divides. So while genocide may sometimes appear to become the focus of my writing, in Chapters 3 and 4 for instance, which look carefully into Dr. Lenz’s classroom treatment of the subject as a seasoned Holocaust scholar, and again in Chapter 5 which looks into how historian Gary Clayton Anderson dismissed genocide altogether in a high-profile public lecture tied to the course, my interest is in contradictions the violently unequal past presents to fact-seeking, equality-minded white educators and students today. Ultimately, this work draws out various ways their attempts to resolve those contradictions reopened the wounds of 1862.
Chapter 2 introduces the J-term course through interview passages selected from four students commenting on the museum-writing project. In contextualizing these passages, the chapter gives evidence for key themes that recur throughout the book: (a) how appeals to equal validity for all perspectives provide political cover for racially divisive social practices, and (b) how calls for “the facts” and “balance” on the U.S.-Dakota War work to hold interpretive and moral judgment in check. The chapter includes a brief and perhaps belated history of the war, but one so placed as to illuminate important dilemmas the J-term students faced trying to balance an imbalanced history.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Dr. Lenz’s teaching as a Holocaust scholar faced with the prospect of conducting classroom discussions on regional genocide in light of southern Minnesota’s fearful white public pedagogy on 1862. Through analysis of interview and classroom fieldnote data, a detailed picture of her neutral classroom pedagogy emerges including how it was constructed by way of discursive frames—a frame of balance for foundational white sources on the war and imbalance for Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like? (2008), a text very clearly arguing that white officials and settlers alike perpetrated genocide against the Dakota in the 1860s. These chapters end with analysis of student focus-group talk both critiquing and endorsing Dr. Lenz’s frames which effectively cropped out talk of regional genocide in the classroom. The chapters conclude by showing how instructor neutrality adversely affected potential critical-social-justice outcomes in the traveling museum exhibit.
Chapter 5 continues the theme of regional genocide, examining historian Gary Clayton Anderson’s public lecture on the post-war trial process that saw 303 Dakota men condemned to death by hanging. In making the case that the Minnesota’s kangaroo tribunal was largely unjust and part of an overly severe reaction to the violence carried out by Dakota fighters, Anderson also argued that genocide, as legally defined, never occurred in Minnesota. In reading Anderson’s lecture closely, the chapter identifies a racist politics of descent embedded in the speaker’s arguments which carried marginalizing repercussions not just for Dakota people or critically minded whites in attendance, but for an indigenous scholar visiting from the Nordic region as well. Analyzing her reaction helps make visible the epistemic violence the lecture enacted on her and the entire J-term experience.
Chapter 6 takes its point of departure in both public and J-term claims that “balance” can be achieved through adherence to “facts” provided by long-established white authorities on the war, from the earliest histories to Kenneth Carley’s The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (1976). This chapter proceeds then to historicize white-sourced “balance,” tracing its roots back to the 1860s and early arguments for white citizens uninvolved in the violence to remain fair and suspend moral judgment toward Minnesota officials and the extermination campaign unfolding against the Dakota people at the time. As demonstrated, today’s gap between polite middle-ground balance and vulgar white-supremacist balance is not wide, both types serving either to condone or “justify” disproportionate retaliatory measures carried out by whites in the 1860s. This chapter ends by showing the effect of current white balance on J-term student understandings.
Chapter 7 continues to historicize the white public pedagogy, unpacking core tenets of white justice as fairness as a civic-minded form of public reasoning that seeks to obscure knowledge of unfairness through stock discourses—“objectivity,” “neutrality,” “fairness,” and “balance.” To give evidence, the chapter recounts how empowered white commemorators at the U.S.-Dakota War’s semicentennial (1912) once fashioned their privileged colonial white identity as socially abstract and epistemologically supreme in relation to Dakota identity, an impulse that has long ideological roots reaching back through settler society’s socioracial contract. As I argue, the impulse toward epistemic superiority lives on in today’s “evolved,” pluralist forms of white representation of the war, consolidating reasoned objectivity as a white domain and elevating it to ontological status. Chapter 7 ends with analysis of J-term focus-group conversation and examples of student museum-exhibit work that simultaneously dismantle and reproduce the regional racial politics of white justice as fairness.
Chapters 8 and 9 focus on Mr. Harwell’s pedagogy as he supervised student exhibit-writing work, especially on two key panels listed on the J-term syllabus, “War—Dakota perspectives” and “War—Settler perspectives.” Positioned dichotomously near the middle of the exhibit as a kind of fulcrum for balanced perspective-providing, these panels created the most tension of any between students and instructors. Eventually, the “War—Dakota perspectives” panel created conflict between J-termers and members of the Dakota community as well, leading some of the most critical students to position themselves in defense of their shared (intellectual) white property. Looking carefully into the ways institutional power moved through instructor and student talk as these two panels took shape, these chapters reveal how Mr. Harwell won consent among J-term students to represent white justice as fairness rather than advocating for critical social justice.
The book concludes by reconsidering key questions taken up in the Preface and Introduction, namely what justice looks like to successful and empowered white Minnesotans who engage in teaching-and-learning practices related to the U.S.-Dakota War. Its final thesis involves the ongoing struggle over the ultimate social good—land—and whites’ inherited sense of possessing superior ways of knowing and commemorating how this struggle has unfolded to their alleged advantage. In arguing for socially just ways of teaching and learning about Dakota and Minnesota history, the final chapter envisions an alternative traveling museum-exhibit project based on the Conflict and Remembrance students’ unwritten exhibit panels, that is, the panels some initially imagined or tried to write but could not for their instructors’ deference to white ideological demands. The book ends with an overview of the current state of the white public pedagogy surrounding U.S.-Dakota War commemoration in southern Minnesota and its continuing cycle of forgetting and remembering the state’s foundational event.
***
Finally, readers may notice that the language and structure of this book engage narrative strategies symptomatic of the white public pedagogy it hopes to expose and undermine. For example, I have already wielded a detached scholarly voice in analyzing white forms of commemoration such as the “Reconcile” poem. Similarly, I’ve arranged quotations around this Introduction and Chapter 2 according to “Perspectives,” a kind of code word in the white public pedagogy signaling academic sophistication. I make these moves consciously throughout, running the risk of exuding a heightened sense of objectivity that merely perpetuates the white conceits I seek to resist. Yet, as Sandy Grande (2004) argues in Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, Western literacy practices continue to provide the basis for critical pedagogies that offer visions of liberation from Western hegemony. In the course of developing such pedagogies, “knowledge of the oppressor and the oppressor’s language is essential to the processes of resistance” (p. 87). My own journeys through “objectivity” comprise, then, an attempt not just to understand southern Minnesota’s language of oppression better but to communicate with it directly and push back against its untenable need to suspend judgment on a situation of injustice. Above all, I hope this work provides support for the liberatory pedagogy Waziyatawin proposed in 2008 with What Does Justice Look Like? To this end, I keep my language use critical, focused on the politics of land occupation and Waziyatawin’s insight that the crimes against humanity perpetrated here cannot be rationalized from any valid perspective. Undoing the region’s resilient white public pedagogy will require sustained use of critical-literacy skills on a variety of fronts including day-to-day educational practices that pass for common sense as they reproduce white-supremacist ideology.
- 1.
Gotland is a pseudonym used to preserve anonymity promised to this study’s participants.
- 2.
St. Lucia College is a pseudonym applied to maintain the promise of anonymity to study participants.
- 3.
Instructor names are pseudonyms applied to maintain the promise of anonymity made to study participants.
- 4.
Also a pseudonym to help preserve participant anonymity.
- 5.
Field journal, September 22, 2011. The following account and all direct quotes in this section are reconstructed from journal notes taken on the days of the conference, September 22 and 23, 2011, and held in the author’s possession.
- 6.
This first field trip also included stops at the Blankenship County Historical Society and a regional psychiatric treatment facility that provides settings for Thomas Maltman’s novel The Nightbirds.
- 7.
The readings were organized in the following order: Ella Cara Deloria, Waterlily (1988); Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan Woolworth, Through Dakota Eyes: Narratives of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 (1988); Kenneth Carley, The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (1976); Thomas Maltman, The Nightbirds (2007); Sarah Wakefield, The Captivity Narrative of Sarah Wakefield (1863/1997); and Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation on Dakota Homeland (2008).
- 8.
Source withheld to protect participant anonymity.
- 9.
The instructors sought Dakota perspective from Morse on this and other occasions during the J-term experience. As manager of the Lower Sioux Agency Historical Site, Morse was a professional colleague of Harwell’s at the time of this study. Morse explains in a promotional video for the Agency site that “My family was one where the culture was not what we lived every day. I am very much a novice compared to two- and three-year-olds from the [Lower Sioux Indian] Community because they live in the culture every day.” Morse, who introduced himself to the J-term students as a ninth-generation Mdewakanton Dakota (Fieldnotes, January 19, 2012), had been voted on and denied enrollment by the tribal council 21 times prior to the J-term. As he explains in the video, he still remained hopeful in 2012 of future enrollment because of the amount of Dakota blood he feels he shares with enrolled relatives. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ak3R6qPP0.
- 10.
Historian William Folwell (1924) addressed this double standard writing on the U.S.-Dakota War long ago: “In civilized communities infuriated gangs wreak their wrath on obnoxious individuals or groups in contempt of the law of the land […] Among our own people, moreover, lynchings are still too numerous” (pp. 212–213). Philosopher Charles Mills (1997) writes of the same double standard in a global context as, “the actual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together,” a record that includes “the killing through mass murder and disease of 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas” (p. 98).
- 11.
“Forgive everyone everything” has not been Wabasha’s message in years past. In 1987, she referred to the “Year of Reconciliation” as “a farce” for its failure to make a difference in white/Dakota relations, including whites’ persistent tendency to blame the Dakota for the violence of 1862 (Wilson, p. 130).
- 12.
Adapted from Linehan (March 4, 2012), pp. A1, A6. Prior to its printing, the poem had apparently only been available through an archived radio broadcast. Its reproduction in the newspaper paid little heed to form and possible line breaks, thus my “adaptation.”
- 13.
Developed by Rawls as a form of “ideal theory,” in this case theory on the way justice would ideally work in a modern liberal society, “justice as fairness” was never intended to be descriptive much less applied to current affairs. Yet, “justice as fairness” does turn out to have underlying descriptive elements both culturally and historically rooted in Eurocentric white ideology, an ideology that routinely attempts to abstract itself from the social contingencies of race and injustices of white colonial violence (Mills, 2009). My application of “justice as fairness” principles that Rawls so powerfully named and defined seeks to move beyond questions of authorial intent, the aim being to interrogate white idealism and the exclusionary political effects of living social-contract discourses.
- 14.
My understanding of liberal society’s social contract also draws on work by Mills (1997), Steele (2005), and Seth (2010) as explained in Chapter 7.
- 15.
In Building Academic Language: Meeting the Common Core Standards Across Disciplines, Jeff Zwiers (2014) writes, “Being a historian means suspending judgment about the past, realizing our present-centered biases, and challenging our beliefs about the past in order to learn from it” (p. 89).