It’s not about righting wrongs that have been done. For me, it’s about how do we move forward and recognize the humanity in all of us, that we’re all noble beings. Um, and that we all have good hearts. Even the people who are the oppressors have good hearts. That’s the perspective that I come from.
—Lori1 (Interview, January 23, 2012)
You know, this is a class that was built in the perspective from a white person trying to explain the position of a red man. Sorry, sorry. I love the Dakota person. Because there wasn’t a Dakota person writing these panels, um, you can’t- you can’t blame that person for building something incorrectly if somebody else’s truth is different from your own.
—Tom (Interview, May 11, 2012)
I kind of felt when I was reading it [What Does Justice Look Like?] like I felt when I read Malcolm X, you know. I was like a little bit threatened. I was like, ‘Well I didn’t do any of these things. My ancestors didn’t do any of these things. What? Are you mad at me?’ But, you know- and I also realize that that’s kind of a ridiculous racial irony because the only reason I feel so sensitive about being like racially profiled is because it never happens to me because I’m white.
—Stephanie (Interview, January 24, 2012)
I think a lot of my sense of guilt is- there’s the guilt from what my family has done, and then there’s the broader notion of white guilt that extends way beyond my family. Because whatever money or land or power that my family gained directly from killing natives, that was enabled and reinforced and affirmed and perpetuated by the broader existence of white privilege.
—Alan (Interview, January 9, 2012)
***
These four quotes are selected from conversational interviews I held in 2012 with students enrolled in the St. Lucia College J-term course Conflict and Remembrance: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. St. Lucia is a small private liberal arts school located in Gotland, Minnesota, a town of approximately ten-thousand residents.2 In the summer of 1862, scores of white refugees fled to Gotland during violence unfolding at points west.
In 2012, 15 students enrolled in Conflict and Remembrance, 14 whites and one Latina, four men and 11 women. As mentioned in the Introduction, the course co-instructors—Dr. Judith Lenz, Professor of English, and Mr. John Harwell, Director of the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS) located in Gotland—had spent two-and-a-half years designing the course as a hands-on experience in public history, lining up a widely publicized six-part lecture series, conducting three field trips including stops at seven regional historical sites, and hosting in-class visits from four guest speakers. For the final project, Dr. Lenz and Mr. Harwell arranged for students to design a traveling museum exhibit consisting of ten approximately 3′ × 7′ “panels” printed on retractable banner stands including text and images that would contextualize the war in chronological fashion, from “Dakota Culture (Pre-Contact),” as stated on the course syllabus, moving through the violence of the summer of 1862, and ending with “Aftermath — Exile/Diaspora” and the “Commemoration and Reconciliation” of today. Six books were on the reading list. Additional bibliographic materials had been compiled for students. Principal designer and supervisor of the exhibit-writing project, Mr. Harwell stood ready with a wealth of other resources and practical advice based on his eight years of experience as a professional public historian at BLCHS. As a result of his planning, the exhibit had already been slated to tour educational sites in the region through 2013.
In the present chapter, I build profiles of the four students quoted above, contextualizing their statements in ways designed to emphasize dilemmas they faced as J-term knowledge workers. With Lori and Tom, I discuss the principle of equal validity for all perspectives, telling how that view was supported by classroom instruction and how it sometimes worked to reinforce racially divisive social practices. I proceed then to demonstrate how the same principle was supported outside the classroom in a lecture that encouraged community audience members to embrace equal validity and suspend judgment about 1862 through appeals to sameness for all and “the facts” of the war. In moving on to introduce Stephanie and Tom as two students strongly predisposed to resist the equal-validity principle, I show how J-term experiences took a toll on their critical funds, positioning them in ways favorable to the relativistic or “balanced” view promoted. Following the epistemological challenge posed in the lecture, I look into “the facts” of the war myself and show how they presented Lori in particular with a key dilemma—how to balance an imbalanced history. The chapter ends by bringing both community and classroom demands for balance and the white-justice-as-fairness view into sharper focus.
Lori and Tom
After interviewing students and hearing them contribute to conversations in different settings over time, I grew familiar enough to have a sense for where the more vocal among them were coming from. Lori, the first student quoted above, was a fourth-year Gender Studies major at the time of the study and a follower of the Baha’i faith, believing firmly in three spiritual tenets she delineated in our first interview “that there’s one source of all of creation, one god”; that there is “one god, one religion”; and that there is a “oneness of humanity” (Interview, January 23, 2012). Lori’s spiritual study provided her with a language of unity, universals, and frequent references to all that fit well with an equity-minded approach to public history modeled by Mr. Harwell. As he explained it, his approach as a representative of the local county historical society entailed listening to all perspectives from the community and assigning equal validity as long as those perspectives were informed by historical facts. “Everybody has their opinions,” Harwell told the students in their first class session together. “Who am I to say someone’s opinion is less valid? We can’t always agree, especially on something that happened 150 years ago” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). He proceeded to advise students to take this same approach when talking to community members at public events sponsored by the J-term. When telling me later in the course of the difficulties that can arise trying to juggle the many and sometimes conflicting perspectives he hears from voices in the community, Harwell said, “I think we need to be, um, more inclusive in hearing all of those opinions instead of being selective and saying, ‘Well, we’re gonna listen to this person because they have a Ph.D. and we’re gonna discount everything that this person says because they don’t’” (Interview, January 20, 2012). Interesting in Lori’s case were the lengths that equal validity for all perspectives could be taken to. Even though she had just told me in this same interview that “I’ve always wanted to- regardless of what I know about the situation, wanted to stand on the side of the oppressed,” when it came to the question of applying moral judgment, oppressors and oppressed were equally “good” inside, an outlook conducive to the white-justice-as-fairness view.
Lori’s comments provide a glimpse into ways democratic-sounding language might provide cover for undemocratic social practices. In Tom’s case, one sees the dynamic laid bare. Tom was a third-year Nursing major in 2012. Hailing from Hutchinson, Minnesota, a town besieged by Dakota fighters in 1862, Tom knew the history of the U.S.-Dakota War well prior to enrolling in the course. He sometimes invoked his settler ancestry in interviews to express opposition to classmates he perceived as being too liberal. Having co-authored a museum-exhibit panel originally listed on the J-term syllabus as “War — Dakota perspectives,” Tom admitted that the course had positioned him, as he describes in the epigraphic quote, as “a white person trying to explain the position of a red man.” The paternalistic aspect of this positioning seems to flow inevitably into his next comment—“Sorry, sorry. I love the Dakota person.” What could make this okay? An assurance that all perspectives are equally valid and that moral judgment has been suspended, at least in public spaces where formal representation occurs. As Tom put it, “you can’t blame that person for building something incorrectly if somebody else’s truth is different from your own.” In trying to justify his J-term experience as a white student knowledge worker presenting Dakota perspective to a majority-white public, Tom seems to invoke a rather defensive form of pluralist expression (Bernstein, 1991). Because all individual truths are worthy of equal respect, the public speaker (foremost Tom) operates in a space beyond “blame” in the event he may have built something “incorrect” (stereotyped) about racialized others.
Some of the people working on their panels really are reaching out to Dakota people, um, and putting a lot of work into understanding the Dakota perspective. Um, but still, doing it on behalf of them? You know what I mean? Does that make sense? Like, I’m sharing this for you? Um, and that’s the nature of the class itself, so there’s not really any way that you can get around that. (Interview, January 23, 2012)
Tom agreed, blaming the project design when accounting for angry reaction to his panel from a Dakota viewer the day the exhibit was unveiled to the public—“if I were to tell him that was mine, he would probably be like, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with you,’ but even so, it’s like you- you were- we were given 250 words to say- to speak for an entire people and their perspective of why the war happened” (Interview, May 11, 2012).
It just kind of gave me this broader understanding of the actual events versus just the Sunday-school version, ((in a Dana Carvey-like, church-lady voice)) “Jesus this is the answer for everything,” you know, you know, so the story is, ((church-lady voice)) “the Indians were bad and they burned everything down but the good settlers prevailed,” you know. You can get that in most fifth-grade history courses. (Interview, January 9, 2012)
These passages from Lori and Tom reveal tensions for each of them between critical awareness of engaging in unequal and even unfair history-writing practices as whites presenting Dakota experiences to the public, and uncritical assertion of equal validity for all perspectives. In looking carefully into discursive moves J-term students and instructors made as they navigated such tensions between critical knowledge and white justice as fairness, I hope to better understand how the teaching-and-learning processes behind white justice as fairness work, seeing them as I do as barriers to critical-social-justice education. What was it about the course that enabled Lori to acknowledge the problems of providing Dakota perspective “on behalf of them,” but proceed anyway with a sense of goodness in all? What in the J-term experience made it possible for Tom to admit “trying to explain the position of a red man,” but proceed anyway with a sense of blamelessness no matter the outcome? To what degree were these students and instructors torn between either suspending or engaging moral judgment not just on Minnesota’s past but on its present in the public-history practices they were engaging in? Finally, what role did salient discourses like “balance,” “objectivity,” and “neutrality” play recruiting them to the white-justice-as-fairness view? Importantly, not all of the J-term students were white, so while pursuing these questions, I will eventually attend to how these tensions shaped the learning experience of Christina, the lone non-white student enrolled in Conflict and Remembrance.
The Freedom to Think Runs up Against “the Facts”
I wish to emphasize at this early point that democratic-sounding discourses teaching the principle of equal validity for all perspectives were pervasive during the J-term, just as they are in the larger regional white public pedagogy as historian Waziyatawin (2008) has noted (pp. 75–76). Pervasive too was the tendency for these discourses to mask undemocratic social practices, past and present. This dynamic found perhaps its most naked expression in a public lecture delivered late in the month by regional lay historian Corrine Marz.
Marz has worked independently for decades writing articles and booklets on the U.S.-Dakota War mainly printed by Park Genealogical Books and Prairie Smoke Press, local independent presses respectively owned and operated by genealogist Mary Bakeman and long-time Minnesota Historical Society archaeologist/curator Alan Woolworth.3 Around the time of her lecture, Marz was contributing to Minnesota’s Heritage: Back to the Sources (2010–2013), an occasional journal by Park Genealogical Books promising “objective looks at Minnesota’s diverse heritage with well-researched and documented articles” (Bakeman, 2011, p. 1). Funded by a Minnesota Legacy grant and produced expressly for the U.S.-Dakota War sesquicentennial era (“Minnesota’s Heritage,” 2010), the journal focused on setting primary-source materials before the public so that citizen-scholars could, according to Bakeman, “consider 150-year-old resources in order to cut through the veil of opinion and politics and seek a balanced view of the past” (2012, p. 2). This approach fit Marz’s research agenda as stated in a piece she co-wrote for the journal where the authors sought to “give a voice to the primary sources […] and allow them to speak for themselves,” presumably without political commentary, so that scholars could “better weigh the facts and draw their own conclusions” (Monjeau-Marz & Osman, p. 114).
Speaking on “The Aftermath of the 1862 War,”4 Marz began her J-term lecture commending the students by relating what a colleague had recently told her—“The students taking this class really are the future educators of this entire subject because you will have the credentials after taking this class of having something substantive.” She went on to contextualize settler society’s “ferocious response” to the Dakota nation once open warfare had commenced on the prairie, estimating with a great deal of justified uncertainty the number of white war casualties at 600—“So many people weren’t never buried. Uh, their bodies were not found. Their bones, you know, simply became dust. And uh, so and in fact Curt Dahlin has one book called Gravestones and Markers and in that book he said that really only 200 of the casualties were buried.” With this admitted lack of evidence driving her focus on white victimhood, the point was to claim that Minnesota had lost nearly as many settlers in six weeks of fighting as it did soldiers after four years of engagement in the Civil War. Despite no balanced consideration of Dakota war dead either during the six weeks of fighting or in “the aftermath of the 1862 war” (the title of her lecture), Marz attempted to universalize her deep understanding of white victimhood through repeated use of “we”—“We have the history of the Dakotas and we have the history of all of the whites and the mixed bloods who were um- that had lost so much also. But we see that there is really the emotional trauma, the grief that they experience, the despair. They were all the same. Everyone experiences the same” (Lecture, January 24, 2012).
- 1
We have these different perspectives of the Dakota War, and we are each free to
- 2
think- um looking at the facts and the events that happened, you know, whatever is
- 3
true in your heart, that is uh- for you, and uh (1.0) when you think of the great
- 4
suffering that the people of- all of the people of Minnesota uh went through, this- this
- 5
sign is- this uh grave marker for the Confederate soldiers is very true, that “they all
- 6
died for a cause that they believed was worth fighting for and made the sacrifice.”
(Lecture, January 24, 2012)
Admittedly, this was one of the least convincing iterations of white justice as fairness during the J-term,5 witnessing a regional authority on the war highlight the suffering of Confederate war soldiers imprisoned at Rock Island, Illinois in 1863 for balancing purposes, the effect being to diminish by false equivalency the suffering of Dakota war prisoners held at the same time at Fort McClellan prison just across the river in Davenport, Iowa. Objective inquiry into the proportion of each group’s population being impacted or the significance for each group’s prospects as a culture was simply ignored.
Despite its glaring weaknesses, Marz’s lecture was formative for the “future educators” in attendance and the selected passage above is full of themes that recur and prove persuasive in this book—stopping the freedom “to think” short with an appeal to “the facts” (lines 1–2); asserting equal validity for “whatever is true in your heart” (lines 2–3), even if your heart harbors white-supremacist leanings; noting that truth is relative and remains “for you” (line 3), suggesting that it is probably not for “we,” the experts who produce public knowledge; ending in an air of solemn commemoration (lines 5–6), a move aligned with the J-term’s focus on “Remembrance” (the past) rather than social change (the future).
Importantly in Marz’s presentation, democratic commemoration emphasizing sameness for all sought to shelter Indian killers from judgment by way of analogy, i.e., holding deceased defenders of the Old South up as the example and thus leveling the respective “causes” to common goods for simply once having been believed, presumably by fellow equal and rational beings. Thus, justice as fairness to all white victims was served regardless of any crimes against humanity they may have perpetrated. Words etched on the Rock Island marker lingered on the screen and passed without comment by the speaker—“LET NO MAN ASPERSE THE MEMORY OF OUR SACRED DEAD” (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012).
Stephanie and Alan
Next come the epigraphic quotes by Stephanie and Alan, two students I would characterize as forthrightly engaging independent thought and moral judgment about the U.S.-Dakota War and its meaning for them as privileged white Americans. I say “Americans” because Stephanie had recently moved to Minnesota from North Carolina. A third-year Psychology major at the time, Stephanie told me she felt surprised when she first “found out that some people here are like still mad because their great-great grandfather was, you know, beaten to death or whatever.” She went on to explain her reaction:
- Stephanie:
I was like, “That’s not fair. It’s not fair that you feel that way,” and John [Harwell] was just like, “Well-”
- Rick6:
It’s not fair that they still carry the settler anger, or not fair that-
- Stephanie:
I guess I was just looking at it from like a dominant culture perspective. It was like, “You guys are here and you have land and you have freedom that the Dakota people like will never get to have” (Interview, January 24, 2012).
On this same day as Marz’s lecture late in the J-term, however, Stephanie told me her critical view had taken on a different conception of fairness—“I kind of want to hate all the people who were settlers. At the same time, that’s not fair to them either. You know. Does that make sense?”
Like, I am attempting to write a museum panel about your people when my people are your ancestors’ oppressors? That’s sort of continuing- I don’t know- I don’t think we can ever really portray the severity and the horrible situation and everything that they were going through. (Interview, January 24, 2012)
While this shift can be read as an acknowledgment that whites have oppressed Natives in all U.S. states, it also says something significant, I think, about the universalizing identity work performed by the J-term class. In coming together with white instructors and classmates to co-author an exhibit on this specific war and perhaps commit an act of oppression against Dakota people as she suggests the exhibit was doing (“That’s sort of continuing-”), Stephanie was in a way being recruited to a normative regional white-descendant identity, Corrine Marz’s routine use of “we” and appeal to her as a future educator of Minnesota history being just one example. But Stephanie’s comments also reveal the degree to which she was resisting such recruitment. Her experience reflecting frequently on race growing up in North Carolina appears to have given her the ability to identify ancestry-based double standards as they arise, such double standards being a key element of racism this study keeps in view following the work of Barbara and Karen Fields (2012).8 As will be shown in the book’s final chapter, Stephanie retained a strong critical voice after the J-term despite turns she took toward white justice as fairness during the course, her observation in the epigraph about the “ridiculous racial irony” of reacting defensively to What Does Justice Look Like? being a clear signal.
Alan also thought deeply about ancestry and race during the J-term. A third-year Environmental Studies major from Minneapolis, he introduced himself on the first day of class as having enrolled in Conflict and Remembrance to seek “personal atonement” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). That day, he described a rifle belonging to his grandfather that his family believed was once used by Alan’s great-great-great-great grandfather in punitive expeditions against Dakota people following the 1862 war. There were fourteen notches in the butt of the rifle, each thought to have been carved for an Indian killed. Alan’s self-introduction created a dramatic moment of silence in the room. He also told the class that he had taken part in a St. Lucia College delegation to the national White Privilege Conference convened in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis in 2010 and 2011 respectively, providing him with a framework for interpreting the facts he was learning. As he explained to me in our first interview, “whatever money or land or power that my family gained from killing natives, that was enabled and reinforced and affirmed and perpetuated by the broader existence of white privilege” (Interview, January 9, 2012).
I mean my first reaction was no, of course we’re not obligated to. I don’t think we should- (4.0) °Well, I’m not sure.° I do think we have an obligation to our audience (4.0) and that’s where we should start the conversation and try to figure out (4.0) whether it’s possible, what types of presentation are possible for the audience we’re going to have and decide from there. (Interview, January 9, 2012)
This was an important moment in my data collection, witnessing independent thought cut short by collective thinking based on ideological constraints perceived in the community, “what types of presentation are possible for the audience we’re going to have.” Here, Alan presents a discursive checkpoint to himself where the political demands of “we” bring the agency of “I” to a halt and collect a toll, much in the way Corrine Marz interrupted herself at the words “free to think-” and took a turn toward the language of “all” and moral relativism in her lecture which was still two weeks away at the time of this interview. In the block quote, Alan stops himself at the forthright phrase “I don’t think we should-,” enters a four-second pause, brings his voice back with a subdued “Well, I’m not sure,” and then turns to collective thinking about the obligations he and his classmates allegedly owe to their implied majority-white audience. At this checkpoint, Alan’s payment leaves him, at least for the time being, with fewer critical funds expressed through an underestimation of what the white audience can take.9 This critical checkpoint made early in the course foreshadowed Marz’s later formulation well—“whatever is true in your heart, that is uh- for you.” Alan’s resistance to the linear, chronological exhibit remained for him. This form of public pedagogy contradicted powerful advice brought to the Conflict and Remembrance experience on two occasions by Dakota speakers Glenn Wasicuna and Sheldon Wolfchild who encouraged the students to always speak from the heart on history and their roles representing it (Fieldnotes, January 5, 2012; January 19, 2012).
Of course, every socially symbolic act demands consideration of audience. Public speakers commonly adjust for things they perceive to be deemed good, appropriate, professional and so forth by the people they address. Yet, all topics of representation are not equal nor are all methods of representation equal as student talk has already suggested. Indeed, histories of oppression are violently unequal histories. They are often ongoing histories as well that find sustenance through oppressive forms of teaching and learning (Freire, 2010). They do not suddenly become equal by interpreting them through the white-justice-as-fairness lens that riddles public teaching moments chronicled throughout this book.
For those working to make their societies more equitable and just, a different sort of language is needed involving unconventional social practices that do not lead to the silencing of critical discernment and moral judgment but serve, rather, to open them up. As Waziyatawin writes in What Does Justice Look Like? (2008), “Silence suggests complicity with the status quo” (p. 94). Struggles for liberation and social change in modern colonial contexts have inspired many memorable public calls for transformative pedagogies that disrupt commonsense notions of the “good,” the “appropriate,” and the “professional” in order to make even the slightest turns toward social justice possible. As Arundhati Roy (2003) writes, “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer restlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories” (p. 112).
There are a lot of people in organizations out there who want to help preserve and understand, but as Dakota people we have to- we have to be the ones that heal ourselves, understand our history, and present our point of view […] We appreciate all the- the work that has been done to try and help understand not only Dakota people but just to understand people like museums and all those books that have been written by people who want to help. Those are good. We appreciate that. Bless those people that do that. But we want to tell our story and that’s the responsibility that we have. And we have to do that. But in order to do that we have to heal ourselves because that’s in the way right now. (Lecture, January 5, 2012)
Judging from comments made by Lori, Tom, and Stephanie, this view on who should be telling whose stories was partly disregarded in the J-term exhibit writing project.
These four introductory sketches of Lori, Tom, Stephanie, and Alan provide an initial glimpse into the diversity of J-term perspectives on local history. Students, instructors, and public speakers could evoke the principle of equal validity for all perspectives to the point where it provided political cover for oppressive history-writing practices. At the same time, orientations conducive to critical social justice sometimes led to straight talk about racial power and the problematic politics of display developing with the museum-exhibit project. Most troublingly, such talk from Lori and Tom revealed the fact that they proceeded anyway despite what their critical conscious was telling them. Ultimately, the tensions I highlight between student critical consciousness and white justice as fairness were not taking place on any level playing field. As comments from all four students suggest, to participate fully as a J-term knowledge worker and contribute to a successful museum exhibit required suspending judgment at key junctures.
“The Facts” and the Dilemma They Present
The first half of the nineteenth century marked a time when white power brokers drew the color line through Dakota homeland by various means, the most decisive being deceitful treaties (Meyer, 1967; Westerman &White, 2012). By 1860, state authorities had confined Dakota people to a 10- by 140-mile reservation, cutting them off from their traditional sources of life. Accustomed to accessing vast expanses of forest and prairie, hunters now had to cross reservation borders to find food, encountering increasing numbers of newly arrived land-hungry settlers. Food and treaty payments were often delayed or dispersed only to those assimilating to settler ways of living.
Widespread fighting commenced on August 18, 1862, after four Dakotas killed five settlers in Acton, Minnesota the previous day. Spurred on by young Dakotas seeking to revitalize their culture and push back against years of white-supremacist abuse (Anderson, 257–260; Meyer, pp. 114–116), prominent Dakotas such as Tháoyateduta (His Red Nation aka Little Crow), Sakpe (Little Six), Makato (Blue Earth aka Mankato), and Wambditanka (Big Eagle) led as many as 1,500 Dakota men from the Upper and Lower Sioux Agencies in a successful campaign to expel whites from the region. Upward of 20,000 settlers went running for their lives (Dahlin, 2013). As historian William Folwell (1924) put it, “a region two hundred miles long and averaging fifty miles wide was devastated or depopulated” (p. 124).
Besides overt white supremacy, those fighting for cultural revitalization were actively resisting individualist and materialist values imposed upon their people for decades by the U.S. government and members of the trader/merchant class (Anderson, 257–260). The burning of Joseph Brown’s “Farther-and-Gay castle” stands as a prime example (Lindeman & Nystuen, 1969). In line with these oppressive values, empowered commentators often emphasize the loss of white property over lives when telling the history, for example, early historians Bryant and Murch’s (1864) commentary on the violence at Lake Shetek—“In this, as in all other portions of the State visited by these savage monsters, the destruction of property was almost total and complete. Of a population of three hundred, not one was left in the whole county” (p. 160). Garrison Keillor’s narration in the Twin Cities Public Television documentary The Dakota Conflict (1993) follows a similar trajectory, striking an ominous chord after recounting the destruction of approximately 190 structures at New Ulm—“2,000 people made the journey down the valley, and many never returned to Minnesota.”
This material setback to white hegemony—the temporary loss of reterritorialized or whitened space—is critical for understanding both the perpetual state of unknowing the “general public” seems to remain in regarding the U.S.-Dakota War and the anxieties exhibited by J-term instructors and students as they designed a museum-exhibit project for that same public in 2012. On the one hand, the U.S.-Dakota war remains a silenced history (Trouillot, 1995) akin to other successful uprisings against white domination, the most prominent example being the Haitian Revolution. It provides evidence of settler wrongdoing and a substantial body of facts challenging whites’ legitimacy in occupying the land. On the other hand, as a revolt that temporarily reversed the trajectory of white land-grabbing, the war sent what philosopher Charles Mills (1997) calls an ontological shudder through colonial society, disrupting whites’ sense of themselves as superior beings entitled to rule over racialized others (pp. 85–86). Uprisings like the U.S.-Dakota War unsettle deeply ingrained convictions among whites that only white people can establish law and order, provide the conditions for freedom and prosperity, and, ultimately, deliver justice.
Upon receiving word of the fighting in 1862, Minnesota’s man on the spot, former first governor Henry Sibley took up the role of colonel despite never having served in the military (Wingerd, p. 309). He traveled up the Minnesota River valley with a makeshift militia in late August to quell the uprising. When combat ended in late September, over 350 white settlers, 90 U.S. military, and an untold number of Dakotas had lost their lives (Folwell, pp. 391–393). In the wake of the battles, Sibley established a military tribunal in the field, subjecting 392 Dakota men to speedy trials, first on suspicions of having raped settler women, then when scant evidence had been found, for involvement in any battles; all while providing the defendants no legal counsel (Chomsky, pp. 21–22). The kangaroo court ended its proceedings in early November with 303 men condemned to death by hanging. Warned of grave injustice, President Lincoln stayed the execution and ordered a review of transcripts from the proceedings. Weeks passed and, as the state awaited the President’s final decision, the frontier press unleashed a flood of white-supremacist calls for extermination (Bessler, p. 49; Lewis, p. 60). Thousands of Dakotas had fled west and north by this time when white officials were actively promoting vigilante violence through state-sponsored bounties against Dakota people.
In the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War trials, regional militia marched upwards of 1,700 Dakotas—mainly women, children and elderly—from “Camp Release” near present-day Monetvideo, Minnesota, to a concentration camp near Fort Snelling in St. Paul, detaining them until their forced removal from their homeland the following spring. The condemned men were marched to Mankato where soldiers had all they could do to keep white mobs from killing them (Bessler, 2003, pp. 49–54). By early December, Lincoln’s lawyers had found enough errors in the trial transcripts to pardon 264. The President approved executing the rest. After a late reprieve, 38 were hanged together on December 26, 1862.
Rather than putting an end to the war, this show-execution served more as a signal of large-scale violence to come, actions Lincoln’s Indian Commissioner William P. Dole positively labeled “vindictive” at the time (“Letter from Commissioner Dole,” p. 1). Already in early November 1862, the commander of the Military Department of the Northwest, General John Pope, had proposed a campaign for the following summer to “remove entirely” all Indians living between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, or as he put it “to seize and dispose of all the Indians upon whom we can lay our hands in like manner, so the lines of travel, and emigration shall be secure to the smallest parties” (“The Sioux War,” p. 1). In accordance with this plan, Generals Alfred Sully and Henry Sibley carried out two subsequent years of genocidal massacres in the name of state security, killing untold numbers of Dakotas and destroying massive amounts of provisions to engineer starvation.
All such developments signal another effect of successful uprisings noted by Charles Mills (1997), that they spark what he terms the white terror, or “massively disproportionate retaliatory violence” in collective efforts to ensure that “the foundations of the moral and political universe” prevail for whites (p. 86). From the trials and hanging to ethnic cleansing and genocide, disproportionate retaliation carried out by early Minnesotans does not reflect well on a society prone to cast itself as a liberating force founded on values of freedom and equality. Nor has the white terror fully receded, living on as it does in socially symbolic acts performed by white defenders whose early-source “facts” come with moral convictions about this “conflict of the two races” primarily being “a conflict of knowledge with ignorance, of right with wrong” (Bryant & Murch, p. 48). More than reaction to events reflecting poorly on white ancestors, the fragility and rage I analyze in U.S.-Dakota War commemoration implicates the white social contract itself and its untenable “great law of right” to dominate racialized others (Bryant & Murch, p. 48). As my ethnographic work shows, modern regional enactments of white justice as fairness often combine vulnerability with a sense of righteousness that seeks to “justify” the unjustifiable.
I commenced by disposing of the various forces so as to destroy with the least delay the vast quantity of goods left in the timber and ravines adjacent to the camp. The men gathered into heaps and burned tons of dried buffalo meat packed in buffalo-skin cases, great quantities of dried berries, buffalo robes, tanned buffalo, elk, and antelope skins, household utensils, such as brass and copper kettles, mess pans, etc., riding saddles, dray poles for ponies and dogs.
Finding that one day was too short a time to make the destruction complete, I ordered the men to gather only the lodge poles in heaps and burn them, and then deployed the men and fired the woods in every direction; the destruction was thus complete, and everywhere was manifest the rapid flight of the Indians, leaving everything, even their dogs and colts tied to the pickets. In skirmishing the timber dead Indians were found killed by exploding shells. After a thorough examination of the camping ground, and by judging from the amount of lodge poles burnt, I should judge the camp to have numbered 1,400 lodges.
—Col. Robert N. McLaren, Second Minnesota Cavalry, July 29, 1864 (Minnesota Board of Commissioners, p. 543)
Much had been accomplished. Forty-four bodies of warriors had been found, many more carried off and concealed. The season’s supplies of meat and clothing material, and their wagons, were destroyed. The howlings of the squaws that came across the river told the tale of their misery and despair.
—Lieutenant Col. William R. Marshall, Seventh Regiment, Minnesota Volunteers, 1863 (Heard, 1863, p. 332)
Sully’s men spent September 4 and September 5 burning plunder and Indian gear, including 300 lodges and a winter’s supply of 400,000—500,000 pounds of buffalo meat (representing at least 1,000 butchered buffalos). Captain R. B. Mason, the wagonmaster, stated that “fat ran in streams from the burning mass of meat.” (p. 141)
I hope you will not believe all that is said of Sully’s successful expedition against the Sioux. I don’t think he ought to brag of it at all, because it was what no decent man would have done, he pitched into their camp and just slaughtered them, worse a great deal than what the Indians did in 1862 […] It is lamentable to hear how those women and children were slaughtered, it was a perfect massacre and now he returns saying that we need fear no more, for he has wiped out all hostile Indians from Dakota; if he had killed men instead of women and children, then it would have been a success, and the worse of it, they had no hostile intention whatever […]. (Clodfelter, p. 141)
Besides white military histories like Clodfelter’s, bibliographic materials provided to the J-term students included early white-supremacist histories like Isaac Heard’s History of the Sioux War and Massacre of 1862 and 1863 (1863) and Harriet McConkey’s Dakota War Whoop: Indian Massacre and War in Minnesota, 1862–1863 (1864). Modern critical works by Vine Deloria, David Nichols, Waziyatawin, and others were on the lists as well to assist in the museum-writing work.
Students found “the facts” of the war uncomfortable, sometimes painful and shocking, all in multidirectional ways like the fighting itself. Some of them consulted newspapers from 1862 showing the extent to which settler society dehumanized the Dakota, inciting violence that worked to “justify” land confiscation, expulsion, and extermination. A call to “exterminate the wild beasts” printed in the St. Cloud Democrat during Lincoln’s review of the trial transcripts, for example, made it onto the “Settler perspectives” panel authored by Jennifer who used it precisely because she found it “heinous” and thought it would not only grab attention but educate unwitting white audience members (Interview, January 18, 2012). Hers was not a common approach among J-termers nor did it come without problems, as Chapter 8 examines. Although the discovery that Dakota warriors had killed so many settlers had a strong impact on students, so too did white discourses espousing white supremacy, Native “savagery,” and genocidal intent.
- Lori:
I’ve only lived in Minnesota for a year, um, so I’m not sure what the public knows and what the overall feeling is or perspective is about what actually took place, um, so people could be very upset about what appears to be imbalance in- in how we are portraying through the quotes that we’re using and the images that we’re using, um what the settlers and the traders and the government officials were like.
- Rick:
Like- like you’re- you’re cherry-picking the worst?
- Lori:
Right, right. Um, (2.0) however, (3.0) seeing what I’ve seen and looking at what I’ve looked at (4.0) there’s very few (1.5) perspectives that I’ve seen that are not what would be considered the worst if you were only to have the option of putting one quote up. (Interview, January 23, 2012)
There were only four days left in the course when Lori told me this. Most of her research was finished and she had a final draft of her panel narrative due in three days. The constraints she refers to (putting up a single quote), and which Tom referred to (limiting panel narratives to 250 words), made the kind of balanced representation implied next to impossible. For Lori, to choose a triumphalist quote from the 1860s promoting white “victimhood,” “innocence,” “benevolence,” or “gallantry” could have meant to sanitize the history, embrace white supremacy, or be accused of trying to make whites look bad. Choosing white quotes about Dakota “savagery” or critical quotes from Dakota people from commentators like Samuel Brown about racism, oppression, and genocide could have made it look like she was, again, trying to make whites look bad. Whatever factual quote she chose would likely make it appear as if she had intentionally cherry-picked the “worst,” a possible accusation from white audience members seeking “balance.” In consulting the facts from early sources, Lori was bound to present the unavoidable “imbalance” she noted about the 1860s, an act that seemed to imply breaking a code in the white public pedagogy, making fellow whites upset over what appears to be but can only be imbalance.
Such were immediate struggles facing the J-term students in their coursework requirements—how to consult the facts and suspend judgment while arranging the facts in “balanced” forms of representation fair to whites. These frontline dilemmas engaged white epistemology (fidelity to printed facts and sources), white ontology (showing equal validity and respect), and their combined resistance to critical-social-justice education on 1862.
As will be seen in coming chapters, however, this work involved even deeper dilemmas for students concerning white identity and mutual obligations that identity implies when accounting for its role in the racially violent present and past—obligations commonly invoked in the underwriting of today’s white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War.
- 1.
Pseudonyms are used for the students and instructors in keeping with the promise of anonymity made to study participants in signed consent forms.
- 2.
St. Lucia College and Gotland are pseudonyms developed to help keep the promise of anonymity made to study participants in signed consent forms.
- 3.
Woolworth passed away in 2014.
- 4.
Of the six public lectures comprising the Conflict and Remembrance lecture series, I transcribed four because of their relevance to dominant discourses emerging in my analyses of the white public pedagogy in classroom talk and interviews. The lectures were video recorded by St. Lucia College staff and made available to the public on the College website via Creative Commons for over a year after they took place. Marz’s lecture occurred on January 24, 2012, with three days remaining in the course. After attending the lecture, I transcribed it for analysis from the College recording.
- 5.
Dr. Lenz offered this assessment: “I just thought what she said was crap, and I thought that was pretty recognizable by most of the audience that it was crap” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Student negativity toward the lecture in interviews and the last focus group support this assessment, as Chapter 4 shows.
- 6.
Rick is the interviewer and author of this book.
- 7.
In the TPT documentary The Past is Alive Within Us: The U.S.-Dakota Conflict, Minnesota state legislator Dean Urdahl says, “I hear from people in the state, from descendants of white settlers who say, ‘Don’t you dare say you’re sorry. Don’t you dare talk about reconciliation, making comments like, ‘It wasn’t me that did this. Issue an apology for my great-great grandfather, but not for me.’” See http://video.tpt.org/video/2365142131/ (52:30).
- 8.
Fields and Fields (2012) define racism as “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).
- 9.
The construction of the exhibit for an imagined white audience will be discussed in upcoming chapters. Two of the students introduced here made the point rather bluntly. Tom: “The panels aren’t to explain to a Dakota person what happened. They already have that history” (Interview, May 11, 2012). Stephanie: “If I were a Dakota person it would offend me. But we’re not making the panels for Dakota people, we’re making them for like ignorant white people” (Interview, January 24, 2012).
- 10.
Withholding information can take many forms. Two worth noting are omitting discussion of white exterminationist agitators exerting pressure on Dakota communities prior to 1862 (Meyer, 1967, pp. 101–102) and the acknowledgment of exterminationist actions taken long after the fact, when it was politically safe to do so. On the suppression of information regarding the terror that settlers brought down on regional Indian communities in 1862, for example, the Mankato Review once reported—“These Winnebagoes [Ho-Chunk] were known to be friendly with the Sioux, and only the most watchful care and vigilance had prevented them from joining in the murderous raid […] One noteworthy act of the Mankato lodge, however, merits particular attention. This was the employment of a certain number of men, members of the order, whose duty was to lie in ambush on the outskirts of the Winnebago reservation, and shoot any Indian who might be observed outside the line. […] For obvious reasons their reports were not made a matter of record” (“The Knights of the Forest,” 1886, p. 6).