You’ve heard the accounts of wars, the battles, the sieges, the skirmishes, all of them from an objective point of view. [2.5] I’m not here to be objective. I cannot be objective when I have a personal stake in this history.
—Gwen Westerman, St. Lucia College J-Term Lecture, January 26, 2012.1
* * *
This statement by Minnesota State University Professor Gwen Westerman in the last installment of the J-Term lecture series was the only critical public response to white objectivity I heard all month. It came as a direct reply to Corrine Marz’s overview two days before of the various “perspectives” involved in studying the U.S.-Dakota War, an overview that ended with the historians’ privileged perspective—“And then finally there is a view of historians who try to be very objective.” As soon as Marz asserted this, however, the objective foundation seemed to crumble—“And it is not very- it’s not always possible to be objective because you, you try to look at each side and each viewpoint and see (3.0) what they- uh, you know, why they are thinking the way they do, and to look at the facts and, um, to try to decide for yourself what is the b- best, uh, viewpoint for yourself.” Marz had nothing to say about why the objective historian could slip so quickly into subjectivity like that. Could it be because there were Dakota people sitting in the audience?
The crux of Westerman’s lecture emphasized that Dakota people are still here in Minnesota—“We are doctors, farmers, teachers, lawyers, ranchers, engineers, inventors, poets, artists. We live in rural areas. We live in cities. We live in subdivisions. We live on reservations. We are your neighbors.” This message came after her overview of Minnesota’s exterminationist past, including an indirect rebuttal to Gary Clayton Anderson’s assertion that genocide never occurred here. Only then, with one celebratory day remaining for J-term students and instructors, did a professional educator speak clearly about the Rome Statutes’ criteria for genocide, display international law for everyone to see, and discuss why it should apply when making sense out of “the facts” of Minnesota history. For students who had taken Waziyatawin’s book seriously, Westerman added evidence to a growing indictment. “In the mid-nineteenth century,” she said, “the legislature in Minnesota was considering a bill to encourage killing gophers and blackbirds. Pests to crops. One senator offered an amendment to this bill encouraging the extermination of the Dakotas as well.” If genocide had never been carried out as official state policy, “written down” as Anderson would have it, hearing of its nearness to policy and proclamation from the lips of policymakers had done serious damage to the ethnic-cleansing-only thesis.
I drive a hybrid SUV. I live in a house. It’s more economical to drive a hybrid SUV than it is to own a horse, or so I’ve heard. But I’ve been in a tepee. Yet those are the kinds of questions that we as Indian people today, that we as Dakota people today still get, because for some reason our image is stuck in that 1890 time period when Indians were elements of Wild West shows, later to be immortalized in the Westerns of the 1950s.
Indeed, as seen in the wreath-passing lessons, partial knowledge of Dakota people, that is, incomplete and biased representations of them were always lurking (Kumashiro, p. 39), especially when a specific property-owning identity found defensive reconstruction. In these moments, encouraged by neutral (yet biased) instruction, the J-term devolved into oppressive pedagogy. On the other hand, Dakota speakers had addressed J-termers on at least five separate occasions, telling them about language loss, forced removals of children and families to boarding schools and segregated communities in the twentieth century, and about legal restrictions on Dakota ceremony until at least 1978 (Fieldnotes, January 19, 2012). Moments like these offered learning experiences in anti-oppressive pedagogy, moments when the students were encouraged to identify and confront oppressive practices and to try to speak out against them from the heart. This is one way the course could be said to have been politically “balanced” yet highly segregated by race and pedagogy with white educators playing the roles of objective providers of perspectives, positioning Dakota people as tokens of their culture rather than building solidarity with them through critical-social-justice activity.
I felt a lot of pressure from John to give the other side, because the rest of it is very one sided. And so- I mean ((sigh)) in- in wanting to have it be balanced, I think that was what was, you know, wanting to happen, but I feel like if I was gonna go all the way we should have just gone all the way and just- and just gone all the way and just done it. (Interview, April 26, 2012)
Here “the other side” stood for whites “trying to do good work” in 1862, as Jennifer recalled Harwell saying. Going “all the way” meant producing an exhibit that would have been critical according to Jennifer’s initial view, advocating for social justice. In admittedly being almost haunted by such moments in my data collection, especially this one where Jennifer erases all sense of agency when describing the demand for balance—“in wanting to have it be balanced, I think that was what was, you know, wanting to happen”—I’ve grown convinced that something more is going on than simply trying to appease white-settler descendants or account for the uncommon story of so many whites having been killed regionally in 1862. A different and highly naturalized sense of “justice” seems to be afoot here, one that runs counter to the kind of justice Waziyatawin and other critical educators speak of today when encouraging people to identify the social and cultural roots of inequality and work against the oppressive social practices that shape them.
That’s what these next two chapters on the white public pedagogy are about, trying to get at the normative sense of “justice” that regional educators seemed to operate under in 2012 and to account for why no whites, including highly educated ones, pushed back against white objectivity in public as Dakota speaker Gwen Westerman was able to do in her lecture. This first chapter focuses on the white public pedagogy’s demands for citizens to suspend judgment, seeking to historicize commonsense claims that, for example, a source like Kenneth Carley (1976) holds the “fairly balanced perspective, which is what we’re looking for.” First, how is this claim tied to a sense of balance operating among “us” outside the classroom when it comes to the U.S.-Dakota War? What is the history of this sense of balance regionally? Then, how do Carley’s history and his presentation of the facts serve to reproduce this sense of balance? Finally, to what degrees did various J-termers attain the sought-after Carleyan balance? Ultimately, this two-chapter journey through the white public pedagogy offers answers to Waziyatawin’s question What does justice look like? (2008) and Sandee Geshick’s question quoted in my Preface about why racial discrimination still exists regionally to the detriment of the Dakota people.
The Public Call for Being Balanced and Fact-Based
While the plight of native Americans has clearly been horrific, there were also deep scars for the descendants of the hundreds of settlers who were killed in 1862.
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. There is blame enough to spread around and plenty of stories of heroic and compassionate actions on both sides.
But as the time period is more closely studied this year, there is also no benefit in sugar coating or romanticizing the actions of either side. Learning and discussing the facts, as best they can be found and as fairly as possible, should be the goal in this sesquicentennial year. (“Dakota-U.S. War history,” 2012)
This pronouncement came in direct response to a public event hosted by the Blue Earth County Historical Society the previous week in which, as this same editorial paraphrased it, “Dakota Indians told of the difficult road they have had in regaining their heritage.” The Dakota speakers had reportedly traced their struggles back to aggressive assimilation efforts begun by whites in the nineteenth century resulting in the prohibition of Dakota language and spiritual practices far into the twentieth century.2 The editor’s advice told readers who presumably had not had their language or religious practices banned in the past that when acquiring such knowledge in the coming year, they should keep in mind scarred settler descendants and avoid weighing the historical trauma of “both sides” on the scales of justice. In following their task of being fair-minded citizens, readers should assume a prior position of balance and be ready to maintain it no matter what the hard-to-find facts might turn up.
Why should the implied reader of this column even bother learning about the U.S.-Dakota War? Because “you owe it to yourself to learn more about this tragic period of our local history.”
This subtle switch to the first-person plural—our—by an editor addressing a community reporting an American Indian population under 1% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015) suggests that specific assumptions are in play about normative civic identity and its ways of knowing. The reader is racially unmarked in contrast to the “Dakota Indians” who spoke, and most likely imagined as white given Mankato’s 90% white population. But the reader is also literally unmarked in relation to the settler descendants imagined; that is, the reader being addressed—you—is someone unscarred by this trauma. The implied reader seems to stand in a kind of ahistorical neutral zone between sides like Lori Sturdevant’s imagined public commemorator in the Minneapolis Star Tribune from Chapter 3. Both configurations look something like this—Dakota descendants /the unmarked citizen /white war descendants.
Noting this pattern provides a way into understanding how “justice” on 1862 is supposed to operate for whites in southern Minnesota, both civically imagined whites and real ones, who are paradoxically encouraged to learn but discouraged from engaging judgment (much less justice) on the U.S.-Dakota War. “Justice” in the sense of distributing rewards and punishments fairly where wrongs have been committed is definitely not in play, as the newspaper editor signals. That kind of justice would involve engaging intellectual discernment, ethics, moral judgment, and perhaps even international law as a judge might do when making a ruling where wrongdoing has caused people harm. This would be actually using the scales, or “weighing,” which the newspaper does not want people to do. Indeed, engaging judgment is not necessary according to this view because a public sense of “justice” already exists with the unmarked citizen and his or her ability to remain reasonable and maintain balanced fairness however threatened that sense of fairness may grow when faced with inconvenient facts Dakota people courageously bring to white public forums.
With this observation, however, come considerations of how the Free Press’s version is different from the Star Tribune’s. The Free Press evokes “deep scars for the descendants of the hundreds of settlers who were killed” in an effort to counterbalance Dakota trauma. Scales are being used here, but in a competitive binary effort to restore a sense of equal validity for “both sides.” There is specific historical violence in this appeal unlike the picture presented in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Mankato appeal says that when facing Dakota trauma, the specter of violence committed against whites should be enough to recruit white citizens to justice as fairness. It feels as if the slain ancestors of fellow whites are not continually kept in mind, something vital to the social fabric—the common sense of justice—could come undone. Rather than being similar to Lori Sturdevant’s account of the political landscape on the U.S.-Dakota War, the Mankato editorial seems more closely aligned with the socially symbolic act performed by the angry professor at the History conference in Mankato the previous fall, discussed in my Introduction. It makes a direct appeal to settler genealogy and the white terror (Mills, 1997) experienced in 1862 to persuade the unmarked citizen to suspend judgment in all its forms.
Race, Regional “Objectivity,” and the Anti-Indian Sublime
In his article “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom” (2009), Walter Mignolo provides a history of “zero-point” epistemology and the rise of the objective, detached white observer. According to Mignolo, as European capitalism and colonialism developed from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, theologians and eventually secular philosophers and scientists asserted the power to classify the rest of the world and its peoples, the purpose being both to enable and justify socioeconomic and cultural expansion for Europeans whom I will label here “whites” for the context I’m addressing. Non-whites had little say in the empowered observer’s splitting of the world into European humanitas and non-European anthropos (p. 161), nor did they always have the means to effectively resist the classificatory methods used to dehumanize them and render their homelands terra nullius, or “nobody’s land,” presumably empty for the taking.
Somebody said, “You people are Sioux.” And we said, “OK. We’re Sioux.” A little later on somebody else said, “No, you guys are Dakota,” and again we said, “OK. We’re Dakota.” […] We overlooked who we were told we are by the creator. The creator said we are ikce wicaṡta. Ikce wicaṡta in Dakota means “common man.” (Lecture, January 05, 2012)
Building on this for J-termers, Sheldon Wolfchild visited the classroom and distributed readings on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, an early iteration of the European colonial hegemony Mignolo describes. Wolfchild explained that the Doctrine originated in a fifteenth-century papal bull and eventually found its way into U.S. policy, upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1823 Johnson vs. M’Intosh decision (Fieldnotes, January 16, 2012). One of the readings went further to say that the Doctrine “was essentially a racist philosophy that gave white Christian Europeans the green light to go forth and claim the lands and resources of non-Christian peoples and kill or enslave them — if other Christian Europeans had not already done so” (Toensing, 2009, pp. 1–2). Following philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez’s work, Mignolo (2009) explains how the idea of “the detached observer, a neutral seeker of truth and objectivity” (p. 162) spread with colonial expansion, and of how notions of universals became naturalized for whites in the process, successfully promoting notions of socially abstracted knowledge or “truth” to the point where it continues to dominate Western methods of teaching and research (Mignolo, p. 160).
Given all this, white common sense might say that even though history is written by the victors, Western methods of recording facts and truth by 1862 involved enough objectivity to enable today’s citizen-scholars to make fair assessment of events using the sources Minnesota’s colonizers first produced on the U.S.-Dakota War. Thinking like this certainly lay behind the Mankato editor’s 2012 appeal to the “the facts, as best they can be found,” an expression partly revealing knowledge of the war as a silenced history whose early sources have grown obscure. Yet, the violence against white ancestors with which the editor aligns his appeal to “the facts” already suggests knowledge of these obscure sources’ partial (incomplete and biased) content about white victimhood, still important knowledge to acquire because, after all, many whites did die in 1862. My argument, however, is that the ways in which these sources’ content are framed by the humanitas (civilized) /anthropos (savage) divide, or, more specifically, what historian Peter Silver (2008) has termed the anti-Indian sublime, makes it virtually impossible for any white reader today, even highly educated ones, to use the sources and arrive at any “fair” assessment of what actually occurred in 1862.
The fact that they were Indians, intensely hating the whites, and possessed of the inclinations and revengeful impulses of Indians, and educated to the propriety of the indiscriminate butchery of their opponents, would raise the moral certainty that, as soon as the first murders were committed, all the young men were impelled by the sight of blood and plunder — by the contagion of example, and the hopes entertained of success — to become participants in the same class of acts. (p. 257, emphases Heard)
In instances like this, and there are many, Heard’s text serves as a key primary source for the regional history of “the facts” as a political discourse, showing its roots in “moral certainty” rather than any objectivity or suspension of moral judgment. For Heard, the primary fact of all regarding events of the previous year was that Indians were savage by nature, predisposed to “indiscriminate butchery,” and “impelled” (bloodthirsty) once any butchery commenced.
Unsurprisingly, his history contains some of the most sensational stories of white “victimhood” and Dakota “savagery” the historiography has to offer. Scenes covering the onset of violence in Heard include a teen-age girl being pinned to the ground and raped in front of her dying mother, a fetus being cut out of a woman’s womb, and young children being nailed alive to various doors and tables (pp. 69-71). Who? Where? Heard does not say, yet some regional lay historians still cling to these stories (Dahlin, 2013; Glotzbach, 2012; Mueller, 2012) despite professional historians’ efforts over decades to dispel them as overblown and ideological rather than factual (Blegen, 1963; Folwell, 1924; Meyer, 1967; Wilson, 2006). With his privileged status as the first early historian to comprehensively package primary-source materials for white readers, Heard managed not only to set the tone for how knowledge about 1862 would later be told but also to establish, along with his contemporaries McConkey (1864) and Bryant and Murch (1864), what citizen-scholars would find whenever they would go “back to the sources” in the future, as Minnesota’s white Heritage discourse community prides itself in doing (Lybeck, 2018).
Accordingly, macabre white-supremacist lore on womb-slitting and baby nailing has circulated for 150 years in the local press, as in this anonymous letter to the editor in the 1950s—“who would not wish to seek revenge against a neighbor who comes calling, shakes hands with one’s family, then unprovoked, shoots the daughter, rapes the women and girls, swings the infants by their heels against the wall, nails the older children to the cabin wall….” (“She wants marker displayed,” 1959); and in this letter from the 1960s—“Some women saw their husbands killed, then tomahawks sunk one after the other into the heads of their children while they were held screaming to watch. Some children were mutilated but still left alive and then nailed to fence posts to die” (Grams, 1962); and in this letter from the 1970s—“Men, women and children slain, some scalped or dismembered, some babies nailed to a barn door” (Mann, 1971). Periodic reproduction of white early-source knowledge has not only fueled Mankato’s stigma over the decades but supported commonsense notions that real knowledge or the “truth” about 1862 primarily involves white victimhood in the form of rape, mutilation, and other atrocities committed against white women and children.
Early sources on American “Indian wars” have always presented truth puzzles, even to readers in their day. How could their authors make bold claims to fact- and truth-telling and at the same time deliver lines like this one from Isaac Heard when prefacing a violent scene— “Helplessness, innocence, tender age, prayers, tears–these were not calculated to induce mercy” (p. 69)? This sounds subjective, yet Heard’s Preface promises a “reliable history” (p. v). As Peter Silver (2008) explains, this genre of history writing happens to have ripened in the eighteenth century during the age of sensibility, a pre-Romantic aesthetic that promoted sensitivity to the emotional states of others as the key to moral improvement. In doing so, the aesthetic indulged in acute feelings like sorrow and terror, holding them up as most “sublime” sensations. Engaging this literary trend, Indian-war narratives generalized and embellished violence against white “innocence”—womanhood and childhood in particular—rendering it through the highly emotional prism of the “pathetic sublime” (Silver, pp. 83–90). One sees this effect in Heard’s references to mercy and tears above, and indeed throughout the early sources on the U.S.-Dakota War, perhaps most ridiculously in Bryant & Murch (1864) where authors start out writing of the historian’s project, “It is his business to record the facts, and leave the reader to arrive conclusions, drawn from those facts” (p. 29), only to proceed to deliver lines like this one—“My daughter, O! my daughter! doomed to the foul embraces of an Indian fiend in her ripening youth and glorious beauty!” (pp. 272–273).
Although Silver’s context is the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic, this dominant discourse—the anti-Indian sublime—ran straight through 1860s Minnesota filling early-source materials with all sorts of content meant to be “thrilling” and “exciting” for white readers. What could make such history writing “objective” for writers like Heard and Bryant & Murch was not so much its function recording “facts” or events as they really happened but its grounding in disciplinary practice, fitting events from Minnesota into a scholarly tradition reaching back to works on King Philip’s War where Indian-war literature’s stock phrases (“nameless outrages”) and formulaic tropes (violated doors and wombs) were first forged (Lepore, 1998; Silver, 2008). For U.S.-Dakota War scholars, the assault on truth set in motion by the early historians may be exposed in a broad range of political texts and speeches strongly resonating with Heard and his contemporaries, from Benjamin Franklin’s reversal of perpetrator/victim dialectics in his 1764 pamphlet A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians (Silver, p. 86) to Donald Trump’s revival of womb-slitting discourses in current abortion debate (Crary, 2019; Parquette, 2016). Throughout, the target remains the sentiments of the potentially critical white reader/voter who might take a stand against white supremacy and/or find solidarity with Indians.
Some have criticised the action of the court because of the great number of the condemned. Great also was the number of crimes of which they were accused.
Many of the presses in the East condemned the demands of the people of Minnesota for their execution as barbarous in the extreme. For their benefit let me cite a few instances from the history of their own ancestors under similar circumstances. See how the investigation and trial above detailed, and the refraining of the people to visit death summarily upon the criminals, or upon any one of them, compares with their conduct, and then judge. (p. 270)
In this, I read a plea to the unmarked citizen not unlike the one made in the 2012 Mankato Free Press editorial quoted at the start of the previous section of this chapter. From a site of institutional power, the white producer of public knowledge appeals to citizens’ reason, arguing that they suspend judgment and remain fair while consulting the facts. These facts center on acts of racial violence involving white ancestors, a body of knowledge sure to keep the reasonable citizen from laying blame. Yet in a seemingly straightforward reconstruction of oppressor/oppressed relations that refutes white victimhood (not a common move today), Heard calls out Easterners for ruthless acts of extermination committed by their forebears, a kind of sideways acknowledgment of what was transpiring in the Dakota Territory at the time of his writing. Because Heard and the court and other authorities had shown restraint and not visited death summarily upon the Dakota, Minnesota’s brand of extermination was more civilized than theirs, or so the argument (not unlike Gary Clayton Anderson’s) goes.
Fear and the White Community’s Suspension of Judgment
In both appeals to fair-mindedness made by Isaac Heard in 1863 and the Mankato Free Press in 2012, symbolic white ancestors are associated with racial violence and thereby function as fear-inducing agents to divert white citizens away from engaging judgment. Although I’m not suggesting any causal relationship between the January 10 Mankato editorial and the actual wildspread suspension of judgment that took place among regional knowledge workers in 2012, I do suggest the discursive move as endemic to an ideology that leaves one with the idea that to disrupt or break with it could be risky business to the point of damaging the social fabric. As noted in the “Official Perspective” prefacing my Introduction, the Director of the Blue Earth County Historical Society in Mankato summed up her institution’s approach to the war by saying, “We’re not going to get into who was right and who was wrong. We’re trying to stay as neutral as we can” (Ojanpa, 2011). The Director of the Nicollet County Historical Society used virtually the same words as the anniversary of the fighting drew near, saying, “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” (Krohn, 2012). Within a week of that statement, Brown County Historical Society spokesperson Darla Gebhard echoed, “We are not looking at this from the perspective of who’s right and who’s wrong, but simply what happened here” (Ojanpa, 2012).
In some cases, suspending judgment sounded politically expedient, as with Gebhard, a New Ulm “Junior Pioneer” paraphrased elsewhere as saying the U.S.-Dakota War “still runs through the veins of many,” meaning white-settler descendants who tenaciously defended their town when it was besieged by Dakota fighters in August 1862 (Dyslin, 2012). Other times, suspending judgment seemed fearful, as with the Blue Earth County Historical Society which planned to devote significant time to Dakota culture in 2012 and ended up refusing to put a wooden beam on display believed to have been part of the scaffold used to hang the 38 Dakota men in 1862. Public letters variously criticizing this decision and policing the institution’s neutrality included accusations of “failing to remember whites who died” in 1862 (LaBatte, 2012) and reference to a “blond scalp” it once had on display believed to have been severed from the head of a 13-year-old settler girl. “I’m sure her death was a lot more complicated than a drop from the gallows,” the letter writer added (Mueller, 2012).
Disappointed at not being able to see the suspected gallows beam, another reader wrote, “The controversy over the scaffold timber has reminded me of all the wonderful and interesting artifacts the historical society possesses, many of them donated by families like mine with long histories in Mankato” (Rowher, 2012). Such statements could come across as chilling considering newspaper reports related to the Blue Earth County Historical Society’s beginnings, when relics first brought by community members for public display included not only body parts, nooses and a beam used in the hanging, and a tree branch from a subsequent lynching, but “one of the 38 Indians” (“Of days gone by,” 1902).3 This same 2012 letter by Rowher made clear connections between the vindictive violence carried out by whites in 1862 and the call to suspend judgment today—“Museums are not interpreters of history, but preservers of it.” Such was the approach in New Ulm as well where the Brown County Historical Society Director claimed, “We can’t interpret the war. It’s just so complex” (Fischenich, January 28, 2012). Politically expedient or fearful, situated histories of racial violence were shaping community-wide calls to suspend judgment in 2012 on both interpretive and moral fronts.
there is a lot of unrest going on in the people that are attending these lectures, and they’re not talking about it, and I think that’s part of the problem is that there’s all this like- and you know, it’s the Midwest- it’s the Minnesota nice kind of BS that we’re dealing with here, and it’s like, “I’m not gonna out myself cause I don’t wanna look like a racist” and it’s like, “Well you are. You’re still sitting there and you’re just quiet.” (Focus group, January 20, 2012)
At this point, she referred back to what she had told me in an interview two days before about being “more wary to” and “stepping around” not just white people but “the children of white people” (Interview, January 18, 2012). Holly explained her own reluctance to ask critical questions at the lectures for fear of offending “all of the white old people sitting around me” (Interview, January 26, 2012), suggesting that perceived racist silences among the older set were breeding critical silences among the younger set. For Steven, the silence of the crowds caused uncertainty and an assumption about political negativity toward the J-term exhibit-writing work—“We kind of had that view that like- we were never really sure about like the townies that showed up, maybe they were just the people who weren’t talking, but had like, um- some not-so-nice things to say” (Interview, May 03, 2012). The students had this view and yet white “townies” never did object to the J-term work, at least in ways I was able to capture. There was just the lone email sent to the instructors mentioned in Chapter 3.
Sitting among the overflow crowd just before the start of the first lecture on January 4, I felt something similar to what Jennifer and Steven later told me. With my knowledge of sensational letters written to the Free Press and having witnessed the angry professor’s symbolic act at the History conference in Mankato, I couldn’t keep from profiling those sitting around me. I noted a man just behind wearing an authentic-looking Union soldier’s cap bearing crossed gold rifles. A man on my left was telling his neighbor about the number of whites killed in the summer of 1862, saying, “in today’s numbers, it would be around 15,000 people or so” (Fieldnotes, January 04, 2012). Mankato’s Abraham Lincoln impersonator was easy to spot nearby for the press coverage he had received. A substantial number of Dakotas turned out, sitting close to the front. In my notes, I expressed surprise that hardly any college students seemed to be in attendance besides the J-termers, an assessment students confirmed in the first focus-group discussion that week (January 06, 2012). Using my journal to write my way through and reflect on my own biases, I described the majority as looking like “heritage people who carry with them an angry settler mentality” (Fieldnotes, January 04, 2012). To the audiences’ credit, however, not once did an audience member publicly voice the kind of vitriol I had seen in the paper and had got me involved as a researcher in the first place. How much of it had been real and how much produced by today’s institutional descendants of white frontier newspaper editors? I never found out, yet political savagery from local white descendants seemed a threat, even for J-termers who didn’t take the Mankato paper.
The Effect on Curriculum: Locating Carley’s “Balanced Perspective”
Commonsense notions about putting primary sources first when studying history are deep rooted and permeate the regional white public pedagogy (Lybeck, 2018). So too are notions that the facts from primary sources stand apart from secondary-source opinion; thus, the sesquicentennial journal Minnesota’s Heritage: Back to the Sources and its project “revisiting the primary sources surrounding the Dakota Conflict of 1862” in order to make it possible “for scholars and the public alike to consider 150-year-old resources in order to cut through the veil of opinion and politics and seek a balanced view of the past” (Bakeman, p. 2). As seen in discussion of the U.S.-Dakota’s War’s first historians, however, primary-source facts on 1862 are inextricably bound up with early-historian opinions about whites and Indians.
In A History of the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians (1864), Heard’s contemporaries, Charles S. Bryant and Abel Murch, profess only to “state such facts as seemed connected with the massacre, in a connected form, and in the plainest possible manner” (p. iii). After hundreds of pages of commentary including lines like “O! my daughter! doomed to the foul embraces of an Indian fiend” quoted above, the authors end up reflecting that events in 1862 comprised part of “an INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL WAR” between the races” (p. 463). Accordingly for them, a primary frame for packaging the facts posited that Indians were bloodthirsty “savages,” depicted at one point in their chapters as a pack of wolves close on the heels of bleeding white settlers (pp. 416–417). In like manner, Harriet Bishop McConkey (1864), the Minnesota Territory’s first public-school teacher, promises “truth” and “facts” in her history of the U.S.-Dakota War (p. 18). Among her facts concerning the four young Dakotas who shot settlers at Acton on August 17 is that “the sight of blood infuriated their demon thirst” (p. 31).
One stone struck the boy in the head and dropped him to his knees. He knelt there and touched the wound on his forehead and when he took the hand away a squib of blood leaked down his cheek.
Blood changed the game. The children quit laughing. They found larger stones and hefted them. […] And though the adults had to urge them on at the beginning, once blood was spilled, the children didn’t hesitate. Otter picked up a stone like all the rest.” (p. 288)
The idea here evokes Isaac Heard’s line quoted earlier about young Dakota men being “impelled by the sight of blood” and “the contagion of example.” I haven’t located this specific scene in the early histories, but McConkey, for example, relates a similar one where Dakotas allegedly mock a white boy as they torture him to death with sticks and knives, a story told to illustrate what McConkey depicted to be in the Dakotas’ “savage hearts” (p. 46). Many stories like it exist in the early histories, but their status as white-supremacist folklore rather than truth needs to be unpacked before anyone, including novelists, begins to tap them as sources.
J-termers didn’t say much about The Nightbirds or go into detail when discussing the book in interviews. Stephanie told me she found the book “traumatizing” and cited it as a key source that gave her a new-found appreciation for the settler experience, the new sense of fairness she said helped “put things in perspective for me” (Interview, January 24, 2012). This was the impetus for her moving away from her previous judgment about the unfair perspectives of settlers and their descendants which she looked back on as having initially been too harsh, as told in Chapter 2. Lori referred to The Nightbirds as playing an important role in the overall “balanced perspective” she took away from the course (Interview, April 27, 2012).
In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), Barbara and Karen Fields make an analogy to witchcraft to explain how racism perpetuates itself as ideology, becoming fully naturalized as a set of commonsense beliefs shared even among the most educated living in the racist society. In the case of witchcraft, the authors explain that even skeptics like Martin Luther could go on believing that “a person could steal milk by thinking of a cow and that his mother had contracted asthma via a neighbor’s evil eye” (p. 20). The beliefs keep finding support in “evidence” observed in the external world, and believers keep chalking up reasons for events to unrelated signifiers like dark skin. Because of the ideology’s self-perpetuating logic, counterevidence gets overlooked or disregarded for what it actually is. For example, part of a captivity narrative reproduced in McConkey’s (1864) history reads, “I had been in tight places before, among the Indians of the plains, but a kind of providence had always watched over me, and delivered me safely, and I now put my trust in that same Power, to deliver me from this most dangerous situation” (p. 58). According to this belief system, no number of safe deliveries could ever work to overturn the conviction that Indians were anything other than dangerous “savages.” The thought of Indians being fellow human beings who had looked out for the narrator’s safety is not a consideration. While captivity narratives obviously had to work hard to make things look “exciting” and “thrilling” for sales, it is nevertheless this kind of thinking that Heard appeals to with a line like, “The fact that they were Indians,….” It is this kind of thinking that accounts for even the skeptics of 1862—people like Sarah Wakefield and Bishop Henry Whipple—calling the Indians savages in their writings while otherwise identifying and critiquing race-based double standards circulating around them. Widespread naturalized racism thus compounds the dilemma the J-term students experienced when encouraged to consult the sources and come back with factual examples of settlers who were “doing good work” in 1862, as Harwell put it to Jennifer (Interview, April 26, 2012). Examples were hard to come by, and when they seemed to have been found, conflicting information could also be found to “complicate” the picture.
All this brings me to Kenneth Carley’s balanced perspective.
Carley’s The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (1976) continues to provide white students the “ABCs” of the war, as Jennifer put it in the wreath-passing discussion. In 1970, Carley helped resurrect Harriet McConkey’s Dakota War Whoop: or, Indian Massacres and War in Minnesota, or 1862–‘3 (1864), an early history that had recently passed 100 years without reissue. A few examples of McConkey’s outlook have already been given in this section, but one of the purposes of her book is to extol the virtues of the white male heroes of the war beginning with Brigadier-General Henry Sibley in the frontispiece—“THAT THE LAUREL WREATH WHICH ENCIRCLES HIS BROW, MAY NOT FADE TILL EXCHANGED BY THE DIVINE HAND FOR A CROWN OF IMMORTAL GLORY, IS THE EARNEST PRAYER OF THE AUTHOR.” One of the most striking observations McConkey makes about the war is that the settlers of New Ulm, “a class of German infidels,” deserved to be attacked by the Dakota because they practiced Catholicism and spent their Sabbaths drinking and reveling in a dance hall (pp. 81–82). In such ways, McConkey’s text exudes an Anglo-Saxonist white supremacy that has been handed down to modern historians, for instance, Rhoda Gilman (2004) who struggles to take critical distance while describing Henry Sibley as white society understood him near the end of his life—“the benevolent embodiment of Anglo-American culture in the racially and ethnically diverse community around early Fort Snelling” (p. 234).
Do you remember, reader, of the horrid “scare stories” of the nursery, about the Indians, and of the after lessons of our school books, and how the impression of terror mixed in the mind with the very name of Indian? You would have run then at the sight of a passive Indian, and these impressions were now having their fruition of fear. You, no doubt, would have done the same. (pp. 76–77)
Despite all this and more, Carley provided the Foreword to the 1970 reissue of Dakota War Whoop, calling it “a significant source of information on the uprising” and praising its comprehensive approach to events from the war’s beginning through the summer of 1863 (p. iii). Only after promoting the book this way does Carley begin to address its interpretive problems. As he notes, it fails to quote military reports verbatim and instead changes their language in ways that distort understanding (as if the reports weren’t already distorted); it erroneously attributes the uprising to meddling Confederate agents; and it fails to acknowledge white land encroachment and economic exploitation as causes of the war.
But when noting the problem of McConkey’s portrayals of the white terror, Carley makes a significant interpretive move of his own, writing, “McConkey told many atrocity stories in the interest, partly at least, of readership and sales. The Indians did get out of hand in their age-old way of fighting, but some of the atrocity tales are doubtless overdrawn” (p. iii). On the issue of white-supremacist folklore, then, Carley is only willing to give a little in acknowledging the exaggerations of his ideological forebears; and while doing so, he must give a narrative wink to the reader suggesting that the Dakota may have been “savages” after all despite the economic intentions whites shared depicting them as such. But even this brief bigoted expression does not fully reveal the racism of the interpretive move. Like with the angry professor’s socially symbolic act at the History conference in Mankato, white savagery receives a pass as the comment is made, not just the genocidal violence carried out by whites in the Dakota Territory after 1862, or in, say, the Mexican War before or the Philippines after, or in domestic lynchings that persisted into the twentieth century as noted by William Folwell (p. 213), but in the war being conducted in Vietnam at the time of Carley’s writing.
What Carley seems to be trying to handle in discussing “atrocity” are simply the culturally different ways Dakotas waged war, ways presented in the white sources not only as “fiendish,” “infernal,” and “hellish,” (Bryant & Murch, pp. 102, 272) but as “hideous” (Heard, p. 69) and “unearthly” (Bryant & Murch, p. 213) so as to cause “unpleasant sensation” (McConkey, p. 106; Heard, p. 93). From such depictions running straight through Carley, one gets the sense of Dakota resistance being not just exotic in the way a white anthropologist might traditionally describe an “age-old” custom among racialized people, but merely inappropriate. The pass then that white savagery receives in Carley involves a double standard that makes anything whites have done in warfare more civilized by way of implicit, sensory-based contrast, a key way race has always been constructed in America (Smith, 2006).
Not surprisingly, the “balanced perspective” that today’s readers encounter in Carley is an undeniably partial white-settler perspective. In its current form, Carley’s history tells of Dakota warriors swooping down on unsuspecting and defenseless victims and of an ontological shudder rippling through white society (pp. 21–22). Anyone who comes to the aid of whites is deemed heroic, both whites and Indians in typical balanced fashion (pp. 15, 23). Although Carley can be counted as one of the historians working to dispel the atrocity and mutilation tales of Heardean myth (Carley, pp. 22, 42), his text cannot help but reproduce a highly gendered, implicitly sensationalized white terror. So, Carley’s readers often encounter detailed and intimate stories of trauma suffered by white women and girls—Justina Krieger wounded, left for dead and to wander alone for thirteen days (p. 42); Julia Wright and Laura Duley forced by Indians to roam endless miles for weeks through the Dakota Territory before being ransomed over to whites in November (p. 24); Mattie Williams and Mary Schwandt taken prisoner and raped after seeing their would-be protectors murdered (p. 22), and so on. Conversely, names and intimate details cannot be supplied for stories about the traumatic experiences of Dakota women and girls because the one-sided history of white knowledge production never allowed for it.
Such obvious imbalance continues to shape the white public pedagogy right down to the most local of its local iterations. As mentioned in my Introduction, the church-basement children’s theater production, …We Cannot Escape History …, provided character representations of white women and girls from 1862 but no representations of Dakota women or girls, only white youth and adult actors playing Dakota men.4 Still, the drama was promoted by the Mankato Free Press as “reasoned” and “objective,” its playwright quoted as offering “multiple perspectives” and not “arguing one side over the other” (Kent, 2012). The claim to “objectivity” made again by the playwright immediately following its first performance prevailed because the script had been “researched” (Kent, 2012). When I wrote the playwright to take issue with his claim to objectivity, he responded by saying, “It would have been a great help to me if more sources from Dakota women and children had been available. I eagerly anticipate the publication of the Dakota letters, along with many other historians. Hopefully, those will fill a gap in the historiography” (Personal correspondence, May 25, 2012). Despite acknowledging counterevidence, then, the claim to objectivity still stands because the white sources were consulted. As in Corrine Marz’s crumbling into subjectivity after asserting the historian’s objectivity on the J-term stage, uncritical revelations of subjectivity were all over coverage of …We Cannot Escape History …. The promotional article, for example, bore the telling title “Passion Play” (Kent, 2012).
A Balanced J-Term Perspective
All three anti-Indian-sublime sources discussed in this chapter—Heard, Bryant & Murch, and McConkey—are listed as key sources in the required ABCs-of-the-war readings J-termers covered in week two, Anderson & Woolworth’s Through Dakota Eyes (1988) and Kenneth Carley’s The Dakota War of 1862 (1976). When it came to Carley who would provide the fairly balanced J-term perspective, students were a bit unclear about whether or not the text was biased. Jennifer took issue with him estimating white-settler deaths while not seeming to bother much about Dakota deaths (Interview, January 18, 2012). Lori said, “the Carley book that we read felt like it gave an accurate portrayal of things that took place, but some of the word choices and the going back and forth between some of the choices of words kind of gave me a funny feeling […] It made me wonder what Carley’s personal views were because I felt like in some capacity they seeped into what he was writing about” (Interview, January 23, 2012). Again, Lori’s insights into the racially divisive museum-writing practices she had participated in show her to have had a strong inclination toward critical insight. Yet, in a course whose syllabus listed study of “the ‘linguistic turn’ in history” as a primary goal, her lingering questions about Carley’s accuracy suggest important opportunities had been missed in teaching critical awareness of race, identity, and their effect on language use and white knowledge production.
and at least two students today said ((gasps)) “I didn’t realize they killed women and children settlers. This is, you know, this is unsettling me.” And so I do think it’s important to acknowledge all of those perspectives, and I think the thing John did today with factions5 was important and to some extent the captivity narrative6 will give some of that perspective as well. (Interview, January 12, 2012)
But it was at this moment that Dr. Lenz also shared with me her observation from earlier in this chapter, that no one in her field “asks that Holocaust studies courses be balanced and teach Hitler’s perspective.” Despite all critical knowledge, then, that the going “perspectives” ideology demanding equal weight for the settler perspective engaged a dangerous line of thinking that could enable fascism, Dr. Lenz continued to help push for white balance, even to the extent that she could partly re-enact an ontological shudder she sensed rippling through class that day—the “((gasps))”—and its “unsettling” of two students, evoking the unsettled settlers of the past. As Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole wrote in 1862, “No people were ever more justly exasperated.”
One of those unsettled ones was Nikki, a third-year Nursing major who did not agree to be interviewed until the course ended. On the first day of the J-term, she had reported hoping “to learn why the U.S. wanted to put Native Americans on reservations instead of learning to coexist” (J-term “Pre-Test,” January 03, 2012). In April, Nikki told me more about herself, that her grandmother was Ojibwe and part Cree and had taken her to powwows in Minnesota every year when she was growing up. In light of this background, she expressed something common among the students, that she enrolled in Conflict and Remembrance feeling strong sympathies toward the Dakota:
- Rick:
Do you feel like that shifted at all after?
- Nikki:
It did! When we read the book of the war of 1862, I-
- Rick:
The Carley book?
- Nikki:
Yes. I had no idea that- um- how many white settlers were killed, honestly. I thought it was basically just a massacre of Indian tribes. And so, when I was reading that book, I was going back and forth, back and forth, and then, like that next day we had the ceremony at the buffalo, and I was just- I had all these feelings cause I had no idea.
- Rick:
Okay. Okay. So Carley is maybe like most- the most memorable read for you because of that- that perspective?
- Nikki:
Yeah.
- Rick:
That perspective. Okay.
- Nikki:
And just that I mean they were killing women and children.
(Interview, April 27, 2012)
Nikki’s “back and forth, back and forth” moment reading Carley describes exactly the kind of balancing act prescribed to the community by the Free Press early in 2012. As the regional white-public pedagogy has it, citizens generally knowledgeable about the genocide of Native-Americans must first consult facts from the hard-to-find sources before bringing such conclusions to bear on regional history. In doing so, the reasonable citizen-scholar is bound to learn that Dakota warriors went on a rampage killing hundreds of innocent, defenseless, and largely unwitting settlers in brutal fashion, foremost the women and children. Behind this educative prescription lies an assurance that the stories found in the early sources will provide all one needs to know about justice, including the sense of justice behind white claims to equal trauma, even genocide as Chapter 9 will show. The public charge to consult the facts seems like a safe bet, especially when presented to colorblind whites who are disinclined to talk about race. After all, it’s unlikely that today’s citizens, even well-educated ones like Nikki, will have the interpretive tools needed to see what might be wrong with the early sources and the ancestry-based double standards that shape their facts.
Conclusion
Untitled Buffalo, sculptor Tom Miller (1997)
(Source Author’s photo)
- 1.
Of the six public lectures in 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 license for over a year after they took place. The Gwen Westerman, Corrine Marz, and Glenn Wasicuna lectures quoted in this chapter occurred on January 26, January 24, and January 5, 2012, respectively. After attending the lectures, I transcribed them for analysis from the College recording.
- 2.
For original coverage of this event, see Fischenich, January 8, 2012, p. A1.
- 3.
A 2014 Free Press story reported on the recent discovery of a full skeleton of one of the hanging victims in the basement of a Mankato home being prepared for sale. Before the house changed hands, an unidentified relative of the owner allegedly removed the skeleton and took it with him to the Twin Cities (Krohn, 2014).
- 4.
…We Cannot Escape History… was not the only regional reenactment that recruited white actors to play Dakota Indians in 2012. In Rochester, Joe Chase, an Olmsted County District Court judge, also produced his own script and drama for public performance (Weber, 2012). Directors of both performances told the press that they consulted Dakota people during production.
- 5.
Harwell led discussion that day, at one point asking students to take stock of all factions involved in the war, both white and Dakota.
- 6.
Sarah Wakefield’s Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees was on the reading list for the following week.