The proper role of a white curator is to facilitate the neutral presentation of Indian artists and their work, and to have no real opinion on the content. The proper role of white artists, well, they don’t really have a role.
The code has been in effect for a couple of decades now, and to state things bluntly, it feels deader than disco.
—Paul Chaat Smith. (2009, p. 73)
***
Blue Earth County Courthouse “Lady Justice” (1889)
(Source Photo courtesy Jordan William Green [2011])
Mankato’s Justicia wears no blindfold, suggesting she can see difference quite clearly as she judges. Her right hand clutches the hilt of a sword. Once her scales blew away in a windstorm, leaving her only the sword for 64 years (Huggins, 1973).
This chapter continues to uncover the violence lurking just beneath the surface of the balanced (yet biased) white public pedagogy on the U.S.-Dakota War. First, I examine explicit use of the white terror as a balancing or neutralizing agent for white educators who would attempt to take critical stances on the war in public. Below, the example used to illustrate this dynamic involves journalistic enforcement of the hanging site as an interpretive-free zone over time. Looking carefully into the politics of a symbolic case enables me to contextualize this enforcement as part of a national public pedagogy that favors democratic-sounding thought (equal validity and respect) over critical thought (whose interests are being helped and harmed) whenever empowered white Americans gather to educate each other about the racially violent past. As I consider a national example, I return to local history to emphasize situated aspects of neutralized public representation, specifically Mankato’s hanging site, a place of uncommon white retribution and uncommon white “neutrality” since the war’s 1912 semicentennial. From this analysis, a local iteration of white justice as fairness emerges, providing further understanding of what whites mean when they evoke “neutrality,” “objectivity,” “fairness,” and “balance” to interpret the past. Ultimately, this chapter analyzes local white-supremacist ideology, giving further context behind Sandee Geshick’s claim about racism today and Waziyatawin’s question from 2008, What Does Justice Look Like?
On Being Neutral and Fair Locally
Since I moved to Mankato in 2006, the Free Press has covered the work of Steve Miller, a recently retired local public-school teacher who periodically took his fifth-grade students to Reconciliation Park, the modern site of the 1862 hanging, to learn about the war and Dakota culture. Teaming up in years past with David Larsen from Lower Sioux Indian Community,1 Miller publicly stated his purpose of making local history more meaningful for elementary students and of addressing the fact that there has been, according to the newspaper’s paraphrasing of Miller, “little mention in the curriculum about the Dakota Conflict and its widespread impacts on southern Minnesota” (Kent, 2010). By having his students interact with Larsen and other Dakotas when learning about Dakota history and culture, Miller promoted a spirit of “acceptance, equality and co-existence” (Kent, 2010).
Across stories chronicling Miller’s work, Larsen’s role sometimes involved teaching the fifth-graders specifically about the history the newspaper felt compelled to counterbalance with its editorial column analyzed in Chapter 6, namely, “the effort by Indians to regain their culture after a century of attempts to crush their language and history” (Krohn, May 16, 2012a). Attempts by whom, the story quoted here does not say. A 2010 article reported that “Larsen told students how Native American children were once made to change their names because their teachers, of European heritage, couldn’t pronounce them. He talked about the impact of words like ‘Sioux’ and ‘squaw,’ which were somewhat derogatory terms white settlers coined but have no meaning to Native American people” (Kent, 2010). The phrase “somewhat derogatory” gives an idea of the care that can be taken to make the content palatable to today’s implied Free Press reader, a far cry from past coverage that could include Dakota commentary on “the psychological rape of the people” (Moos, 1986) when it came to the topic of names and slurs.
At least twice in recent years, Miller’s work was disparaged in violent letters to the editor by David J. Gray, once in the January 2011, letter “Why is the white side in Conflict ignored?” discussed in my Introduction and again in the March 2012, letter “38 murderers don’t deserve memorial.” In the first letter, also written to denounce the coming publication of the Dakota prisoner-of-war letters (Canku & Simon, 2013), Gray conjured his great-great grandfather who fought to defend New Ulm in 1862; lamented the disappearance of the controversial old hanging monument that used to stand near Miller’s teaching site; referred to the “murder, rape and thievery” allegedly carried out by the hanging victims; and proceeded to complain that “now grade-school children sit in front of a limestone bison to be indoctrinated as to how evil their predecessors were. How sweet.” In the second letter, Gray again lamented the disappearance of the old monument, called the 38 hanging victims “murderers and rapists,” and complained that “Our young children needed to be indoctrinated with a particular one-sided point-of-view” (Gray, 2012). The purpose of this second letter was to argue against the new monument proposed to the 38—“If the city council, in their infinite PC wisdom, should approve this travesty of a memorial, let them also require a plaque listing the names of all 450–800 white victims to be placed alongside it as a balanced reminder of why 38 Dakota were hanged in the first place.” Familiar themes run through these letters—balance as a dominant discourse expressing a white-settler politics of resentment, critical pedagogy being imagined as a form of “PC” anti-settler indoctrination, and violence against white ancestors working as a neutralizing agent even toward a mild form of critical teaching such as Miller’s.
Miller said his goal is to enable his students to think critically about events of the past.
“When we teach history, we teach facts. All we can do is read them and then form your own opinion,” he said.
“I try to plant the seed and see if it grows. There’s no teaching; there’s
listening.” (Ojanpa, September 9, 2012, p. A1)
As publicly represented by the newspaper across time, then, Miller’s teaching seemed to transform since 2010 from a combination of his own messages of peaceful co-existence with Larsen’s critical pedagogy to an impossible approach of hoping to foster critical thinking while sticking strictly to “facts,” refusing to teach, and seeming relatively unconcerned about the outcome—“All we can do is read them and then form your own opinion.” Presumably, students could form any opinions at all because those would remain, to follow Corrine Marz’s line of thinking, for them, or “for YOURSELF” as this article’s title claimed. Critical understanding would definitely not be for the community in any collective sense. Individual opinions derived from “facts,” and always sharply demarcated from facts, were sure to remain both individuated and equally valid. So why worry about them?
Education meant instruction in the basic skills and facts necessary for the global market along with an inculcation of respect for the law. The certainty of moral education could be divorced from historical ambiguity. Citizens did not need cultural or historical orientation for deliberation about their public lives. According to this way of thinking, there was no reason to get bogged down in the subjective self-understandings of individuals who could decide for themselves which interpretation of history to believe. If history were to go beyond facts, then this matter should be privatized — individuals could seek out their own interpretations, just as they could decide what novels to read or movies to watch. (p. 1)
This type of “neutral” back-to-basics education has of course a long and ongoing history in the U.S. continually renewed since the post-1968 conservative restoration (Apple, 2014; Shor, 1986). The solution in South Carolina’s example at the time was to bring the flag down from the State House roof, resituate it on the grounds, and erect an African-American memorial nearby (Steele, p. 2). Of course, this resolution proved untenable in relation to ongoing racial injustices. The flag was removed from State House grounds altogether after nine black parishioners were gunned down by a white supremacist in a Charleston church in 2015 (Faussett & Blinder, 2015). But with the “democratic” process carried out in the year 2000, legislators could be perceived at the time as having acted fairly and provided space for balanced representation of equally valid perspectives.
Arguably, Steele maintains that South Carolina’s example was not necessarily a peculiar one of trying to hide from a brutally racist history (Steele, p. 2), convenient as the process may have been for white supremacists and descendants of slave owners. Rather, it was an example of citizens in a liberal democracy exercising constitutional ideals of “equal freedom and respect,” principles that “command a consensus unlike that of other values” in the public sphere (Steele, pp. 2–3). As these core ideals of national identity tend to prevail whenever white institutions attempt to resolve competing socially situated interpretive claims, the effect is indeed to neutralize history, to hide from it, as Steele’s title suggests, keeping moral judgment displaced from education and distanced from public spaces like newspapers, classrooms, parks, etc.
Much of this explains patterns of fair-and-balanced representation I have tracked in the Mankato Free Press, for example, polling readers about the form a new monument for Reconciliation Park should take rather than acknowledging the justice in a monument dedicated only to the hanging victims (“Most prefer Dakota Conflict,” March 27, 2012); displaying “Dakota perspective” one day only to follow up quickly with “settler perspective”; and in the balanced middle where the power to produce public knowledge resides, taking no position and prescribing no position to the community even when that position is explicitly aligned with white property. One cannot help but note the historical function of such modern journalistic work. As Minnesota State University, Mankato, professor Charles Lewis (2011) writes regarding the history of regional newspapers, “a free press is not really free. It serves to perpetuate rather than challenge those who dominate the status quo because media are not autonomous. The press is more of a guard dog for elements of the power structure rather than the mythical watchdog that helps to protect individuals from the power structure” (p. 51). Most important here are the biased interests that both drive and find sustenance through “unbiased” coverage—how no position, be it promoted in the newspaper or classroom serves to support the historically colonial institution and the privileged positions whites occupy within it, or, more generally, how democratic-sounding discourses routinely seek to “justify” the unjustifiable. Bishop Tutu’s dictum comes readily to mind when facing no positions taken on regional situations of injustice—the oppressor’s side has been chosen.
Nowhere did such fair-and-balanced journalism become more evident during the sesquicentennial in Mankato than on December 26, 2012, when the arrival of the Dakota 38 + 2 Memorial Riders coincided with the new monument’s dedication ceremony. That day’s edition of the Free Press featured a front-page tribute to the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry for their fighting at Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 (Krohn, December 26, 2012b). The front page also contained an article titled, “There was a mystique to the Minnesota men,” promoting a new book about the First Minnesota Infantry authored by an “enthralled” Civil War re-enactor (Krohn, December 26, 2012c). Inside came an op-ed by Mankato’s Abraham Lincoln re-enactor and Traveling Troupe playwright, Bryce Stenzel, who gave a defensive history of Mankato’s old hanging monument, calling for its return since its mysterious disappearance from a storage site in the 1990s. Strangely, this piece failed to mention that a new monument was being dedicated that very day. To the left came an editorial acknowledging the importance of the day, but not without dropping a line shaped by the entire edition’s settler-colonial frame—“The Dakota will come on their horses today and the whites maybe in their SUVs” (“We can build,” December 26, 2012).
So, as the new monument provided signs of overcoming the racism of yesteryear—a “hope that the lessons will come sooner and travel further than in the past” (“We can build,” 2012)—settler conceits about white progress and its contrast to Native tradition would evidently abide. All of this balanced white-identity work came in anticipation of the next day’s coverage of the new monument ceremony which was bound to include photographs of Indians on the streets downtown and critical comments made by them. The granting of equal validity and respect to the old-soldier identity on December 26—unavoidably also the old Indian-killer identity—provided a key discursive site where local racism betrayed itself in 2012, making reactionary interpretive slips as it tried to promote multicultural education; evoking figures from the exterminationist past only to shelter them under an ideological umbrella of patriotism; leveling the historically empowered and the historically dispossessed to equally competing interest groups.
The code strongly advises that Indian artists should be in a group show with other Indians. The code also advises that only Indians have authority to speak on Indian issues, and Indian issues should be about “land” or “identity” or “we are/have always been/will always be here” and that Indians are “sacred” and so forth. The proper role of a white curator is to facilitate the neutral presentation of Indian artists and their work, and to have no real opinion on the content. The proper role of white artists, well, they don’t really have a role.
The code has been in effect for a couple of decades now, and to state things bluntly, it feels deader than disco. (p. 73)
Indeed, throughout the pedagogical situations analyzed so far in the Conflict and Remembrance course at St. Lucia College, sharply segregated roles have been in play with J-term students only witnessing critical pedagogy from Dakota educators. As represented by the Free Press, the Miller-Larsen duo also appeared to assign critical teaching only to the Dakota educator while the white educator merely listened and sometimes espoused discourses associated with uncritical reconciliation but ultimately claimed not to even be teaching. In light of the “deader than disco” white public pedagogy Paul Chaat Smith identifies and which the Free Press has supported with its polite coverage and vulgar resistance to Miller’s work, Miller’s claim of trying “to plant the seed and see if it grows” can be read as a kind of critical white frustration; it seems to say the community demands no teaching from me on this subject, only listening to Dakota people. Hopefully this listening will plant seeds of critical consciousness among my white students because they need it, yet it is not my place as a white educator to do the planting. The white educator must not break the raced or ancestry-based political obligations his position implies. Judging from the Free Press’s eagerness to print letters debasing Miller’s work, even this harmless brand of “objective” pedagogy comes too close to anti-settler political indoctrination and merits symbolic counterbalancing acts rooted in the white terror.
Following the publication of these articles closely gives context for addressing a question I posed in the Introduction as to why the newspaper would seem to take the Dakota prisoner-of-war letters seriously one day only to subject them to scorn and ridicule later the same week and go on satisfied with an ensuing silence. As discussed, “Why is the white side in Conflict ignored?” appeared five days after the Free Press gave its thumbs up to the Dakota-letters translation project at North Dakota State University. Similarly, “38 murderers don’t deserve memorial” appeared the day after the editorial column titled “The goal is to reconcile.” In such moments of fair-and-balanced coverage, it seems as if the scales of a highly situated brand of justice is being thrust out over the heads of the citizenry—in one pan, a massacre of a Dakota village is taking place, in the other pan, a massacre of a settler township. The latter weighs heavy for the detailed, intimate, and sensationalized ways regional white communities have taught themselves about it since 1862. Still, both battles rage on as abstractions in white public forums like newspapers, city parks, city-council meetings, classrooms, and so on.
Mankato Free Press building façade with The Land
(Source Author’s photo)
Objective (yet Biased) Public Commemoration: A Brief History
White neutrality, silence, attempts to suspend moral judgment, attempts to dictate objective education to the community—all of this has a long tradition on the representational front in downtown Mankato. For many years, the site of the 1862 mass execution went with no marker of any kind. The land where the hanging took place belonged to railroad interests in the 1860s. It eventually went over to oil interests, remaining private property when commemorative activity began to emerge in earnest after the turn of the twentieth century (Andrews, 2010). At that time, a 1902 newspaper article described the “exact spot” of the hanging in detail and told of potential donors interested in putting up a monument (“Willing to donate,” 1902). Still, years passed with no marker. When the fiftieth anniversary of the execution loomed in 1911, a bona fide committee formed with the purpose of “determining the exact location” of the hanging, as one article put it (“Call for meeting,” 1911) and “relocating the spot so that it can be suitably marked,” as did another (“Pipestone man,” 1911).
Two Civil- and U.S.-Dakota War veterans convened the committee—General James Baker, founder of the Mankato Free Press, and Judge Lorin Cray, a local attorney with previous business ties to the site’s landowners (Baker et al., 1903; Hughes, 1909). With Cray directing much of the work, the duo invited soldiers and citizen eyewitnesses to the hanging to testify in Cray’s office as to where exactly they believed the scaffold once stood and why (“Call for meeting,” 1911). Newspaper stories chronicling the proceedings highlighted what “old Indian fighters” told (“Located site of hanging,” 1911), a frame leading to the circulation of white-supremacist folklore—“He was a ‘dead Indian,’ but not desirable company” one eyewitness quipped when telling of a woman who had allegedly discovered the body of one of the hanging victims under the floor of a house she was renting (“Located site of hanging,” 1911). Another eyewitness claiming to know exactly where the central gallows pole was once placed joked, “‘this is the place’ the redman had full swing” (“Neff and the Indian,” 1911). Despite all this celebration of the aging exterminationist identity, the committee maintained an air of objectivity about its work, generating data at the quasi-public hearing, triangulating stories, and walking the grounds together in an effort to locate a kind of ground zero, or spatial absolute of the hanging (“Located site of hanging,” 1911; Lybeck, 2015).
Significant among articles published about the committee’s activities are traces of political controversy at the time. Coverage of Cray and Baker’s work first appeared only a few short months after Minnesota’s Swedish-born governor, Adolph Eberhart, had signed an anti-death penalty bill into law, the result of years of abolitionist movement often led by Scandinavian-American politicians (Bessler, pp. 161–162). Not coincidentally, testimony generated by Cray and Baker’s committee included a tale about a Norwegian, “Ole,” who supposedly assisted a local doctor to the mass grave the night after the hanging to help him bring home a cadaver for medical study. When Ole encountered one of the bodies already disinterred and propped against a tree, the story tells that he jumped, “let out of him a whoop […] and started on a dead run for town.” The committee allegedly considered this evidence, the path of Ole’s flight, while determining the prior location of the scaffold (“Neff and the Indian,” 1911).
By Indianizing Ole with a “whoop” and emphasizing his lack of mettle, the tale showed how Cray and Baker’s committee was also marking probationary whites as it carried out its identity work for the “old settler,” “old soldier,” “Indian fighter,” or “early citizen” variously referenced across the newspaper stories, thereby affirming the historical notion of the “citizen” in America as “someone who could put down a slave rebellion or participate in Indian wars” (Jacobson, p. 25). Probationary whites of suspect loyalties according to this notion were immigrants and foreign-born politicians like Eberhart who vowed during this same time to meet with Dakota representatives and discuss their efforts to recover reservation land expropriated by Minnesota officials following their expulsion from the state in 1863. According to one report, Eberhart had promised to “do whatever he could to help them” (“Sioux Indians endeavor,” 1912).
Recent arrival of Scandinavian, German, and other immigrants to the region and the resulting climb of non-Yankees to seats of power presented political challenges to local founders who understood their identity in ethnic terms as expressed by General Baker during “Old Settler’s Day” in Mankato a decade before, “that lofty Anglo-Saxon spirit, which dares all things, accomplishes all things, [and] planted, in primeval solitudes, the rude foundations of this American colony” (Baker et al., p. 123). Importantly, Governor Eberhart made Mankato his place of residence and had studied for the bar under Judge Cray in the 1890s (Hughes, 1909).
Mankato Hanging Monument (1912)
(Source Image courtesy Minnesota Historical Society)
Rather than standing as the simple marking of an historical event, controversy soon emerged over the narrative’s thinly veiled politics. Defensive statements made by Judge Cray and others at the monument’s dedication ceremony on December 26, 1912, revealed that accusations had already been swirling about the monument being boastful, as newspaper reports chronicling the committee’s work had clearly shown the work behind it to be. At this, Judge Cray sniffed and asserted an epistemological claim to “correctness”—“The marker was not so placed to flaunt before the public that we hanged the Indians. It was erected in an entirely different spirit. It was in the spirit of perpetuating the immediate history of this region, and permitting the handing down of history to the generations to come in a correct manner” (“Incidents recalling the Indian,” 1912).
But coverage even of this dedication ceremony where Cray had uttered these words reveals the committee’s “spirit” to have been far from correct or solemn. As with all early commemorative events associated with the war and hanging, speakers seized the opportunity to voice a situated brand of white-settler supremacy. Mankato Daily Review editor, C. E. Wise, who spoke at the event, framed his report the next day with a well-known fable—“The lives of over 1000 people were sacrificed to satisfy the bloodthirsty appetites of the redskins, and the atrocities which they perpetrated have no parallel” (“Incidents recalling the Indian,” 1912). Judge Cray chimed in with a defense of the death penalty, saying “those guilty of heinous crimes should suffer,” as the Mankato Review editor paraphrased him. He proceeded to tell the audience tales about “the innate treachery of the race” of Indians, reproducing a defense of local and regional injustices reminiscent of the early historians—“If some of our critics had their wives murdered, their daughters and sisters taken in captivity to be outraged, this sentimentality, I think, would be entirely lacking, and a sane estimate of the Indian character would be made” (“Incidents recalling the Indian,” 1912). Reiterating Cray’s claim that “this was a monument not erected in the spirit of exultation,” other stories printed around this same dedication ceremony heralded the time of the hanging as one when “the hardy frontiersman” transformed “unproductive wastes into reservoirs of the world’s food supply but also changing it from a hatchery of savages into a citizen factory furnishing the nation the finest class of citizens the world has ever produced” (“Outbreak of the Indian War,” 1912). Such journalistic work dramatically illustrates the ideological roots of local objectivist representation of 1862 and how epistemological conceits behind local public display originate in a socially situated brand of white Anglo-American institutional power.
In the decades that followed, even people who likely knew nothing about the identity work conducted by Cray and Baker’s committee spoke out against the monument’s distasteful content, apparently for its bold inscription of the historically true and fact-based word HANGED. Historian William Folwell of the University of Minnesota, said, for example, “The execution of the Indians is not the sort of thing to which Americans erect monuments” (“Someone would remove,” 1922). Nationally renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow commented as well on a visit to Mankato—“I can’t make myself believe that the people of a civilized community would want to commemorate such an atrocious crime” (“Marker at hanging site,” 1937). While such objections indicated that progressive views toward justice (capital punishment) were calling old-settler assumptions about their “civilized” superiority into question, the monument still provided occasion even for the harshest of critics to reconstruct old-settler conceits about white innocence and victimhood. New Ulm resident and brother of former Governor John Johnson, Fred Johnson called erecting the new monument a “deed of savagery,” but added, “History had proved that the settlers are the innocent victims of the treachery of the officers of the government in dealing with the Indians” (“Marker at hanging site,” 1937). So, even when some aspects of settler ideology seemed to be changing, other aspects found discursive support, deflecting agency away from “old settlers” or the early Indian-killing citizen.
Across decades of critique, the monument provided multiple occasions for defenders to reconstruct the objectivist argument. In responding to public criticism raised ironically by a fellow veteran in the 1920 s, Judge Cray reiterated his epistemological claim from the decade before—“it was not erected to boast of the execution, but to mark a historical spot” (“Someone would remove,” 1922). This same defense reverberated throughout the U.S.-Dakota War centennial in 1962 when serious activity targeting the marker’s removal was afoot, prompting letter-writers to remind the white public of their commemorative heritage—“Let’s hand history down to posterity, and hand it down truly” (Haack, 1962); “I agree that the monument is a factual reminder of the history of Minnesota” (Schmidt, 1962); “I do not think the monument casts any stigma upon the community. It is, first of all, just a statement of an historical fact” (Grams, 1962).
Facing renewed criticism by American Indian Movement representatives in the early 1970s, white defenders propagated a “marker” versus “monument” debate, the idea being that a marker simply marked a spot—fact—whereas a monument would provide commentary—opinion (Simonson, 1971; Berg, February 19, 1971); this despite headlines and reports from 1911–1912 freely calling it a monument and even Judge Cray sometimes referring to it as such in his defenses (“Letters pertaining to marker,” 1922). One defense made in the early 1970s attempted to keep separate what cannot be separated given the monument’s roots in white-supremacist folklore—“Some people can’t seem to distinguish between race prejudice or discrimination and simply acknowledge an event from the past” (Meyer, February 19, 1971). Local officials removed the monument in 1971, ostensibly for a phase of urban renewal but at a time when the American Indian Movement (AIM) posed a significant challenge to its existence, cited in my Introduction (Woutat, 1971). By the time the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan reached Mankato in 1972, the marker was down. It has gone missing altogether since the mid-1990s, allegedly absconded with by a former mayor (Dyslin, 2012). Yet, appeals to its sacred epistemology persist, having undergone renewal on December 26, 2012, with the op-ed piece cited above and its epigraphic quote from Abraham Lincoln—“History is not history unless it is the truth.” Taking issue with “Native American activists and their white apologist allies” who would attempt to destroy any knowledge of Dakota “wrongdoing,” this column authoritatively laid down the purpose of memorials as “providing a thought-provoking, objective explanation of the event being commemorated, based on truth” (Stenzel, 2012). Whose truth? Objective for whom? one wishes to ask when confronting the objective (yet biased) white regional public pedagogy.
Zero-Point Narrative and the White-Justice-as-Fairness View to History
In Chapter 6, I paraphrased Walter Mignolo’s (2009) account of zero-point epistemology spreading with the rise of colonialism and its principal knowledge worker, the “neutral seeker of truth and objectivity” (p. 162) who produced textual “justification” for whites to exploit indigenous peoples and their homelands. In this section, I will go a little deeper into this figure’s signature narrative strategy of erasing its own voice, or speaking from the neutralized position of the “observer who cannot be observed” (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 20). Analyzing this narrative strategy at work in the hanging monument and subsequent defenses of the hanging itself will enable me to show the marker’s function reproducing a sense of white justice as fairness in official regional commemoration as well as give historical context for the neutral (yet biased) voice that eventually took shape in the J-term exhibit-panel narratives on the U.S.-Dakota War.
While the hanging monument’s “objective explanation” of the 1862 mass execution created controversy among whites mainly regarding the injustice of capital punishment, Natives seemed to always be in agreement about the monument’s offensive nature, beginning with the way it narrated. Although Native perspectives are hard to come by in a white-centric press, a Ho-Chunk visitor to Mankato stood before the monument in 1959 and told a journalist, “They never should have hanged them, and all Indians think this. Just remember white people killed Indians, too. If Indians wrote the history books you would read a different story” (Heinzman, 1959). In 1971, Eddie Benton-Banai, Associate Director of AIM, offered up a counter-narrative that reverberated in the press, saying the monument should read, “Here were hanged 38 innocent freedom fighters who died in the name of freedom” (Woutat, 1971, p. 13). Like the Ho-Chunk visitor in 1959, Benton-Banai’s colleague, Dennis Banks, extended critique to textbook histories and their “lies, degrading a whole race, and distorting the truth” (Woutat, 1971). Well-familiar with the monument narrative, AIM leader Vern Bellecourt stood at the hanging site four years after the marker’s removal and said, “The 38 who died here represented people who reacted to injustice, broken promises and dishonest traders, and they were not unlike the white colonists who fought against their mother country” (DeMarce, 1975). He too pointed out textbook writing as a key barrier to social justice and its routine characterizations of Indians as “savages attacking white women and children” while, as a reporter paraphrased him, “atrocities committed on Indians had been ignored” (DeMarce, 1975). Native criticism, then, tended to associate the monument and hanging site with the kind of zero-point knowledge production evidenced in history-book narratives that had long rendered Indians “savages” while remaining silent about white culpability in the racially violent past. Natives continue to bring counter-narratives to Mankato, drawing out ancestry-based double standards, or the racism in knowledge whites have historically taken uncritically as objective truth.
A week after Benton-Banai and Banks delivered their powerful counter-narrative to Mankato reporters in February 1971, Mankato City Councilman David Cummiskey told the press, “every Indian I’ve ever talked to is offended” by the monument (Close, 1971), suggesting less prominent Native people than Benton-Banai and Banks had been voicing opposition as well. Yet whites continually spoke back through the “hubris of the zero point” (Mignolo, 2009)—“It’s easier to wag the jaw than do a little research,” wrote a self-proclaimed “grandson of the pioneers” later that same month only to proceed to retell tales of rape and mutilation straight out of Isaac Heard’s History (Mann, February 25, 1971). The previous week, a more critical reader had written, “I have never observed anyone looking at that marker and saying ‘What a wonderful thing we’ve done.’ I personally look at this marker and think ‘My God; in the name of law and justice, we did this.’ The marker or ‘monument’ is a reminder of an historical event; an unfortunate event, but removing it will not change the fact; it happened” (Simonson, February 18, 1971). So, even residents looking critically at the monument and its dubious brand of “justice” could still accept it on the basis of its aura of objectivity. In such defenses, the monument was “permitting the handing down of history to the generations to come in a correct manner,” as Cray had put it in 1912, not in the sense of providing whites with “facts” or understanding of “true” events but in perpetuating a common sense of justice. Indeed, the word “just” could even slip from the pen when the marker’s factuality was evoked—“The monument stands to merely cite a historical incident of some interest and importance in the development of Minnesota and Mankato history, and just that” (Meyer, February 19, 1971).
What was it about those “nine cryptic words” on the marker (Berg, February 19, 1971), that “too simple” of a narrative (Berg, 1975) that could recruit white citizens to take up its original “objective” position and thus propagate what was a profoundly white-supremacist sense of justice across so many decades? Another way of putting this, what made this inscription’s explicit expression of racial superiority immediately identifiable to the historically dispossessed but hard to see for the historically empowered whose interests had long been served by zero-point ways of knowing?
WERE HANGED
38
SIOUX INDIANS
a passive formulation erasing all white agents of frontier (in)justice and their roles in events. Nor did the inscription comment on why these “Sioux Indians” were hanged (Andrews, 2010, p. 56). The number at center commanded its own line, also in largest characters, telling future visitors only that an extraordinary number were hanged but working for the operative Indian-killing identity as the number bagged. Just beneath came the victims, SIOUX INDIANS, “Sioux” being a term French voyageurs picked up from the Ojibwe who had applied it to the Dakota people to mean “snakes” or “enemies,” a label variously contested, accepted by some but strongly rejected by others such as Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa who once described it as a sign of the “psychological rape of the people” (Moos, 1986). Thus, the inscription startlingly named or marked Indians but left Anglo-American early citizens unnamed and unmarked, inviting viewers to simply accept the 38 as natural enemies, perpetrators of unmentioned and therefore presumably unmentionable crimes like those “nameless outrages” for which 303 Dakota men were originally condemned to hang.
Beyond merely othering Indians and hiding white responsibility for the uprising and hanging, the core narrative’s silences and passive grammar established a common sense of neutrality among whites past, present, and future. Those “nine cryptic words” abstracted whites from the social situation altogether, setting them beyond the realm of interpretation so that any judgment about them could be suspended. By doing so, the nine words not only exerted a colonial zero-point way of knowing, narrating in the voice of “the observer who cannot be observed,” but they also signaled a zero-point way of being, reducing all whites from Judge Cray’s committee to modern post-civil rights citizens to the free, equal, and rational norm long idealized in social-contract thought (Seth, 2010). In this, the narrative invited fellow whites into a public interpretive transaction about the hanging across generations, resting as it did on a dialectic between (unmarked) whites and (marked) Indians established long before 1862 in the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—Locke in particular who theorized the free, equal, and rational colonial identity against the Indian, or man in “the state of nature,” a figure supposedly lacking the reason needed for transacting anonymously in the modern colonial marketplace (Seth, p. 84). In the public commemorative transaction then between Mankato’s early citizens, white citizen descendants, probationary whites, and future newcomers to the community, the monument’s passive grammar attempted to create shared normativity that would reinforce a common sense of fairness, implicitly saying to future viewers that the hanging had been carried out by free, equal, and rational people just like them. As Vanita Seth (2010) explains, prospects of new-found wealth in the American colonies where Locke personally held substantial land investments drove this way of thinking, where the citizen had to imagine fellow strangers of similar capacity for social abstraction with whom he could build a sense of mutual obligation and transact with in trust without ever having to meet them (pp. 80–97).
Symbolized by Mankato’s old monument, the socially abstracted way of narrating (and knowing) through which the regional old-settler identity expressed its racist sense of justice was readily identified across the decades by Native visitors, associating the inscription and the hanging site itself with narrative strategies applied in history and school textbooks. This point is crucial to what’s coming in Chapters 8 and 9 in my analyses of the student museum-exhibit narratives that tell the history of 1862 using an updated, pluralist equivalent of this same zero-point voice to reproduce the common sense of white justice as fairness. I wish to emphasize such public history writing as identity work where white “reason” (objectivity, balance, etc.) becomes elevated to ontological status (Giroux, p. 184) to the effect that suspended moral judgment is both handed down to and passed along by whites actively building a sense of community over the racially violent past.
On the issue of community, it’s helpful to turn to modern theory around white social-contract philosophy and another frame for interpreting both the monument narrative and what today’s empowered white speakers are up to when they assume official public positions of neutrality, balance, objectivity, and ultimately fairness on the U.S.-Dakota War. Just as it told about the hanging from the un-position of an observer who cannot be observed, the 1912 monument encouraged viewers to assume what political philosopher John Rawls (1993) called the original position where intergenerational identities and the sociohistorical power differentiating them level to an abstracted free, equal, and rational identity, building in the meantime a temporary sense of “justice” so that fair public bargaining may transpire (pp. 23–25). In order for this to happen, social contingencies like race, gender, class, and wealth that create unfair bargaining advantages for some must be cast behind a veil of ignorance so that the requisite sense of mutual trust and obligation may emerge (pp. 23–24).2
In this, the white justice as fairness I’m theorizing, borrowing and spinning off Rawls’s justice as fairness, is especially conducive to ahistorical and colorblind stances like that seen in the “Reconcile” poem analyzed in my Introduction. By serving as a representational device strongly mediating an “original position,” the 1912 hanging marker managed to set the entire nineteenth-century colonial apparatus behind the veil. In subsequent defenses, the sense of trust and fair cooperation it reproduced among white defenders across generations taught certain viewers—ideological descendants—that the hanging must have been, after all, an act of justice. From the point of mutual obligation, these descendants could claim the monument was a mere statement of fact. From there, local whites could begin interpretive bargaining over the trials and hanging and related injustices carried out before 1862 and ever since.
As I hope is clear, my argument approaches white justice as fairness as a pedagogy that perpetuates white silences in public spaces, encouraging whites to take up most appropriate “original positions” of neutrality, balance, and objectivity while keeping fellow whites in mind, i.e., ancestors both symbolic and real, contemporaries, and descendants. Significantly, this pedagogy encourages whites to co-construct shared senses of epistemic, disciplinary, and even moral superiority—hubris—as they inhabit their neutralizing positions. Much more powerful than what I am referring to as the “vulgar” forms of this hubris seen in angry public letters is the “polite” or institutional forms such as that expressed by Dr. Lenz when trying to make sense of Waziyatawin’s arguments and being “not certain how much she believes what she writes” (Fieldnotes, January 03, 2012). Yet, in both kinds of cases, one sees “preservationist” identities being performed, the angry “grandson of the of the pioneers” (Mann, 1971) on the one hand and the careful scholar upholding the traditions of higher education on the other.
Across my analyses, this theorizing of white justice as fairness draws attention to the sense of “social justice” in Rawls having little to do with critical social justice, as some conservative commentators at the national level have confused Rawls’s justice as fairness with (Rothman, 2019). On the contrary, Rawls’s concepts, defined with much clarity in Political Liberalism (1993), routinely emphasize the importance of public reasoning or common sense in the existing social order, that is, what feels “proper” and “appropriate” for citizens born into and acculturated by the ideal liberal society (pp. 16–25). Where justice as fairness must sacrifice knowledge of unfairness in order to create temporary senses of equal footing, critical social justice seeks to make knowledge of unfairness and the conditions that create it visible so that reparations may be made in the interest of a less oppressive liberal society. Where justice as fairness relies on status-quo moral judgments to the extent that injustices may parade as “justice,” critical social justice engages moral judgment for anti-oppressive social change. When it comes to ongoing histories of race like the U.S.-Dakota War, these basic and perhaps even obvious distinctions matter deeply. As Charles Mills (1997) demonstrates, the social contract has always been a racial contract that works for those historically written into it while violently excluding racialized others historically written out of it. Article 7 of Minnesota’s first Constitution, reproduced in my Preface, serves as a prime example of this effect considering the textual omission and oppression of blacks in the state (Green, 2007), a point George Floyd’s murder makes abundantly clear; inversely, so too did the inscription on Mankato’s old hanging monument by so graphically marking “SIOUX INDIANS” and leaving whites out of the controversial equation. Following Mills’s thought (1997, p. 110), “justice” always meant “just us” for whites commemorating 1862.
To operate, then, inside the discursive frames of white justice as fairness has meant to transact inside the bounds of a “moral wall” sometimes identified by U.S.-Dakota War historians (Namias, p. 39) but rarely explored in terms of its evolution to the present day. My argument is that the moral wall abides in the current white public pedagogy through which whites continually assure each other of their heightened sense of reason, accuracy, equality, and shared capacity for social abstraction all commonly expressed through discourses like “balance,” “neutrality,” and “objectivity.” This is the common whitestream sense of justice presented in my Introduction, the perspective through which discriminatory practices toward Dakota people and other people of color continually find renewed support. The ontological aspect of this objectivist pedagogy is what justice looks like for historically empowered whites whenever they come together to make collective sense of the U.S.-Dakota War.
The Students Dismantle “Balanced” Commemoration, but that Remains for Them
Dakota (Sioux) Memorial (1980)
(Source Author’s photo)
“Winter Warrior,” sculptor Tom Miller (1987)
(Source Author’s photo)
When the J-term class stopped at the hanging site on January 11, none of us knew that a monument would be going up within a year displaying the names of the 38. After inspecting the existing monuments and plaques with classmates, Steven said, “I think we all felt that immense frustration with that memorial in Mankato. I don’t know if just making an exhibit is enough for the knowledge that we’ve gained, you know” (Focus group, January 13, 2012). It was at that point that he spoke of his desire to write to local newspapers and urge the community to acknowledge the event more directly.
I mean, I think that revising that monument and the commemoration there is important. Maybe it’s not so much important to the Dakota but as a white person. It’s important for the whites to see that, you know? And so, I don’t want that to sound bad cause it’s like, yeah it is for white people. To a certain extent, yeah it is. Like putting up a monument would be for white people to say, “This happened. This is part of your history,” you know? And so in that regard it’s kind of like we’re gonna have to do some things that are really for white people to get them to the point that I think many of us are at. (Focus group, January 20, 2012)
Jennifer thought that “white people need to shut the hell up and sit there and listen” when participating in dialogues with Dakota people (Focus group, January 20, 2012), a reasonable stance given all the damage white speech has done over the years. As author of the Settler Perspectives panel, she was growing increasingly aware of this effect. At the same time, the prospect of taking distance or disagreeing with a Dakota speaker in the formal dialogue sounded potentially “bad” in the sense that saying it might imply she thought she knew better than the speaker about something that deeply affected Dakota people. To try to make the case that representation at the hanging site provides an opportunity for whites to learn about the history of white supremacy and hopefully change from that learning risked saying something divergent from the perceived Dakota perspective and thereby coming across as racist. Rather than helping to enrich the dialogue, Jennifer’s view went unexpressed and ultimately remained “for her.”
This dynamic suggests the degree to which J-termers could feel like representative whites in the Dakota-white dialogue forums, just as many Dakota people undoubtedly must feel like representational people in such forums, but in ways that imply much greater risks. Still, asking questions or speaking at all in formal settings could reflect poorly on J-termers and their whiteness, so they remained very quiet whenever meeting with Dakotas. Rather than speaking, they patiently waited for formal proceedings to end so that they could go and pose questions to Dakota speakers one on one. In the nearly two-hour “dialogue” at the Lower Sioux Recreation Center, only one student spoke and that was to help a Dakota speaker find a word she couldn’t quite think of in the moment (Fieldnotes, January 19, 2012).
Much of this white public silence was encouraged by the instructors who had collected student questions ahead of time and e-mailed them to the Dakota speakers, precluding students from even asking their own questions when everyone sat down together. Harwell was particularly anxious about what the students might have asked had he and Dr. Lenz not overseen student contributions in advance (Interview, January 20, 2012).3 In all of this, I find evidence of instructors, Dakota community members, and students all co-constructing white public silences. For the white instructors, these moves were made “reasonably” (to avoid embarrassing racist slips; to not disrupt what could be a Dakota way of listening to elders) but they were also made ideologically, to avoid the development of cross-racial movement toward critical-social-justice education.
Sarah conducted the exhibit-writing work on the final panel in the J-term exhibit originally labeled “Commemoration and Reconciliation” on the course syllabus. A second-year Classics major from east St. Paul, Sarah had graduated from Hill Murray High School, a private Catholic prep school in Maplewood. She suspected her parents sent her to Hill Murray to keep her away from the more diverse learning environment at Harding Senior High, the public school that served her neighborhood. Sarah pulled me aside one day in the St. Lucia café and started telling me about her background, how the only “diverse” students at Hill Murray were children of African royalty (“no kidding!” she exclaimed), foreign exchange students, and Asian adoptees. During the J-term, she had been thinking carefully about how things might have turned out differently for her had she been allowed to attend Harding and perhaps even been off studying that very January at a different kind of college (Fieldnotes, January 16, 2012).
I knew Sarah to be soft-spoken, an incisive and deep thinker. She often made connections to the Bible and other pieces of classical literature while studying the war (Fieldnotes, January 06, 2012). She had read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) at Hill Murray too. She explained to her classmates in focus group that Zinn’s is “revisionist history, so it tells history from the side of the oppressed instead of the oppressors. Um, and that might be of interest to anyone taking this class because it definitely tells the story from the indigenous perspective” (Focus Group, January 06, 2012). She told me her teacher at Hill Murray had juxtaposed Zinn with a traditional textbook on American History to emphasize the point that, “Hey, this isn’t how everyone tells history,” as Sarah put it to me (Interview, January 26, 2012).
Who visits these monuments? Descendants of the colonizers, who have inherited the dominant society set in stone by the events of 1862. The story here is of the white “settlers” and not of those who gave up their land. It is found in the language of the markers. To whom were the Indians of the “Loyal Indians” monument loyal? The white newcomers. As Waziyatawin Angela Wilson states in In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors, “These men would be considered traitors by Dakota standards.” Indeed, the vast majority of southern Minnesota monuments remember the losses of the colonizers, the newcomers, or the “settlers,” and is remembered by those of euro-American heritage. (January 12, 2012)
With this first draft, Sarah had in no way gone beyond representational parameters initially promised by the course. The list of bibliographic resources provided to her on a sheet compiled by Harwell in December, titled “Resources for ‘Reconciliation’ Panel,” included In the Footsteps of our Ancestors as well as other titles by Waziyatawin, Paul Chaat Smith, Vine Deloria, Donald Fixico, and Diane Wilson. Yet commentary written by Harwell in the margin beside this selected passage from Sarah’s first draft reads, “This is true, but pretty inflammatory for a panel.” Harwell seemed to take issue with Waziyatawin—“So is she saying Dakota people have only one perspective?”, a comment revealing he either hadn’t read or heeded the author’s argument about there being “only one moral perspective on this history. That is, that the genocide and ethnic cleansing against Dakota people was a crime against humanity that cannot be rationalized from any valid perspective” (Waziyatawin, 2008, p. 76). His written commentary at the end encouraged Sarah “to focus down to a handful of points or ideas. Remember, we only have a handful of words.” He encouraged her to end the panel on an “optimistic note of Dakota and non-Dakota people working together, like in Mankato or Winona” and perhaps “to get a quote from Anthony Morse or another young Dakota person about what they hope will happen at the 200th anniversary.”
The contradictions in these pedagogical moves suggested that executive decisions about Sarah’s panel had already been made or were being made on the fly. While the syllabus and bibliographic materials produced before the start of the J-term labeled her panel “Commemoration and Reconciliation” and “Reconciliation,” respectively, Harwell surprisingly disavowed use of “reconciliation” in the exhibit at the beginning of the second week of class. After Sarah had just presented sources she was using to her classmates that Monday and still sat holding a copy of In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors up for her classmates to see, Harwell addressed “reconciliation” head on—“Well, we’re not using that word. You are the seventh generation. At some point we’re going to have to move on. I want to be honest and truthful and maybe end on an up note” (Fieldnotes, January 09, 2012). Dr. Lenz said she agreed. The title of Sarah’s panel eventually read “Commemorating the Dakota-U.S. War.”
The “truthful” reasons for privileging “commemoration” over “reconciliation,” like “internment camp” over “concentration camp” in the final exhibit, were not talked through with the kind of student input I was hearing in focus group. Harwell’s curtly stated decision (“Well, we’re not using that word”) recalls something very different than Waziyatawin’s disavowal of uncritical reconciliation for making no demands on white property or the white status quo. Harwell’s disavowal sounded more closely aligned with the settler politics of resentment described by state congressman Dean Urdahl in the 2013 TPT documentary The Past Is Alive Within Us—“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.’” The message for students taking up the charge to “move on” perhaps as ideological descendants—members of “the seventh generation,” as Harwell put it—seemed to be that past acts of reconciliation had positioned them uniquely to fashion a progressive exhibit devoid of this antiquated word. For different reasons, then, students would assume a stance friendly to the one taken by settler descendants who would not consider historical obligations carried today in light of what Minnesotans once gained and continue to benefit from at Dakota expense (Waziyatawin, 2008, pp. 76–77).
As Sarah conducted her research, Dr. Lenz lent her a copy of Curtis Dahlin’s The Dakota Uprising: A Pictorial History (2009), a book that opens with a dedication “to the innocent white settlers and the innocent Dakota Indians who were swept up in the irresistible tide of 1862.” Dahlin’s history often presents the war this way, as a natural disaster whose initial violence “ignited a conflagration which very rapidly enveloped the Upper Minnesota River Valley and beyond” (p. 3). Elsewhere in this volume, the uprising “hit with full force,” almost like a hurricane (p. 50), uprising as storm being a trope handed down from the early histories (Heard, pp. 51, 115; McConkey, p. 227; Bryant & Murch, p. 89). Rarely does the violence break out as a socially generated phenomenon. As Dr. Lenz explained to me, the value in Dahlin’s book lies in its wealth of photographs of people, places, and memorials associated with the war. She had heard Dahlin speak about his book—“He gave a talk at John’s- at the Blankenship County Historical Society museum last year and he said that he had gone to all these auctions and family yard sales and everything and collected these amazing photographs. We wouldn’t have those photos if he hadn’t done that. But he’s an amateur historian and he has to be read that way” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Dahlin’s reliance on discourses from the early histories in his longstanding effort to exceptionalize regional white victimhood, as shown in my Introduction, did not figure into her account.
In interview, Sarah took issue with Dahlin “still using the term uprising,” as she explained to me, and placing too much emphasis on the Acton incident while failing to contextualize why the young Dakota “were hungry and wanted to steal some eggs, you know, and just that super over simplification, right?” (Interview, January 26, 2012). For Sarah’s purposes of developing ways to represent forms of commemoration since 1862, Dahlin’s work listing information on people killed and providing photographs of their memorials concerns whites only. Yet the back cover of the particular volume Sarah borrowed promotes Dahlin’s history as one written “without an agenda.”
Sarah’s independent research led her to more sources like Dahlin’s. In the third focus-group discussion, she mentioned the Family and Friends of Dakota Uprising Victims website (Focus group, January 20, 2012), a source that promotes work by the Minnesota Heritage discourse community mentioned earlier—Corrine Marz, John LaBatte, and Curtis Dahlin—all of whom served as key sources for the J-term or BLCHS around the sesquicentennial. The Family and Friends website is run by a “settler advocate group for our ancestors who settled not only in Renville County but across the State of Minnesota” (“Family and friends history,” n.d.). Works by Dahlin promoted there include titles similar to the group’s name—Victims of the Dakota Uprising: Killed, Wounded, and Captured (2012) and Dakota Uprising Victims: Gravestones and Stories (2007).
01 | Sarah: | I definitely focus on the Dakota side of things because I think that their wounds are, you know, gaping whereas you know honestly I don’t know what happened to my great-great grandfather and it |
doesn’t really affect me because I’m, you know, a member of the | ||
05 | dominant society here, and if he was killed by an Indian, you | |
know, it happened and I’m not in a lesser place for it. | ||
Alan: | I think that’s a really important point. | |
Stephanie: | That’s a good point. | |
Alan: | Because it’s like (3.5) we’re fine, like(hhhh) | |
10 | Sarah: | Right. [Right. |
Stephanie: | [Yeah. | |
Jennifer: | [Yeah. | |
Alan: | We’re going to school here. We’re gonna be just fine. | |
Sarah: | Right. | |
15 | Alan: | And so I think like (.) I guess I’ve viewed it personally through |
like a social-justice lens in terms of who deserves to have their | ||
voice shared and it’s the people who have been silenced. | ||
Jennifer: | Right. | |
Steven: | I hope- I hope some people get pissed, you know, that we have- | |
20 | Rick: | Does anyone disagree with that, sitting here? |
Sarah: | Well, I don’t know. I was concerned that, you know, when people read my panel they might be like, “Wait, this is primarily one side of the story. What about the other side?” But it’s like the other side has been told for the past one hundred and fifty years, right? | |
25 | Holly: | And for Mitch and I doing treaties, it’s hard to make it sound like the white people did anything that was good(hhhh) cause it’s like, |
first they screwed em over in this way and then they screwed em over in this way and then they pulled this trick up their- like I- like there’s no way to make the white settlers sound good. (Focus group, January 20, 2012) |
Majority J-termers often spoke candidly about their privilege like this (lines 04–14). For Sarah and others, the prospect of pursuing white-victim identity struck them as unnecessary if not slightly absurd because of their elevated sense of privilege as St. Lucia College students and their general privilege belonging to the “dominant society” (line 05), or from simply being white.
Even when adjusting for the historical burden Alan expressed on the first day of class, the students speaking in this passage fit very well the unmarked white-citizen identity posited by journalists in 2012. Sharing no genealogical ties to Dakotas or settler descendants also carrying “deep scars,” as the newspaper has it, these students seemed to inhabit the imaginary neutral zone between sides analyzed in Chapter 6, a privileged unmarked position where one can get along “just fine,” according to Alan (line 13), not even knowing about the U.S.-Dakota War. But after studying “the facts” from sources like Carley, learning of the white terror from sources like the early newspapers, hearing white experts like Anderson and Marz speak, visiting sites like Fort Ridgely, and, in Sarah’s case, conducting an extensive survey of the regional sources on white victimhood, these white students, when speaking behind the scenes, still did not express alignment with the proverbial fair-minded citizen. On the contrary, Sarah and her classmates had engaged moral judgment while learning, as human beings are wont to do. They dared set historical trauma on the scales of justice and the verdict by the end of the third week was that only one descendant group could possibly be suffering from wounds today, mainly because of their understanding of how white privilege works. As Holly observes (lines 25–29), the dilemmas students confronted when mining the sources for examples of whites doing good deeds in the 1860s only supported that verdict. The newspaper’s call to locate “stories of heroic and compassionate actions on both sides” did not pan out for them in their scholarly efforts to achieve balanced representation. At the same time, this emerging portrait of students resisting the white-justice-as-fairness view to history is not so straightforward. As Alan notes, social justice provided “a lens” (line 16) rather than a goal to be worked toward together. Perhaps it was merely one lens competing among many. In this, the racial privilege the students so candidly owned still presented a barrier to advocating for critical social justice, especially working amid so many institutional pressures not to.
***
Sarah’s final panel narrative begins this way:
The story of this war does not end at the hanging of the 38 or with the ensuing Dakota exile. It is, as author Thomas Maltman describes, a “living wound” that has been passed down in the collective memory of the communities involved.
Until recently, commemoration efforts have been told from one perspective — that of the victors. Monuments and markers at Fort Ridgely, Acton, Wood Lake, Milford, Birch Coulee, Camp Release, and others honor the settlers/newcomers killed by Dakota akicita across Southwestern Minnesota.
Importantly, by beginning with Thomas Maltman’s aphorism, the “gaping wound” discussed by Sarah and her classmates in the numbered exchange above, that is, one specific to the Dakota people, gets diffused in the final public narrative by way of equal application to “the communities involved.” The narrative proceeds with the “colonizers” of her first draft being changed to “victors,” erasing intentions that could have been aligned with the white identities implied and thus provided context for why Dakota fighters (akicita) killed them.
Sarah’s use of “settlers/newcomers” is the only instance in the series of ten student-authored panels where ambiguity arises over how to refer to whites. As Harwell told the students directly and explained on a special panel he devised to clarify the exhibit’s use of contested terms applied like “internment camp,” “newcomers” was decided on for its inclusion of all non-indigenous people together in 1862, from white officials like Col. Sibley to blacks.4 Like so many double-edged words and phrases involved in today’s pluralist forms of colonial history writing, newcomers seems to respect Dakota indigeneity as it simultaneously levels all other identities, conveniently erasing the decisive social power exerted by “old settlers.”
“Commemorating the U.S.-Dakota War” panel sidebar
(Source Courtesy Sarah)
Yet by having to simply state the facts of Dakota living memorials herself and resign critical commentary to a Dakota speaker, Sarah cannot not relate the whys behind regional commemoration she so incisively identified in her first draft. By having to write from the zero point as narrator, Sarah had to erase the critical, first-person voice of her earlier draft, thereby casting social contingencies like white supremacy behind a veil of ignorance. In having to edit her voice in the direction of an observer who cannot be observed for the official public narrative, her position as a privileged white knowledge worker ends up holding true to its historic political obligations. From this socially abstracted position, she can no longer acknowledge the whiteness of the settler/newcomers as she did in her first draft; she can no longer address the silencing of Dakota commemoration head on; she can no longer speak of the ancestry-based double standards that once rendered only the “loyal” Dakotas worthy of commemoration.
“Commemorating the U.S.-Dakota War” panel image of Fort Ridgely Monument
(Source Image courtesy Sarah)
In April, Sarah seemed pleased with her panel, even with its inclusion of the Fort Ridgely State Monument added sometime after the J-term ended. After selecting images showing Dakota forms of commemoration, she had left Harwell with the idea that she wasn’t opposed to adding some element of white commemoration in. “It wasn’t a surprise to me,” she told me. “I thought it would happen. And like at first I was like, ‘Well, I don’t really want any of those images on here,’ but then I was like, ‘Well-’ I mean, there are two sides to this” (Interview, April 26, 2012).
- 1.
Larsen passed away in 2017. He served three terms as Chairman of Lower Sioux Tribal Council and taught Dakota history and culture at many levels and institutions including the University of Minnesota and Minnesota State University, Mankato.
- 2.
As noted in my Introduction, Rawls’s ideal theory of “justice as fairness” was never intended to be used as a descriptive framework or applied to help interpret history or current affairs. Yet, “justice as fairness” does turn out to have its own history and underlying descriptive elements culturally rooted in Eurocentric white ideology, an ideology prone to abstract whites from social contingencies of race and the injustices of white colonial violence (Mills, 2009). My use of “justice as fairness” principles seeks to move beyond questions of authorial intent with the aim of interrogating white idealism and the exclusionary politics of living social-contract discourses.
- 3.
Harwell: “Um, in many instances I’m meeting these Dakota elders for the first time. So I’m worried about those relationships. Um, I’ve been really pleasantly surprised with the students. I think that they’ve been incredibly earnest […] I was also very pleased, um, yesterday, um, some of the questions- one of the questions in particular I was a little horrified about(hhh). The one about, ‘Did any Dakota people create representations of the hanging?’ Um, had I- had I really- uh, I guess I looked at the questions, but I didn’t really- I didn’t vet them, and I felt like maybe I should have after that. But there was a little moment after that question was read like, ‘Oh, dear god!’ (hhhh). I personally would have never asked that question, but it seemed- I mean they gave a very honest response and it wasn’t, ‘Oh, well this is a really stupid question but we’re going to try to make you feel good,’ it was, ‘No, I- uh of course we don’t have that and here is why.’ But there wasn’t lingering offense to the question. There wasn’t, ‘Get out of here, I am completely upset,’ um sort of thing. And because I don’t have relationships with a lot of these elders, I worry about that more” (Interview, January 20, 2012).
- 4.
Harwell’s decision to go with newcomers over settlers followed similar glossing done by the Minnesota Historical Society on its U.S.-Dakota War website in 2012. As MHS explained, “Non-indigenous people are relatively new to the land now known as the United States. They came for many different reasons — to escape religious or political oppression, to find a passage to the East, to discover new sources of wealth and property, to spread Christianity. Millions of Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas as enslaved people. Thus, the term ‘settler’ does not accurately describe every early immigrant.” Here, the leveling away of identities and their accompanying racial status becomes extreme, lumping even black slaves together with the Sibleys and Ramseys of the war under the rubric newcomers (“Newcomers,” The U.S.-Dakota War, 2012).