I mean it’s like, he who holds the money and holds the cultural dominance is going to continue to write the history books and is going to continue to control the narrative.
— Jennifer (Interview, April 26, 2012)
* * *
The March 2012 unveiling of the traveling exhibit Conflict and Remembrance: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 began much like the first day of the J-term course itself with Dr. Lenz giving an overview of the syllabus and readings and Mr. Harwell explaining the exhibit’s structure. This time, however, an audience of about 80 people were on hand, many of them Dakota descendants. Some had traveled long distances to attend the St. Lucia College social-justice conference session and see the outcome of this high-profile public-history project. Dr. Lenz described the course readings just as she had done for students back in early January, spending extra time on Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like? (2008) but letting everyone know that a wide range of texts had informed the students’ work. Harwell followed by explaining that the exhibit did not pretend to tell the history from any other than a white non-descendant perspective, a point on which a number of students disagreed in interviews. He expressed “empathy for what happened in 1862,” adding, “There are lots and lots of different viewpoints with any history, especially 1862” (Fieldnotes, April 10, 2012).
When Harwell wrapped up his comments, he handed the microphone to Sandee Geshick who then passed it on to Dakota audience members who had not been involved in the J-term course but who were nevertheless eager to speak. This created a fluid situation for the instructors, the only one perhaps where control of the narrative seemed up in the air. It was a time when important things some J-term participants had shared behind the scenes in interviews and focus-group discussions finally found expression in Lenz and Harwell’s presence.
Certainly, there is the Dakota perspective and it’s really different than the white perspective, the wašicu perspective. By that I would say, you know, like the people who had their land stolen are gonna look at history differently than the people who stole the land […]
Now I heard Dr. Lenz- is that your name? I heard her say that in What Does Justice Look Like? that the author proposes some radical proposals. From the Dakota point of view, whose lands were stolen, those are very commonsense proposals. But again, it’s all different. And when the word controversy is used, for whom is it controversial? Usually it’s for the white people, the Western Europeans, the U.S.-Euro Americans, the Euro-Minnesotans. That’s for whom it’s controversial, these things that I’m saying. (Fieldnotes, March 10, 2012)
This was all about locating the politicized nature of the Conflict and Remembrance project in the moment and exposing how relativist use of “perspectives” by the instructors had worked implicitly to support only one descendant group in the ongoing struggle over the ultimate social good—land (Fanon, p. 9). Along the way, the speaker applied a key strategy whereby settler society justifies keeping control of the land for themselves—racial categorizing and stereotyping. Using shifting names for the empowered like “U.S.-Euro Americans” and “Euro-Minnesotans,” the Dakota scholar gave whites in attendance a sense of what it might feel like to be defined or displayed from the narrative zero point, of being among those Gary Clayton Anderson had referred to as “hyphenated people” in his public lecture for an alleged lack of better terms available in the past to “ethno-historians” like himself (Lecture, January 10, 2012).1
The people who were victims of genocide as the Dakota were here in Minnesota are gonna look at history differently than the people who perpetrated the genocide. And that’s standard. A perpetrator, he wishes to keep it silent. And the Minnesota Hysterical Society, that’s my name for them, ((audience laughter)) and colleges and universities, including this place, have kept silence, suppressed the history of what really happened.
Indeed, from Lori’s critical analysis of her own panel’s content on Dakota Exile in Chapter 2 to Harwell’s commentary on Sarah’s draft for the Commemoration panel in Chapter 7, various silences favorable to settler society had taken shape, all with taboo attached to the notion that one perspective might carry a vital moral imperative setting it before all other perspectives.
Of course, not all Dakota people hold the same critical perspective on 1862. At certain low points, this fact was capitalized on by whites during the J-term. As a Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) representative explained to students the first day of class, MHS had been “in a quandary” designing its own 1862 exhibit. Its knowledge workers were unsure whether to put a noose on display that had been used to hang Caske in Mankato. There was “no one viewpoint” coming from Dakota representatives to guide them (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). On the last field trip, this same representative was on hand to greet the students at Fort Snelling, asking them with a tinge of smug humor, “So have you found the one Dakota viewpoint?” (Fieldnotes, January 25, 2012). So, while disagreeing Dakota perspectives bore uncertainty for the historically privileged institution and helped shape its “balanced” exhibit in 2012 (Picardi, 2012), it provided some whites a sense of comfort as well.
In various ways, these last two chapters are about the J-term’s reproduction of historic “perspectives” related to the regional racial divide, i.e., white unity on the one hand and Dakota division on the other. The present chapter looks closely into Harwell’s efforts to win consensus among students in taking up the white-justice-as-fairness view to history. Chapter 9 analyzes a nearly unified white defense of the exhibit prompted by Dakota resistance to its lack of critical perspective. These chapters highlight tensions between Stephanie, Jennifer, and Tom who variously rejected, acquiesced to, and embraced Harwell’s pedagogy as he advised them toward narrating from the zero-point perspective. They also analyze tensions between J-termers and Dakota audience members who took issue with ways the exhibit either misrepresented their people or sanitized the history altogether.
Before telling this story, however, I must acknowledge that critical Dakota responses to the exhibit were uncommon during and after the J-term. Indeed, other Dakota speakers at the social-justice conference session in March expressed mainly gratitude and praise for the project. Positive reaction from Dakota attendees contributed to the exhibit’s rapid proliferation. By the summer of 2012, what had begun with $3510 of grant money was poised to garner $20,000 from the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate and Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe for copies of the exhibit to come to their communities, much of these developments owing to Dakota/white relationships either strengthened or forged at the Conflict and Remembrance session (Harwell interview, May 16, 2012). Not only did the exhibit complete its pre-scheduled 2013 tour of regional libraries, schools, and historical societies, but it won national awards and found audiences at the President Lincoln’s Cottage Historical Site in Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York City. A copy of the exhibit also found display at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. So, as I analyze behind-the-scenes tensions and oppressive white identity embedded in the project, I hope to keep the success of its end product in mind, for the story I have been telling all along has been one of J-term struggles for social goods such as praise, good grades, awards, career advancement, positive media coverage and public relations for the individuals and institutions involved. All along, my project has entailed coming to a better understanding of what justice looks like to successful, empowered whites working in historically colonial institutions who have the means to teach the public or “control the narrative,” as Jennifer puts it, about the U.S.-Dakota War.
An Indoctrination
The first three Fridays of the J-term were reserved for working on the exhibit. Two of these class sessions ended up including guest speakers, cutting into writing time. Because of the considerable constraints placed on group work and the syllabus description reading, “The exhibit you will produce is already booked for display at St. Lucia during the [social justice] conference (March 10, 2012) and around the state of Minnesota for all of 2012,” students would rely heavily on the expertise of the professionals around them to get their panels “right.”
Dakota Culture (Pre-Contact)
Fur Trade Relationships
Treaties
Annuity System (post Treaties)
Assimilation and Reservation Life
War—Dakota perspectives
War—Settler perspectives
Trials and Hanging
Aftermath—Exile/Diaspora
Commemoration and Reconciliation
Harwell read these themes aloud on the first day of class (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). In a five-minute introductory presentation, he erected an example panel for the students to see, an approximately 3’ X 7’ vinyl screen that unrolled from a casing on the floor and hooked to a retractable metal stand at top. The particular one he brought in for this demonstration displayed an advertisement for the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS). In the process of assembling it, Harwell explained that students would be responsible for writing titles and texts as well as selecting quotes and images, all in the “hope” stated on the syllabus to “raise awareness of the treatment of indigenous people in the nineteenth century as white settlers poured into Minnesota.” On this first day, attention to the exhibit consisted only in this brief introduction. Students were to begin thinking about partners and selecting themes they wanted to work on, something that would get sorted out within the week.
All participants are considered equal during these sessions.
Listen respectfully, don’t interrupt.
Seek clarification when you do not understand.
There are no wrong answers.
Before judging an idea, listen to its advocate.
People do not need to agree although we still strive for consensus.
Seek common ground and action—not problems and conflict (“Ground rules and guiding principles,” 2012).
Harwell’s introduction to the exhibit-writing requirement came in between Dr. Lenz’s overview of the readings and a PowerPoint presentation by two visiting guest speakers from MHS. While explaining that MHS’s founding by Henry Sibley and Alexander Ramsey put the institution in a complicated position regarding the U.S.-Dakota War, the first guest speaker went on to include other uncomfortable facts about the era related to sites the students would be visiting, for instance, that slaves were once held at Fort Snelling and that the Lower Sioux Agency was established for the sole purpose of appropriating land. “How do you balance all this?” he asked rhetorically (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). He gave no clear answer other than that public historians like the J-term students needed to listen respectfully, pay attention to cultural cues especially when talking to Dakota people, maintain an eagerness for learning, and remember “not to step on anyone’s toes” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012).
His colleague agreed. She told the students they needed to understand “that people feel that they’re the victims of genocide and historical trauma. People in New Ulm also feel this. It didn’t happen very long ago.” The first speaker added that “this isn’t a black-and-white story” but rather a brutal and painful history in which “there were no winners” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). Narratives from 2012’s larger white public pedagogy riddled this formative session, evidenced by newspaper headlines to come later that year—“Describing the conflict a daunting task for historians” (Krohn, February 5, 2012); “Dakota, settlers were all victims” (Craig, April 27, 2012); “Good guys, bad guys? History isn’t always so simple” (Krohn, August 12, 2012). Corrine Marz would punctuate the point about there being no winners later in her J-term lecture—“There was so much death and so much loss and grief (.) that even though there was a side that came out victorious, it’s really difficult to see where the winners were with so much pain and loss” (Lecture, January 24, 2012). Since whites suffered losses too and held an equally respectable claim to historical trauma, perhaps even as genocide victims, white justice as fairness should prevail.
A current of fear ran through this presentation as well. The lead speaker from MHS started by assessing the students’ precarious positions as knowledge workers on this topic— “Creating 10 panels without much background knowledge gives me the hives” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). He quickly followed up by trying to give courage, telling the students this was a good course and a great opportunity for them. He asked the students what they thought so far. They remained mostly quiet, one saying it seemed overwhelming and another that it sounded exciting. Only Jennifer attempted to shed critical light on the students’ positions, raising a point about ignorance that she would return to throughout the month and eventually pose in Q-and-A sessions following public lectures (minus the confession of whiteness)—“I’m white and I’m embarrassed I don’t know more.” The second visiting historian responded by saying she was “uncomfortable” even being at St. Lucia College that day to talk about the war—“This topic scares the crap out of me. People point fingers. It can be scary sometimes because people accuse you of being racist” (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). In such exchanges, one sees a silenced history reproducing its own silences through actors inhabiting positions of institutional power, whites coming together to enforce the “deader than disco” white code (Smith, 2009, p. 73).
Writing White-Guy History: Harwell Defines the Standard
I conducted my first interview with Mr. Harwell at the end of the third week. Originally from North Carolina, he had earned a Master’s degree in Public History twelve years earlier. His first job as a professional historian was with MHS. He had been working as executive director of BLCHS for seven years.
Besides wanting to learn more about his background, I approached this first conversation being curious about anxieties or fears Harwell may have had going public with the controversial U.S.-Dakota War. Like with Dr. Lenz and the contradictions concerning her aversion to assuming a “radical” approach to this silenced history of genocide, I had prepared to question Harwell specifically about balance and neutrality based on cautious stances he took in the classroom.
By the time of our interview, I had observed Harwell in the role of lead classroom teacher four times. I had seen him share a great deal of critical insight into the U.S.-Dakota War by way of analogies to geographically distant situations of injustice he knew about from film and television—inner-city L.A., Baltimore, the Vietnam War. But as I had come to realize, this sharing often occurred immediately before or after official class time. Rarely had I seen it integrated into lessons in ways designed to foster critical inquiry and discovery with students. For Harwell, who of course did not have a Ph.D. like his co-instructor, official class time seemed to be a time of teacher caution against making statements that could be perceived as politically threatening to status quo understandings. The most curious example of this came in the second week when he began the January 9 class session by playing a live version of Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side,” a song that targets a core tenet of manifest destiny, calling out the hypocrisy of a society that continually wages war while promoting its own Christianity. As soon as the song ended, Harwell distanced himself from its unavoidable politics—“I’m not advocating Dylan’s perspective. I just thought you might like to hear it” (Fieldnotes, January 9, 2012). The lyrics were not shared and student discussion about the lyrics’ bearing on 1862 was not solicited. Like with Steve Miller’s pedagogy in Mankato, there would be no teaching, only listening, and students could form their own opinions about whether or not the settlers had God on their side.
Harwell often humorously referred to himself as a “white guy,” owning the fact that his racial privilege made it so that he only knew of oppression in distanced ways. “I come to it from a white male’s perspective where the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is New Coke,” he quipped (Interview, January 20, 2012). When I asked him directly about fears he might have had teaching the U.S.-Dakota War, he said, “I think this topic in particular is one where you- not only are there lots of thorny issues but you cannot make everyone happy. Someone is going to hate you. It might be Angela Cavender Wilson [Waziyatawin], it might be John LaBatte, but someone or both of them are going to be very unhappy” (Interview, January 20, 2012). Surprising to me at the time was that Dakota people came to Harwell’s mind first rather than the angry settler descendants always prominent in my mind after following the Free Press so closely. Most prominent for Harwell was a Dakota political spectrum with Waziyatawin on the left and lay historian John LaBatte on the right, a figure Harwell freely referred to in the classroom as “the Rush Limbaugh of the Dakota people” (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012).
And I think we want to make sure in this exhibit that, uh, that it does acknowledge that side and it’s not just, um, the (.) a Dakota perspective uh to it. And frankly we have spent lots and lots of time, the majority of the class time from that [Dakota] perspective. Um, but I think history is a pendulum, and for a long time we heard lots and lots and lots about the whites. And now I think we need to- we need to give more time for Dakota people to tell stories that they want to tell.
Like Dr. Lenz, Harwell failed to acknowledge the extent to which the course implicitly favored a white-settler perspective,2 making it seem all the more contradictory to me that he did not imagine being “hated” by, say, descendants of slain settlers for producing an exhibit sympathetic to the Dakota. In line with Dr. Lenz’s idea of compensating for a Dakota-heavy curriculum by having Tom present on his settler ancestry in class, Harwell did his share of this work too, distributing supplemental readings to counterbalance works by Dakota authors—a chapter from Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England (2009) for students to read alongside Ella Deloria’s Waterlily and an article by F. Paul Prucha, “The Settler and the Army in Frontier Minnesota” (1948), for the weekend students would turn to What Does Justice Look Like? Not coincidentally, Prucha was noted in his day as a “nonmoral historian,” one reluctant to consider decisions historical figures made as choices bearing disparate consequences for the empowered and disempowered (Axtell, 1974, p. 37). No such moral counterbalancing work took place offering critical readings to compare alongside authors like Carley, Anderson & Woolworth, or Maltman. Only Sheldon Wolfchild provided such readings, bringing in articles on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Like with the eventual addition of the Fort Ridgely State Memorial to Sarah’s “Commemoration” panel in Chapter 7, the instructors were performing compensatory white-balancing work on the fly and sometimes behind the scenes to adjust for an implicit threat of white backlash they would not name. Dakota resistance, either from the political left or right, would apparently remain inevitable.
In our discussion of the thorny issues, Harwell brought up the fact that Gary Clayton Anderson had said some controversial things during his visit the previous week, something Harwell wished to avoid. He pointed out one aspect of Anderson’s view, however, with which he was in agreement:
- 1.
But one thing he said, and I think he said this at dinner and, and you weren’t there,
- 2.
was “I hope we get to the point where we can write histories of the Dakota War and
- 3.
the- and base it on- on good history and not who was writing them.” Um, and as a- as
- 4.
a white guy who writes about the Dakota War I can see where he’s coming from with
- 5.
that. Um, I think that some of the- it’s not a danger, but I think it’s just one of the
- 6.
byproducts main- maybe, uh, and frankly it’s a byproduct of everything because
- 7.
there’s a lot of white people saying crazy stuff that isn’t historically accurate(hhh)
- 8.
about 1862, but I think that we need to hear Dakota perspectives. Uh, we also need to
- 9.
realize that not all of those Dakota perspectives are historically accurate. (Interview, January 20, 2012)
In these statements, the politics behind objective and balanced representation come straight to the surface. As in his public and classroom comments, Harwell emphasizes the importance of granting equal respect to “perspectives,” foremost “Dakota perspectives” that need to be heard because of the long history of white imbalance (line 8). But as Harwell strives to hear Dakota voices, he also reserves the ability to “see” good history by virtue of his whiteness and masculinity, or as he puts it, from his perspective as a fellow “white guy” (line 4). With this, Harwell exerts a form of defensive pluralism where “we pay lip service to others ‘doing their own thing,’ but are already convinced that there is nothing important to be learned from them” (Bernstein, 1991, p. 336). Rather than practicing real dialogic engagement, showing openness and sensitivity toward voices like Waziyatawin’s with willingness “to grasp the other’s position in the strongest possible light” (Bernstein, 1991, p. 337; emphasis Bernstein’s), Harwell chooses to adhere to white-guy epistemology and construct it against “crazy stuff” he hears from some Dakotas and, paradoxically, even some whites (lines 7–9).
By including whites among those who can fail to produce “good” history (line 3), and by holding to Anderson’s “hope” (line 2) that essentialist thinking be removed from the evaluation of history writing, Harwell seems to argue well for holding histories to an implied standard of factual substance rather than to any predetermined criteria such as an author’s ethnicity or race. Indeed, this aspect of Harwell’s outlook persuades by conjuring the admirable notion of color-blind justice that has a long tradition with roots in both the abolitionist movement (Elliott, 2006) and civil rights with Dr. King’s dream to judge not by the color of one’s skin but by the content of one’s character. But when recounting in this same part of the interview his disagreement with Sheldon Wolfchild over the question of whether Minnesota officials had taken measures to suppress photographic images of the 1862 hanging, and granting in the end that “neither one of us knows the historical truth in that” (Interview, January 20, 2012), Harwell still proceeded to reserve “accuracy” for the “white-guy” perspective. By definition, “crazy stuff” must emanate from nonwhite and feminine perspectives even though whites sometimes also say “crazy” things.
Importantly for the particular history at hand, the identification of some white perspectives as “crazy” or outside the norm with othered feminine and nonwhite perspectives reveals traces, or to use Harwell’s term, “a byproduct” (line 6) of some old strategies for exerting Anglo-American colonial power. Aligning “crazy” with non-white-guy status conjures ideology expressed by the old settlers of Chapter 7, founders who when setting to the task of framing public knowledge about the war harked back to an enlightenment identity that constructed its own stability (rationality) in contrast to American Indians’ alleged instability (irrationality) (Seth, 2010). By the same token, this identity work implies a kind of “probationary” white status for those resistant to or unassimilated by the privileged norm (Jacobson, 1998), “that lofty Anglo-Saxon spirit, which dares all things” heralded by Mankato’s Gen. Baker in Chapter 7.
In this, I can’t help but read historical significance from Sarah’s defense of Harwell’s neutrality in Chapter 4—“I think he has a very enlightened perspective.” For a student knowledge worker and probationary public historian like Sarah, finding success in the J-term entailed buying into what Harwell described on the first day as the “higher purpose” of the service-learning project (Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). There was a spiritual, utopian flavor to this public-history work expressed in defensive, preservationist tones against Waziyatawin’s proposals for justice as when Harwell told students at Fort Snelling, “We’re never going to reach a point of higher enlightenment without historic sites” (Fieldnotes, January 25, 2012). On the one hand, J-term service-learning meant creating dialogue that would help mend the racial divide, a discourse most often espoused by Dr. Lenz. On the other hand, J-term service-learning meant “enlightening” (imparting information to) an ignorant white public, a discourse represented mainly by Harwell. According to Lori, J-term intentions in designing an informative (non-interpretive) exhibit were “pure,” and the purity of those intentions derived from Harwell’s professional guidance (Interview, January 23, 2012). Further success stories about the exhibit writing included Alan saying he came away feeling “empowered” and that the exhibit work “released me from the weight of just pure- pure guilt,” suggesting he had attained the “atonement” he had been seeking by course’s end (Interview, January 26, 2012; Fieldnotes, January 3, 2012). Looking back on her panel and the ways it had been edited, Jennifer said “my voice was uplifted” (Interview, April 26, 2012). These were stories told by probationary knowledge workers performing service as apprentices, acquiring discrete literacy skills in professional public history.
Important to my following analysis of student work on the “War—Settler perspectives” and “War—Dakota perspectives” panels is Harwell’s use of we in the numbered block quote above, especially the we that Gary Clayton Anderson presumably used at the president’s dinner (line 2). Recall from Chapter 5 Anderson’s different uses of we in his lecture, sometimes inclusive—“This is part of Minnesota’s history we’re talking about. And believe it or not it’s all of our history”—and sometimes exclusive for his implied audience—“Well, it’s what we call in the business today- my friend, uh, Ben Kiernan at Yale….” Whether inclusive or exclusive, we functions in ways that position listeners differently in relation to power (Fairclough, 2001). As one already closely aligned with the implied audience Anderson constructed—white, male, property-owning—Harwell sought inclusion into Anderson’s more exclusive history-writing we. And Harwell was inviting me to this identity as well. Reminding through use of you that I had not been at the president’s dinner after the lecture felt like a way of marking uncertainty about my acceptance (line 1). As a fellow white guy and scholar, perhaps I had gotten the message, perhaps I had not. It was up to me in this moment whether to concur and perhaps bond over crazy feminine, nonwhite histories.
Just as Anderson’s message resonated with Harwell “as a white guy who writes about the Dakota War,” the authority expressed by Anderson echoes and moves in his speech through his own application of an ideologically aligned we when discussing Dakota perspectives—“I think that we need to hear Dakota perspectives, uh, we also need to realize that not all of those Dakota perspectives are historically accurate” (lines 8–9; emphases mine). In switching from first-person singular to plural precisely when touching on the question of Dakota perspectives and their accuracy, Harwell asserts white-guy epistemology as the authoritative J-term perspective from which to evaluate all other competing perspectives.3
As a researcher unaffiliated with St. Lucia or BLCHS, I had an easier option than students regarding whether to resist, accept uncritically, or adopt this we and use it myself in recruiting others to the privileged identity. For me, Harwell’s we excluded by speaking mainly for himself and J-term knowledge workers, an important piece to this effect being that I actively maintained distance. I also happen to find non-white and femin(ist) approaches to history necessary for fuller understanding of the past. For students positioned less equally in relation to their instructor, however, and fearfully in relation to the white public pedagogy, Harwell’s authority provided an ideological coherence that felt wise to sign onto and best not to destabilize on the path to success; this was “common sense in the service of power” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 64).
Even for Dr. Lenz, to call into question Harwell’s expertise and predetermined structures regarding the museum exhibit implied risk, moving her to take up a self-proclaimed “neophyte” position that would ultimately not challenge his decisions (Interview, April 27, 2012). The day when Harwell was leading discussion on whether the class should feel obligated to design a linear exhibit, she asked, “Can I interject a naughty angle?” (Fieldnotes, January 06, 2012). Being “naughty” meant simply questioning whether the exhibit needed to be a conventional linear one. She soon supported Harwell’s linear approach because of her experience visiting the National Museum of the American Indian where she had found non-linear representation “incoherent,” a comment not far from Harwell’s “crazy stuff” remark. The professional expertise and exhibit-writing structures Harwell brought to the class, then, represented the power behind the white-guy discourse. His daily use of we in face-to-face encounters represented the power in that discourse (Fairclough, 2001, p. 36), the pronoun functioning as a discursive tool for managing and constraining both student and colleague contributions to the museum exhibit. We symbolized the authority to direct contributions away from the truly “crazy stuff”—interpretive and moral judgments about 1862.
Whites Doing “Good” Work Balancing the Settler Perspectives Panel
Student vulnerability to the power in Harwell’s white-guy history found perhaps its strongest enactment in Jennifer’s panel-writing experience. Again, Jennifer was a highly accomplished sophomore at the time of this study. A Communication Studies major, she worked as editor-in-chief of the College newspaper. She also helped coordinate campus-wide activities through the St. Lucia Diversity Center and often served as student spokesperson to local media. I held my first interview with her in the middle of the course as she was preparing her second draft for the “War— Settler perspectives” panel, eventually renamed “Press and Panic on the Frontier.” It was during this interview that she expressed views shared in previous chapters, for example, her anxiety in thinking that settler society had perpetrated genocide, her paradoxical endorsement of the neutral J-term pedagogy on genocide, and her conviction that she was likely to be “far more radical” than other students I would interview.
- Rick:
Do you feel like that’s changing a little bit? Or do you feel like you’re more (.) sort of more certain about that initial-
- Jennifer:
I feel like that is gonna change. I am- and so I am- I am optimistic. I’m probably far more radical and I’m probably far more optimistic than a lot of people are. That could be because of my age(hhhh). Um, but-
- Rick:
So are you saying that you feel like you’re changing a little bit more to the understanding to the white side of the history of it?
- Jennifer:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, because I had no idea the amount of casualties that were- but then again there was 170,000 white settlers that were in the area, and what, you know, what are they saying, that anywhere from, you know, 400 to 8-, you know, 900 were killed? Which is obviously an atrocity(hhh). You know, death is death and I would never say that it’s not. So I think that- (.) uh (4.5) definitely, definitely is gonna need far more balance in how- in how I see it. (Interview, January 18, 2012)
As in Jennifer’s sudden erasure of agency when speaking of the demand for balance in Chapter 6, these last three lines remain passive and fail to name the locus of the standardizing view shaping her learning experience. Jennifer places no stress on the word “that” before entering the 4.5-second pause, stress that could have marked “that” as a demonstrative pronoun referring back to her radicalism in line 2. In listening several times to this passage, I interpret “that” as the head of a complement clause devoid even of the non-referential subject it— “is gonna need far more balance in how- in how I see it.” In building toward this complete erasure of agency, Jennifer reveals uncommon vulnerability to the standardizing white-guy perspective by suggesting that her radicalism comes from her young age (lack of maturity and professionalism) and that becoming educated about the U.S.-Dakota War (learning about white victimhood) necessarily means taking up the balanced view. No other students expressed this kind of “optimism” for political reform from initial critical-social-justice leanings.
While Jennifer’s eagerness to espouse balance has been documented in previous chapters, her reform was not so easily won. Early in the J-term, she argued with Harwell over the notion of settler innocence and showed reluctance to display what Harwell eventually presented as “the facts” of white victimhood that he felt her panel needed to display—“I like the idea of adding a sidebar of a victim. The facts are that this family did die” (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Jennifer had organized her first draft dated January 12 according to three categories of whites who played pivotal roles in the run-up to the 1862 war—government officials, traders, and settlers. In the first category, she cited Lincoln’s charge to Gov. Ramsey in 1862—“Attend to the Indians. If the draft cannot proceed of course it will not proceed. Necessity knows no law”—and commented that Lincoln’s response “sums up the perspective of the U.S. government, seeming to say, ‘do what you have to do’ with seemingly little regard for handling the situation with justice and care.” Regarding traders and settlers, Jennifer identified greed for money and land respectively as constitutive of these groups’ mistreatment of Dakota people. Regarding settlers, she wrote, “Many had inter-married with the Dakota and so had good relations with them while others were blatantly hostile and racist.” Jennifer’s narrative then coalesced to a kind of thesis statement—“Whatever perspective, all white settlers benefitted from the oppression of the Dakota people.”
This thesis did not make it onto Jennifer’s final panel. With the eventual editing away of this critical material, I wish to note that Jennifer was attempting to narrate complexity by identifying the varied interests of differentiated white identities from 1862 and their shared complicity inciting violence. This narrative strategy runs exactly counter to white justice as fairness which seeks to level differentiated identities to states of sameness, minimizing talk of social contingencies so that knowledge of unfairness (social power) may be erased from collective memory.
In the margins, Harwell marked most everything off with large parentheses, giving Jennifer a lot of praise for her work but also noting “need to condense,” “the responsibility of others,” and “outside your scope.” These last two comments carried the promise that representation of the government’s and traders’ roles would occur on other panels. Writing “we just have to narrow focus,” Harwell went on to provide extensive feedback, advising Jennifer away from making her own commentary and instead displaying newspaper headlines from 1862—“You could get the ‘facts’ while keeping the flavor of fear, terror, + let’s face it—racism.”
Headlines Harwell proposed were ones of Dakota attacks and white military victories—“You could do ‘Lower Sioux Attacked,’ ‘Soldiers Ambushed at Ferry,’ ‘Dakota repelled at New Ulm,’ ‘Terrible Atrocity to Some Poor Yankee,’ ‘Defeated at Wood Lake,’ and finally ‘Camp Release’” (“Euro-American perspectives,” panel draft, January 12, 2012). One thing Harwell marked as important to keep was a sentence about settler demographics—“By 1860, Minnesota’s non-Indian population exploded from 6077 in 1850 to more than 170,000, ‘a boom unequaled by that of any other state in American history, including California during the Gold Rush.’” Jennifer had copied this line from a display she had seen while visiting BLCHS the day before her draft was due. In advising toward showing headlines, Harwell wrote, “You could frame it with a few opening sentences about population change, general nativity of settlers.”
The strategy of representing settler racism through headlines alone appealed to Jennifer’s position as a journalist. She expressed deep interest in researching the frontier papers and described their portrayals of Dakota people as “heinous” (Interview, April 27, 2012). Just showing this content would be enough to shock unknowing whites about the white supremacy of regional founders and settlers. Yet even showing rather than telling came to be understood as politically perilous work. As Harwell told students to “avoid editorial language” and words like “terrible” and “massacre” because they could “turn people off” (Fieldnotes, January 13, 2012)—a potential check on anti-Indian sublime discourses (Silver, 2008)—he also advised caution toward display of inappropriate words expressed by people of the past. “You can pick quotes that show the racism of the day,” he advised, “but if I’m working with a younger audience, I have to remember that it’s hard for them to distinguish between what’s being said and a quote used to show the racism of the day” (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012). On this day, he told a story in class about a museum project he had once been involved in on World War II where a woman displayed an instance of the slur “jap” from the 1940s to show racism in an exhibit designed for third-graders, a kind of miscalculation as Harwell presented it, resulting in “an email shouting match” between exhibit writers and an angry parent (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012). Like the MHS representative who told the students “It can be scary sometimes because people accuse you of being racist,” fear sometimes involved potential backlash from race-conscious viewers. Jennifer took Harwell’s story to heart. As she told me in interview, “I mean, like he was saying, you can’t be that radical when you’re dealing with small children anyway. You know, like he was saying, you can’t go using the word ‘jap’ when you’re talking to third-graders. Obviously totally inappropriate” (Interview, January 18, 2012).
Jennifer’s second draft dated January 23 contained no mention of settlers’ roles in the violence beyond the white population boom. Her narrative quoted newspaper discourses warning of the “red menace” and incorporated new information about the number of settlers killed and the “military’s superior technology” which quickly ended the war. Jennifer’s thesis about white greed and whites’ oppression of the Dakota people from her early draft was reduced to a single agentless phrase, “the rising pressure of starvation on the Dakota,” a line removed sometime between her second draft and the final panel text edited in February.4 Following her interest in the 1862 newspapers, Jennifer added a call for genocide made by St. Cloud editor Jane Swisshelm in November 1862—“Exterminate the wild beasts, and make peace with the devil and all his hosts sooner than these red-jawed tigers, whose fangs are dripping with the blood of innocents!” Sensing this content as potentially inappropriate, Jennifer made a preemptive move immediately after reading it aloud in class two days after our interview—“I want to stand by this and keep it in my panel” (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Harwell did not suggest removing it in his editorial comments the following week. Swisshelm made the final cut in February.
“Press and Panic on the Frontier” exhibit panel
(Source Image courtesy Jennifer)
Mr. Huggins exercised nothing but kindness toward the Indians. He fed them when hungry, clothed them when naked, attended them when sick, and advised and cheered them in all their difficulties. He was intelligent, industrious, and good, and yet he was one of the first victims of the outbreak, shot down like a dog by the very Indians whom he had so long and so well served.
I must note that Galbraith was the government Indian agent who refused to open food storehouses to starving Dakotas prior to the violence, a man singled out by Tháoyateduta as the main reason he ended up having to lead Dakota men into war in the first place. After characterizing Galbraith as “arrogant, stubborn, emotionally unstable, and a hard drinker” based on “the testimony of men who had no reason, decades later, to hold a grudge against him,” historian Roy Meyer (1967) concludes, “The causes of the Sioux Uprising are manifold and complex, but it is no exaggeration to say that Thomas J. Galbraith had more to do with bringing on the war than any other single individual” (p. 110).5
Detail from “Press and Panic on the Frontier” exhibit panel
(Source Image courtesy Jennifer)
Man, I thought it turned out way better than expected(hhh). Yeah. Um, I was really pleased that they didn’t try to censor me with the Jane Swisshelm. Cause I was a freak. I mean, cause […] I know that it’s extre- it looks, and I know that it is, and- and I- when I went into it, I know that it looks one sided. And I know that it is not very sympathetic to whites. Um, but, you know, I- I- I still stand by it and I’m really proud of my panel. (Interview, April 26, 2012)
I asked her about the origins of the Huggins story because none of it had been included among her draft materials—“Um, they asked me, cause I mean- John knew that it looked a little one sided and he was like ‘Let’s tell one story from a settler’s perspective,’ so I did more research and came up with, um, Huggins.” When I asked her whether she had initially thought of anything on her own to place in the sidebar, she said, “I don’t think I did. And that’s why- and that’s why when I needed something- and so when I talked with John he was like, ‘You know, let’s give a story of um- let’s give a story of someone who, you know, was sympathetic and was trying to do- do good work.’”
Apparently, Jennifer had not delivered on Harwell’s desire to add a sidebar about white victims by the end of the J-term.6 In telling how it came about that she located one soon afterward, Jennifer reveals both how the panel remained her own, accounting for her pride, and how it did not. Important to what she described as this “last-ditch” compensatory work carried out to offset critical “one sidedness” is the language through which it was performed7—in first-person plural—us (“let’s give a story”)—and according to notions of what constitutes “good” work. From 1862, there was “good” Huggins trying to assimilate the Dakotas; in 2012, there was Harwell writing “good” white-guy history, enlightening the general public with “the facts” on white victimhood. Important in the shifting of pronouns in Jennifer’s account is how quickly Harwell’s need becomes an internalized requirement (“when I needed something”). Thus, Jennifer went back to the sources.
Yeah, you know, if I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t- what I- I wanted to go all the way with the panel, and 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, 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.
Um, but I’ve had this panel read in completely different views. I’ve had students who’ve told me it’s completely one sided and it makes whites look like the savages because of the rhetoric in- in this part, and then, I hadn’t heard your perspective. I hadn’t heard that at all. What I- what- what I have heard in the majority of the responses that I’ve heard is “Well it makes it look like white people are awful.”
The juxtaposition of the two stories is kind of- is kind of difficult for me too because I feel like they all flow together in such a way that could present it in that light, which is- which is rough. Cause, I mean, I’m a newspaper woman so I know that the power of placement is huge.
I mean and I- and I get it. And I understand that(hhhh) and it’s also the all-mighty dollar and who is- you know, like who’s- who’s- who’s funding this, you know? And it’s like- and so I think that we got away with far more than we- than I thought we were going to, to be honest. […] I mean it’s like, he who holds the money and holds the cultural dominance is going to continue to write the history books and is going to continue to control the narrative.
Conclusion: “We Cannot Escape History Whiteness”
Our exhibit starts over here. And we try to be very, uh, forthright with sort of our perspective, where we were coming from. I’m a white guy from North Carolina. I am not Dakota. I have great empathy for- uh, for what happened in 1862, but I did not experience it. I don’t have family history. Uh, and so, I just wanted us to be clear that this is where we were coming from. This uh- these people are who we talked to. These are the sources that we looked at. There are lots and lots of different viewpoints with any history, especially 1862, so I just wanted to put that out there.
The mixing of pronouns in this passage provides another example of how the authoritative white-guy identity could move into and out of the J-term collective identity, making that collective identity its own and vice versa through inclusive/exclusive we. In the second line, “where we were coming from” quickly becomes “I,” “a white guy from North Carolina” who symbolically performs J-term forthrightness for the audience. Aligned with the original position, that identity presents itself as abstracted from social contingencies at hand—“I don’t have family history.” It continues on in first-person singular through lines three and four, but suddenly switches back to plural in line five where what “I” wants for “us” suddenly becomes “where we were coming from.” The statement ends with an implicit assertion of the socially-abstracted identity circulating among “lots and lots of different viewpoints,” deferential, to be sure, and arguably on equal footing in the moment, but in no way equal when it comes to producing public knowledge on 1862.
Thinking back on how the original position took shape on the 1912 hanging monument, discussed in Chapter 7, these forthright acknowledgments of racial identity and privilege should maybe come as no surprise. At public gatherings and even in the newspapers, the old-settler commemorators of the semicentennial had no trouble defining themselves in terms of racial identity. It was only in writing the official inscription—shaping the public meditative transaction—where they sought to cast their identity behind the veil. Here is where Harwell can really be said to have carried out progressive work, designing an initially unplanned introductory panel that attempted to reveal the identity behind the official J-term narrative9—“This exhibit was produced by students in the course Conflict and Remembrance: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, taught at St. Lucia College,”10 “These panels reflect that student work and exploration,” and “It cannot speak for all people and perspectives.” Still, the whiteness and masculinity so readily acknowledged in interviews and face-to-face forums did not find explicit expression in the final text displayed to the public.
I don’t know if you heard that discussion but we were talking about word choice and it was Sarah and, uh, um, Jennifer was standing there and was saying, “I think that we need to articulate that- that we spent a lot of time thinking about this. And we’re not saying we’re right and we’re not saying that ten years from now this is gonna be the same word that we’re using, but we did think about it a lot and so if you’re offended by it, at least know that we spent a lot of time thinking about it and here’s how we came to that conclusion.” I think that that’s really, really cool. And I think frankly that’s all we can do. You know, here’s who we were. Here’s who we talked to and what we looked at. Here are other places you can go, and, you know, that’s it. (Interview, January 20, 2012)
Interpreting the right kind of we repetition from Jennifer’s speech provided Harwell a sense of assurance about the kind of exhibit taking shape, leading him to conclude, “I’m comfortable with what I heard today.” While this particular act of monitoring implied some concessions in the white-guy belief system—“we’re not saying we’re right”—Jennifer’s caution and her repeated phrase “we’re not saying” seemed to suggest that the limitations placed on critical thought by the white-justice-as fairness view had taken hold. In this passage, Harwell recognizes this self-proclaimed far “more radical” student’s understanding that whatever meaning the exhibit happened to mediate could be defended from the equally valid J-term perspective—“we did think about it a lot and so if you’re offended by it, at least know that we spent a lot of time thinking about it,” a statement not far removed from Tom’s “you can’t- you can’t blame that person for building something incorrectly if somebody else’s truth is different from your own” (Interview, May 11, 2015). From there, Harwell could safely rehearse “who we were” and its affinity with the familiar “form-your-own-opinion” mantra. Like the newspaper articles, the exhibit narratives would advocate no position, especially positions aligned with that other(ed) sense of justice, critical social justice.
I’m nervous about it getting it right. I’m nervous about- because I’m always going to be informed by my white perspective. No matter what. There’s no way that I’m ever gonna shake that off. Um, and I think that that’s true for everyone in the class. We’re all gonna come from the white perspective. I think that the teachers- the-, you know, those that are teaching the course, Professor Lenz and John, are doing an awesome job. Um, but obvious- I’m still really anxious about how it’s gonna be received. (Interview, January 18, 2012)
Confessing one’s whiteness so frequently within this pedagogy of fear, with no sustained classroom support for critically examining whiteness’s relation to the politics of display taking shape, seemed to evoke and recontextualize Lincoln’s words from December 1862 circulating frequently in the Mankato press during the sesquicentennial—“We cannot escape history.”11
- 1.
Anderson: “There were others though that concerned Sibley, and he said so. Um, we call them today mixed bloods. People who were- uh in the parlance of those of us who are ethno-historians trying to deal with words back in the 1980s, uh, this gets clumsy, but Franco-Dakota people, Anglo-Dakota people. I guess the only way you can put it is hyphenated people. How many were there of them? Probably seven- eight hundred in Minnesota at this time, and their loyalty was questionable” (Lecture, January 10, 2012).
- 2.
I asked Harwell to clarify the point made in this block quote—Harwell: “I think that we have laid- in this course, we have given more deference to the Dakota perspective than the uh (.)” Rick: “Okay, okay. I just wanted to make sure I was understanding it right, that statement. That’s-” Harwell: “But I’m okay with that because I think at this point, in 2012, within the historiography, that’s the way the pendulum is swinging and needs to swing.”
- 3.
In Chapter 2, Alan’s shift from I to we on the question of designing a linear exhibit provides an important example of the power in the white-guy history and its distribution through student talk— “I mean my first reaction was no, of course we’re not obligated to. I don’t think we should- (4.0) °Well, I’m not sure.° I do think we have an obligation to our audience….” Rather than the negative constraint on independent critical thought I analyze, students often happily took up we as a collective comfort, signaling the power behind white-guy history and their recruitment to its ideological coherence (Fairclough, 2011). Alan said he had “pretty solid trust” in Harwell and, in the end, “was very glad we had the terms and chronology” provided by a second introductory panel Harwell devised (Interviews, January 9, 2012; April 27, 2012). As to whether it was difficult to get the language right on her panel, Tracy said, “Um, it has and it hasn’t because we’ve had so much help from John with all the wording” (Interview, January 27, 2012). As to the difficulty of co-constructing a coherent narrative voice across panels, Lori said, “I think as far as what we have right now, it feels pretty good […] I’m sure that whoever goes back over and edits will be able to do that” (Interview, January 23, 2012). On navigating contentious political terrain, Rachel said, “one thing that worries me is how people are going to react to it, and that’s why I really want, you know, John’s feedback, and we just got that today” (Interview, January 24, 2012).
- 4.
Interestingly, Jennifer’s words “rising pressure” remained but became dissociated from its original alignment with white agents as the cause of Dakota starvation, getting shifted instead to divisions within Dakota society—“This [superior white military technology], combined with rising pressure from within the Dakota nation, provided the impetus for their surrender at Camp Release on September 26, 1862.”
- 5.
The J-term exhibit seems to provide balanced representation of Galbraith by quoting him on his desire to see severe retribution against Dakota people in the sidebar to Lori and Anna’s “Exile” panel—“The power of the government must be brought to bear upon them; they must be whipped, coerced into obedience. After this is accomplished, few will be left to put upon a reservation; many will be killed; more must perish from famine and exposure, and the more desperate will flee and seek refuge on the plains or in the mountains.…A very small reservation should suffice for them.” As Lori and Anna had selected this quote before the end of the J-term (Interview, January 23, 2012), the later addition of Galbraith’s words about Huggins on Jennifer’s panel suggests a balanced editorial decision in line with Harwell’s philosophy about Minnesota’s colonizers analyzed in Chapter 9, that there is good and bad in everyone (Fieldnotes, January 11, 2012).
- 6.
Harwell expressed this in class (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Course materials containing the Huggins sidebar are dated February 8. Jennifer’s original side panel submitted January 23 sought to provide more information about Jane Swisshelm.
- 7.
Jennifer: “And I think there were some last-ditch efforts there to try and- cause I feel like- think both Dr. Lenz and John realized that we had pushed the envelope, and so I think there was some last-ditch efforts to kind of be like– (.) but- I mean (.)” Rick: “To make it more palatable to who they thought the audience was gonna be?” Jennifer: “Yeah, to make it more palat- right, to make it more palatable” (Interview, April 26, 2012).
- 8.
Part of Harwell’s instructions for the first panel-writing assignment was, “Write it as if you’re presenting it to your roommate, parent, or somebody who doesn’t have any prior knowledge about the topic” (Fieldnotes, January 09, 2012). Eventually, other implicitly white and perhaps even “innocent” identities like the youthful third-grade viewers of the World War II exhibit mentioned earlier in this chapter blended in and helped shape the implied audience.
- 9.
Image withheld in keeping with the promise of anonymity.
- 10.
Titles and names changed to protect participant anonymity.
- 11.
Lincoln delivered this line in an address to Congress on December 1 when he was seeking to build support for emancipating slaves in efforts to save the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation came on January 1, 1863, less than a week after the Mankato hanging.