I was really nervous about it because if I were a Dakota person it would offend me. But we’re not making the panels for Dakota people, we’re making them for like ignorant white people and so I was going into it knowing that there could be some what-not….
— Stephanie (Interview, March 27, 2012)
So I talked to the students and then I found out that the director(hhh)- the director of the historical society had the final say in the content of those panels. Well, what is that saying? In other words, he used the students but he made the final decision as to the content of each panel.
— Sheldon Wolfchild (Interview, April 20, 2013)
* * *
This chapter completes my analysis of the two-panel fulcrum designed to balance settler and Dakota perspectives in the Conflict and Remembrance museum exhibit. Looking further into Harwell’s pedagogy as he supervised student work on the “War — Dakota perspectives” panel, I continue to develop themes from previous chapters, including use of inclusive we to win consent among students for the white-justice-as-fairness view. This chapter also continues to explore dilemmas instructor adherence to white justice as fairness presented to students, especially Stephanie who thought her panel should give some sense for what the history of the war might look like when told from below, incorporating experiences of Dakota women and children who suffered during the violence of 1862. As in Chapter 8, I frame this discussion in tensions that arose at the St. Lucia College social-justice conference in March, the purpose being to contextualize Stephanie’s perspective more fully and demonstrate how directing students away from critical social justice worked to reproduce elements of the historic conflict the J-term was studying.
Historical Reenactments
As he mentions in the epigraphic quote, Dakota documentary filmmaker Sheldon Wolfchild talked to the students at the social-justice conference workshop on March 10, 2012, as they stood by their Conflict and Remembrance exhibit panels and fielded questions from the public. After investing considerable energy trying to bring critical perspective to the J-term experience, Wolfchild wanted to see what the exhibit panels looked like and whether or not his contributions made any impact on their content. Possible points included information about the adoption of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery into U.S. policy; Article 6 of the 1858 treaty enabling the government to use annuity money to compensate whites should they incur injury or loss of property in the increasingly likely event of war; and special government investigator George E. H. Day’s early warnings to Commissioner Dole and President Lincoln that violence would soon break out if they failed to reform Minnesota’s corrupt “Indian system.” Also, back in January, Wolfchild had brought copies of critical histories to J-term functions, namely Roy Meyer’s History of the Santee Sioux (1967) and David Nichols’s Lincoln and the Indians (1978), using them to model a different way for white students to go “back to the sources,” in this case early critical ones. Throughout, Wolfchild’s purpose had been to help students contextualize the war as a preventable (socially produced) outcome of racial oppression (Interview, March 20, 2013).
Yet, Harwell had been taking indirect issue all the while as indicated in his stance in the previous chapter on whether Minnesota officials had suppressed photographic documentation of the Mankato hanging. For Harwell, Wolfchild’s contributions smacked of conspiracy theories. The week after Wolfchild underscored the importance of George E. H. Day’s federal investigation in a public talk at the Blankenship County Historical Society (BLCHS), Harwell joked in class that Day was “the Kenneth Starr of his times” (Fieldnotes, January 13, 2012). Other times, though, pushback from Harwell’s institution felt more serious, as when Tom, co-author of the “Dakota perspectives” panel, was told by an employee at BLCHS to be careful when talking to Dakota people because “you get some things that are accurate and other things that are distorted.” On the latter point, he was told to “keep your eye on Sheldon,” an exchange I witnessed (Fieldnotes, January 8, 2012).
After the treaties were signed in 1851 the Dakota Indians were expected to move to reservations. Not only were the Dakota mandated to move, but they were also told to conform to Christianity and become farmers. Some Dakota indeed decided to farm on land allotments. As for these few hundred Dakota who did adhere to white society, they were given better goods and more money by the government.
The many Dakota who did not submit to the attempted extermination of their culture were left to survive by their own means. After being asked to completely give up their way of life and live like the newcomers, the Dakota society was perpetually shattered. By 1862, the annuity system, assimilation, and reservation life left the Dakota starving, economically desperate, fractured, and angry.
This is the entirety of Monica’s narrative contribution to the exhibit. Heavy in passive-voice constructions, her text employs active verbs only to show Dakota people making choices offered to them seemingly by no one. While the mandate to move, unfair distribution of goods and money, and phrase “extermination of their culture” all might feel critical to some, white agency is mainly implied through abstractions like “the annuity system, assimilation, and reservation life.”
Unable to pay debts claimed by fur traders, and in perilous economic condition, the Wahpeton and Sisseton Dakota signed a treaty at Traverse des Sioux on July 23, 1851. Dakota leaders agreed to sell their lands west of the Mississippi to the United States, in exchange for $1,665,000 and a permanent home ten miles on either side of the Minnesota River, from present-day New Ulm, to Lake Traverse. Meanwhile, representatives from the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute tribes reluctantly signed their lands away in Mendota for $1,410,000 on August 5. The treaties created the Upper Sioux and Lower Sioux reservations, and opened 24 million acres to newcomers.
In addition to the treaties, Dakota leaders were deceived into signing a document referred to as the “traders’ papers.” These illegal papers redirected the money they were promised for their land to traders. The 1851 treaties were ratified by the U.S. Senate without a guarantee of the reservation in perpetuity. Such deceit and broken promises increased tensions among the Dakota, traders, and U.S. government. [sic]
In cases where active verbs come into use implying white agency, acting subjects are inanimate objects like “illegal papers” or abstractions like “deceit.”
In the process of sharing his displeasure over the panels, Mr. Wolfchild reportedly told J-termers “you’re setting back the discussion 150 years” (Harwell Interview, 05-16-2012). Students grew anxious. Some defended the exhibit as I will explain later in this chapter. Stephanie, the co-author of the “War — Dakota perspectives” panel, broke out in tears when Wolfchild did not so easily relent; she had been trying to account for her panel’s content to another critical Dakota audience member at the same time. Harwell stepped in to try and take the heat off students but admitted later that he hadn’t handled it very well—“I tend not to stand my ground very much. If I’m going to mess up I should mess up in that direction” (Interview, May 16, 2012).
You know, they could say, ‘Oh, well the students wrote it.’ Well, no. When the director has the final say of the content, then that says the- that’s saying then the director had the authority and did those- those panels himself. And so I was very upset about that because I gave them that information. So therein lies the problem with them. And then after that- after that, that became a very- a distrust situation for me again. We’re back to the whole same old mentality of 150 years that we’ve gone through before as Dakota people. (Interview, April 20, 2013)
And so of course, what did that mean then? My documentary [film] as I finished several months later was never allowed to be shown down there by the historical society director or St. Lucia […] Well, when I made the issue on the day of the panels, that said- that gave them their out. Their out was right there. “Okay, now we- now we have our excuse against Sheldon. We have our excuse. We stayed clear of Sheldon and his truthful documentary and that gives us the out so we don’t have to take the blame-” And the authority- “if people aren’t gonna- if they come and see Sheldon’s documentary and we show it, then we’re gonna get in trouble here.” (Interview, March 20, 2013)
It is important to note in this passage Wolfchild’s sensitivity to the collective J-term identity as he experienced it, expressed through his own switch from I to we. Lines like “we have our excuse against Sheldon” and “we don’t have to take the blame” show that the J-term service-learning project was more about whites building community together than it was about engendering dialogue with Dakota people. Inclusive J-term we served as a powerful tool to exclude critical voices, both Dakota and white, in ways reminiscent of 1862.
Sheldon I mean (2.0) you know (1.0) Sheldon’s a person and so(hhh) I mean, he’s a Dakota. He has his history. He has his perspective. But, you know, there are people who- I mean, what did Paul Mazakutemani say? “I don’t know of one nation where all are good or bad.” There are things that I like about Sheldon and respect about Sheldon and there are other things that I don’t. (Interview, May 16, 2012)
This account starts from a position that seems to want to render Wolfchild nullius, making his personhood into something I needed reassured about; yet, according to Harwell’s white-justice-as-fairness view, Wolfchild’s personhood actually does need to be explicitly marked as socially situated and having its history and perspective as opposed to the producer of public knowledge who, as seen in the previous chapter, claims “I don’t have family history” and proceeds to balance perspectives from a socially abstracted point of no perspective. Of course, this racializing view has its own socially situated history examined in Chapter 7 with the empowered colonial citizen constructing his superior reason and ability to transact with anonymity against the Indian who is imagined as irretrievably embedded in the social world, bound by things like kinship ties, indigenous trade relations, etc. (Seth, 2010). In keeping with social-contract tenets underlying this view, the Indian remains both a subject (the topic of representation but historically nullius, an unperson to be dominated) and subjective (one having an irrational perspective), understood in opposition to and as an enhancement of the white producer of public knowledge who remains free, equal, and rational, positioned somewhere outside the bounds of representation and racial conflict.
Before moving on to the “War — Dakota perspectives” panel, I wish to make two final points regarding how Harwell rationalizes his assessment of the conflict between Wolfchild and the students. First comes the Paul Mazakutemani quote, easily recollected for its being stenciled on a wall at BLCHS—“There are good and bad men everywhere. I could not point to any nation where all were good.” Here, Harwell offers perhaps an unintended message that Wolfchild is a “bad” Indian. Mazakutemani made this statement to white officials in 1857 when trying to prove his “loyalty” or status as a “good” Indian to whites in the wake of the Henry Lott debacle near Spirit Lake, Iowa. There, in a precursor to the U.S.-Dakota War, Dakota leader Íŋkpaduta and his men meted out justice themselves, killing settlers after white officials had refused to prosecute Lott, a white trader who had murdered Íŋkpaduta’s kinsman, Siŋtómniduta (Wingerd, 2010, pp. 260–264). Mazakutemani, a Dakota well-known among the whites of his day for having taken up farming and Christianity, worked to rescue settlers in 1857. Following the logic of his quote, then, events in Iowa demonstrated that Íŋkpaduta’s men were no different than any other “bad” people found among any people. There were good and bad Indians just as there were good and bad whites. As with so many relativistic statements used to support the white-justice-as-fairness view, its logic appeals precisely for the way it erases knowledge of unjust relations that established white domination in the region, promoting a sense of sameness and notions of good and bad in everyone to reassure the consciences of those occupying the land. In raising it as a kind of guiding statement for navigating controversy, Harwell signals the way he too, like Dr. Lenz, was working as a preservationist for his institution, in his case applying discourses of “balance” and cultural “complexity” to diffuse what historian Bernard Sheehan once called “the locus of guilt” for whites (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, p. 5; Sheehan, 1969, p. 269).
And so, you know, it didn’t bother me. I had a- a- a Dakota- another Dakota person, and this was related to me so it’s hearsay from my mouth, but you know they said, because one of Sheldon’s quotes was uh, “you’re setting back the discussion 150 years, and I’m gonna tell every Dakota person in the world about this,” and their quote was, “Okay, even if Sheldon does tell uh every Dakota person in the world that- seven will listen.” (Interview, May 16, 2012)
Leveraging disagreement among Dakota people became, then, a strategy for defending the project when facing Dakota resistance. The important point for my remaining analysis is all this being possible among today’s successful white producers of public knowledge who hope to enlighten the citizenry about the U.S.-Dakota War and sometimes say they are working to cultivate cross-racial dialogue and heal living wounds.
Harwell’s statements again call to mind Bernstein’s (1991) point about defensive pluralism as a form of tokenism where lip service is paid to others (Dakota voices) but where real listening breaks down for the conviction “that there is nothing important to be learned from them” (p. 336).1 Indeed, just as Dr. Lenz’s convictions about “good” institutional practices and “appropriate” Holocaust scholarship hindered listening to Waziyatawin and teaching this episode of Dakota history as a history of genocide, Harwell’s convictions about “good” white-guy epistemology hindered listening to Wolfchild and fully representing the U.S.-Dakota War as a preventable (socially produced) series of events.
Significant as well to my reading of this conflict is how many favored principles in the white public pedagogy seemed to have come undone—mutual respect, equal validity for all informed perspectives, the idea that this is no simple history about good guys and bad guys, etc. As I experienced it and recorded it, and have thought about it and investigated it in my research since 2012, Wolfchild practiced text-based “objectivity” better than anyone associated with the J-term, staying true to white sources in particular.2 Still he came away perceived as the subjective and unreasonable one. I can think of no better explanation for this than racism, the application of social and civic double standards based on ancestry (Fields & Fields, 2012).
Imagining Perspectives “From Below”
As told in Chapter 3, Stephanie and Tom helped co-author the “War — Dakota perspectives” panel. To briefly recount their profiles, Stephanie was a fourth-year Psychology major who had recently moved to Minnesota from North Carolina. She had completed previous coursework on race and Native-American history. She had read Black Elk Speaks plus one of the books on the syllabus, Ella Deloria’s Waterlily. One of her stated goals in taking the course was to learn about modern Dakota life from Dakota people. Tom was a second-year Nursing major and veteran of the Iraq War who had suffered an injury serving in the Navy. He came from Hutchinson, Minnesota, a town besieged by Dakota fighters in 1862. He possessed much familiarity with regional historical sites and facts about the war.
I think that the panels would from the Dakota perspective, for our specific topic, you would have 6 or 7 panels trying to- trying to wrap your head around each perspective, you know, mixed-blood pro war, mixed-blood against the war, and why, and you talk and just get all the perspectives to show the complexity of the one side of the war which the one side was multi-faceted. (Interview, January 26, 2012)
Yeah and also it’s impossible to say “this is how the Dakota felt about this” because there were so many different factions there too, whereas, you know, like from the settler perspective generally people were pretty angry and scared. Angry and scared is how they felt whereas- there’s just so much to tell and no space to tell it. (Interview, January 24, 2012)
Indeed, the imbalanced history presenting one side as unified and the other divided seemed to place panel writers in unequal positions as all struggled to separate the historical wheat from the chaff. Usually a helpful exercise in learning how to identify what’s important and focus one’s writing, the requirement to produce condensed narratives threatened to contradict the message that this is a complex history by forcing students to oversimplify.
And I do like that we have the ability to do sidebars, which with these sidebars you can communicate a whole lot more in depth with the information, um, if a person chooses to, but that the main gist of the story is told right here. And I think the process is a learning process for us as much as anything- is how to- knowing you can be short with your words but be able to expand on it if- if called upon. So the- the number of lectures, the mass of the reading, you can put it down in this tiny little context but people are able to ask you those questions and you can give them the knowledge that you have beyond just the 250 word limit. (Interview, January 26, 2012)
I wanted the Dakota war- or the war from the Dakota perspective because I thought it would be easier, like I figured there’d be way more resources on it but the problem is there’s so much and I don’t really feel like I- like I’m representing anything accurately because I can’t do any first-hand interviews with anyone and I’m a white(hhhh) and- so there’s that and then, you know, we have 200 words to convey this huge thing and I know that there’s certain stigmas here like culturally with the white people and this incident and so it’s just really difficult for Tom and I to summarize in 200 words while still maintaining like I think a positive like focus but not too positive because then that’ll look bad. Oh my gosh! (Interview, January 24, 2012)
- Stephanie:
“The Dakota were starving and so they attacked some settlers and then they didn’t win.”
- Rick:
Yeah. So it became simplistic.
- Stephanie:
It’s just so bad. It’s not even-
- Rick:
Because it’s simplistic?
- Stephanie:
Mm-hm. It sounds stupid.
- Rick:
Okay. Yeah.
- Stephanie:
It’s bad.
(4.0)
- Rick:
Do you think anybody could possibly be offended by what you’re gonna put out there in the end? Who would it be?
- Stephanie:
Dakota people.
- Rick:
Yeah? Because it downplays the injustice?
- Stephanie:
↑Yeah!
- Rick:
Yeah. Okay(hhhhhh).
- Stephanie:
↑Oh my god! They’re gonna look at my panel and they’re gonna say, “Here’s two hundred words representing how my people felt about, you know, fifty years of injustice, and, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dead sick children and women that aren’t even mentioned?” So we were talking about putting our names on them, I was like, “Yeah, that’d be fine,” and then I was like, “Wait (2.0) (hhh)everyone ever is gonna hate me.” (Interview, January 24, 2012)
Still nearly two months away from the social-justice conference when she said this, Stephanie sensed trouble lying ahead, or the “what-not” referred to in her epigraphic quote to this chapter. At this late point in the J-term, a day after the students had failed to come to a consensus about having their names, signatures, or photographs printed on their panels identifying them as authors, Stephanie was trying to envision a different kind of narrative than the one Tom was crafting on Harwell’s advice. In sharing her anxiety, Stephanie noted an unmet need to acknowledge subaltern perspectives, that is, to create some sense in her narrative for what the history would look like when told from below (Young, 2003), taking into account the usually nameless Dakota refugees of the 1860s, the “hundreds and hundreds of dead sick children and women that aren’t even mentioned” about whom the conventional sources provide little to information.
Re-Framing on the Fly and from Above
At the beginning of the second week of class, students got together in writing groups to discuss and present sources they had just begun to consult for their research. When it came Stephanie and Tom’s turn to share, Tom mentioned he had been considering Gary Clayton Anderson’s Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (1986). Harwell encouraged him and Stephanie to continue with that and to look at Kenneth Carley’s (1976) history as well, saying, “With this panel we want to present how the Dakota carried out attacks strategically” (Fieldnotes, January 09, 2012). He said they should think about talking to John LaBatte too because he is “a good source.” In this exchange, Harwell set a frame of military history for Stephanie and Tom’s panel on the spot, a frame that had not been stated in the syllabus or clarified in supplementary resource materials. Harwell explained, “We can do this on a panel in a respectful way. The Dakota were smart and powerful militarily. There were many instances where they defeated the U.S. government militarily. They were a powerful nation. This war isn’t simple and one-sided” (Fieldnotes, January 09, 2012).
Like with Dr. Lenz’s comment about the “fairly balanced perspective, which is what we’re looking for,” this powerful new frame, relying heavily on inclusive we, began its work directing Tom and Stephanie away from the syllabus’s stated goal to “raise awareness of the treatment of indigenous people in the nineteenth century.” Again, there was nothing about the listed panel theme “War — Dakota perspectives” that necessarily signaled a focus on “military strategy.” Rather, the frame emerged in this face-to-face encounter as a personal and perhaps pre-determined preference of the instructor, one that encouraged telling the history from above, or from the point of view of the empowered. As with other instances of inclusive we analyzed, this iteration of the authoritative good-history perspective sought to make itself into a collective desire in this formative moment—“With this panel we want to present…,” a “want” Tom was happy to act on given his military background. Tom went on to assume authorship of aspects of the narrative pertaining to military strategy (Stephanie interview, January 24, 2012).
Attending this on-the-fly establishment of the military-strategy frame came the inherent settler-friendly bias favoring Anderson, Carley, and LaBatte, with an implicit understanding that there was really no need to seek out differently oriented sources. Throughout the J-term, it remained a kind of mystery how LaBatte, for example, could simultaneously be “a good source” and “the Rush Limbaugh of the Dakota people” (Fieldnotes, January 9, 18-2012), a formulation similar to Kenneth Carley being “dated” but also offering the sought-after “fairly balanced perspective.” One explanation could be the instructors thought these sources’ facts remained reliable despite their biased delivery. Regardless, persistent deference to LaBatte’s expertise in the classroom silently evoked all the Dakota community members who did not come so quickly to mind for Harwell when advising students in the moment—Sheldon Wolfchild, Waziyatawin, Gwen Westerman, David Larsen, and others—people Stephanie potentially could have consulted in conducting the kind of research she was thinking of when she said, “I can’t do any first-hand interviews with anyone and I’m a white(hhhh)….” In ways similar to those explored in Chapter 4 when Christina suggested that the white experts couldn’t really know about the Dakota genocide on their own, Harwell’s convictions about good public-history practices (who was worth talking to and building relationships with and who wasn’t) threatened to disfigure student perceptions of what was possible regarding research, representation of Dakota history, and white knowledge itself. Thinking back on the Dakota political spectrum evoked by Harwell in our first interview, pre-set ideological orientations made it so that LaBatte (presumably on the far right) was readily available as a source for students to talk to in January whereas Waziyatawin (presumably on the far left) was not. Accordingly, as Stephanie mentioned the limitations placed on her research, she simultaneously identified her whiteness, a racial identity implicitly associated with the constraining J-term whiteness Harwell and Jennifer defined as inescapable. My data suggest something different, however—that this seemingly limited, inevitable, and ideologically defensive whiteness took shape through pedagogical choices made both before the class got underway and during, as the instructors performed white compensatory work on the fly, making daily decisions out of conscious desires to ignore certain kinds of knowledge and certain kinds of people.
The Dakota people were in possession of millions of acres of fertile farmland, which the United States government was eager to acquire in order to facilitate settlements farther west in the Americas […]
However, the first allotments of this money were made to the U.S. Government, “for investing purposes,” and to the traders in the area, to pay off the debts which the Dakota had supposedly accumulated […]
With Minnesota becoming a state in 1858, settlers flooded the region. Settlements near the reservations pushed the boundaries and encroached on territory allotted the Dakota people. In having been confined to a small tract of land and now forced to give up traditional ways, the Dakota became ever reliant on the Agencies and the annuities which were promised in treaty. Food promised through negation was not distributed to the Dakota, with the trader Andrew Myrick stating, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass….”
As in Jennifer’s case, Harwell drew a big parenthesis in the margin marking all of this “great, but not your responsibility for panel.” Contextualizing statements about white encroachment, the embezzlement of money legally owed to the Dakota people, the systematic white production of Dakota dependency, and dehumanizing insults would be revised away with the promise that other panels would handle these respective themes—treaties, the annuity system, assimilation, reservation life, settler perspectives. For an anxious student like Stephanie who sensed trouble ahead while still planning to represent her panel in person at the social-justice conference workshop in March, a lot of trust went into accepting any advice to eliminate context.
Start with Acton. Small group of young men. Fairly small event acts as catalyst for the war.
Little Crow—great speech, interesting guy. Probably deserves a sidebar/paragraph.
Small # of Dakota participate.
Dakota fractured and conflicted. That translates to battlefield. Because they are not unified and strategy isn’t unilateral, they lose advantage at Fort Ridgely.
Still, Dakota force is powerful. If for a few circumstances they could have won several battles.
End with Wood Lake/Camp Release.
The identification of Tháoyateduta as an interesting guy who probably deserves a paragraph emphasizes the degree to which Harwell promoted writing history from above.
Four Dakota men on a hunting trip near Acton came upon chicken eggs belonging to a white farmer. A dare was made to one of the men to prove his lack of cowardice for not wanting to steal the eggs, resulting in the deaths of 5 white settlers. Upon returning to their tribes the men told of what they had done. Discussions were had about what to do about these men. The Dakota knew that the killing of the 5 settlers would bring severe consequences to the Dakota [….]
Harwell’s advice to begin the narrative from this point and portray Acton as the catalyst for military conflict was a risky proposition considering students were explicitly told during one of Harwell’s own PowerPoint presentations that the war “isn’t about stolen eggs” and that Dakota people “hate the egg story” (Fieldnotes, January 18, 2012), presumably for the way it trivializes and threatens to obscure the real causes of the war. Yet Stephanie remembered Sheldon Wolfchild using the egg story in his documentary, making her wonder whether she shouldn’t keep it after all (Interview, January 24, 2012). As with so many dilemmas encountered, the narrative choices available to Stephanie and Tom seemed alternately consequential and trivializing precisely because the two key factors in the U.S.-Dakota War, violent land appropriation and the white supremacy that “justified” it to whites, are not being incorporated into the narrative. While this perhaps apocryphal tale about eggs and violence sparked on a quest for food could rightly symbolize social injustices behind the struggle over the ultimate social good—land—so too could the substantial tale of whites hurling racist insults at the four young Dakota men at Acton rightly expose whites’ provocation of the violence and underlying “justification” for confiscating land. Yet only the eggs seem to rise to the level of dilemma with the Acton story today, while epithets used by settlers (“Redskins,” “black devils”), retold in a key privileged early source on the war, remain ignored (Heard, 1863, p. 55).
During group editing at the end of the third week, the class spent an unusual amount of time critiquing Tom and Stephanie’s revised draft. Alan advised taking the egg story out. Harwell agreed but suggested retaining Acton in a timeline instead. Dr. Lenz linked the story to “uprising” mentality, a word used elsewhere in Tom and Stephanie’s narrative that she recommended removing. “‘Uprising’ gives the sense of normalcy, a sudden uprising, and then normalcy again,” she said, drawing a steep bell curve with her hand in the air. Alan agreed, saying this has “a certain contextualizing effect too. It shows it from the white soldiers’ perspective like it was all about putting down an uprising” (Fieldnotes, January 20, 2012). Afterward, only Tom seemed to express frustration with all of this disproportionate critical attention being paid to the panel he was assigned to—“when we were getting critiqued, it was like, ‘I had to make those decisions of what- to leave that out, and then those are the ones that you picked apart, but if I would have left them in and taken something else out, those would have been taken apart too’” (Interview, January 26, 2012). In short, with relativist thinking engaged for some students like Tom, there was no rhyme or reason to why certain “facts” should be left in and others edited out. Important to the story here is Tom’s switch from we to I in this quote, suggesting how Stephanie’s co-authorship had grown unclear.
The Acton story did not appear in the second draft. Between the draft’s submission on January 23 and the release of the final panel in March, Harwell found a way to retain it (without the eggs) by adding a quote from Hdainyaŋka (Rattling Runner), one of the men hanged in Mankato—“… It was not the intention of the nation to kill any of the whites until after the four men returned from Acton….” Harwell had been using the quote in his own public presentations for some time (Harwell PowerPoint presentation, January 14, 2012).
By the time of the second draft, students had read Sarah Wakefield’s captivity narrative, Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees (1863). Stephanie identified a quote from this volume calling out a key ancestry-based double standard concerning voices she feared wouldn’t be mentioned, the hundreds of starving Dakota women and children—“I often wonder how these poor deceived creatures bore so much and so long without retaliation […] Suppose the same number of whites were living in sight of food, purchased with their own money, and their children dying of starvation, how long think you would they remain quiet” (p. 64). Stephanie sent the passage to Tom and asked him to add it in (Interview, January 24, 2012). As they were in whittling-down mode after submitting the initial 600-word draft, Wakefield would hopefully suffice with her distanced summary of subaltern perspectives. There was apparently little time or stated need to seek out Dakota sources beyond John LaBatte. Harwell did not mark the Wakefield quote as needing removed in his January 24 edits, yet it did not make the final panel presented at the social-justice conference in March.
- Stephanie:
I really like John because he’s super funny and nice but I kind of want to strangle him a little bit.
- Rick:
Because?
- Stephanie:
Because I get that he’s a museum curator and this is what he does. So this is how he sees things. But I mean, he’s just like, “Well, we have to appeal to everyone. We have to make it as short as possible because Americans’ attention spans are this.” And I’m like, “Oh man! How on earth are you gonna get-?” He’s like, “This is the best we can do.” I’m like, “How are you gonna get actual awareness about this?” with, you know, the sites we’ve been to and the crappy offensive videos.
- Rick:
Awareness- awareness about what really happened, right? The injustices that really happened?
- Stephanie:
What really happened, yeah! And what’s still happening. And like we visited the museums and they’re all super dated and awful with crappy movies and ….. (Interview, January 24, 2012)
Like in the interview with Sheldon Wolfchild, Stephanie suddenly switches to we when talking about how Harwell won consent for writing an exhibit largely innocuous for the intended whitestream audience. As with Wolfchild, she maintains a strong sense of her own critical voice, her own I, clearly demarcating its distance from the inclusive/exclusive J-term we she invokes in frustration. To be sure, the J-term we had performed exclusionary identity work on critical whites as well. Paralleling Wolfchild’s critique, Stephanie moves into and out of the J-term we in building toward the conclusion that the injustices of 1862 are not only ongoing but close at hand, some having become visible during recent field trips to sites operated by the county historical societies.3
* * *
“The Dakota Declare War” exhibit panel
(Source Image courtesy Stephanie and Tom)
Starving, desperate, and quickly losing their traditional way of life, the Mdewakanton Dakota soldiers’ lodges led by reluctant Chief Taoyateduta declared war on the United States when they attacked the Lower Sioux Agency on August 18, 1862. Dakota akicitas continued throughout the valley and attacked Fort Ridgely on August 20 and 22, New Ulm on August 19 and again on August 23, and scattered newcomer settlements throughout western Minnesota. Though originally superior in number, Dakota akicitas were divided in their opinions about military tactics, and that lessened their strategic advantage. The war’s final battle occurred at Wood Lake on September 23, 1862. Taoyateduta’s battle plan was accidentally foiled by a group of U.S. soldiers foraging for potatoes, which prematurely started the fighting. At Camp Release, captives held by the Dakota were freed, and a mixture of Dakota akicitas and non-combatants surrendered to Colonel Sibley. Taoyateduta and a few hundred of his followers fled west and escaped capture.
This final version condenses all of Tom and Stephanie’s earlier contextualization of the Dakotas’ suffering to a single opening phrase, “Starving, desperate, and quickly losing their traditional way of life, ….” All of Stephanie’s concern for the hundreds of sick and dying women and children reduces to a single militarized euphemism, “non-combatants.” Sidebars and quotes that could be devoted to subaltern perspectives relate Tháoyateduta and Hdainyaŋka’s views on the dire consequences of taking up arms. Selected images feature pencil sketches by Albert Colgrave of 1862 battle sites and Anton Gag’s 1904 oil painting Attack on New Ulm during the Sioux Outbreak, August 19-23, 1862.
Following my analyses of white-justice-as-fairness discourses and empowered white narrators’ persistent impulse to erase their own agency in the official public narrative, this panel text on Dakota resistance happens to contain relatively few occurrences of passive to be constructions.4 Active verbs like “declared,” “attacked,” “fled,” and escaped” show clear agency for Dakotas. Still, passive language obscures whites’ roles in shaping events, for example, how the Dakota “soldiers’ lodges” came to be starving and desperate. Only the U.S. soldiers at Wood Lake come close to showing agency, their passively rendered (and allegedly innocent or unwitting) foiling of Tháoyateduta’s battle plan starting the fighting there.
Detail of narrative from “A Bitter End” exhibit panel
(Source Image courtesy Rachel and Tracy)
Not only did age-old zero-point ways of narrating shape these panel narratives, but they provided instructors and students potential evidence for defending their work, like Tom did when describing to me how this exhibit was different than the kind of work done at the College social-justice conference—“I feel like we had a very objective point of view on it. We looked at both sides” (Interview, May 11, 2012). Indeed, the panels seemed to refrain from editorializing. They looked equitable at first glance and merely provided factual information upon closer scrutiny. Instructors and students had considered multiple perspectives along the way. They went back to sources commonly perceived to be balanced. And in this process of fashioning a representational device that would mediate a white sense of justice for themselves and fellow whites, exhibit designers refused to stop and consider how such “good” public-history practices were just as likely to reopen old wounds as they were to raise awareness of the treatment of Dakota people in the nineteenth century, as their syllabus claimed.
White Extra-Institutional J-Term Pressures
My focus on Harwell and Lenz’s management of the exhibit writing risks attributing the production of a politically safe exhibit all to them. I hope, however, to leave a nuanced picture of why the students chose to reproduce the neutral and balanced (yet biased) frames that support the larger white public pedagogy. Many examples have been shown of students variously repeating, questioning, contesting, and acquiescing to dominant frames set in classroom discussions, revealing different ways they were trying out the regional discourses and perhaps taking them to heart as most appropriate and professional public-history practices. Examples to this point are many—Lori’s endorsement of “the balanced perspective” in Chapter 4; Nikki’s “back-and-forth” enactment of Carleyan balance in Chapter 6; Sarah’s conclusion that there are “two sides to this” in Chapter 7; and so on.
But along with students’ daily grappling with dominant classroom frames came reinforcing extra-institutional and intergenerational factors that implied political obligations the students owed to their white families and communities. As seen in Chapter 2, Stephanie came from a diverse town in North Carolina yet grew up under highly segregated circumstances, being sent to a majority-white high school even though another high school, a predominately black public high school, lay closer to home. While telling this story, Stephanie noted tension with a white elder regarding racism (Interview, January 24, 2012). Similarly, in Chapter 7, Sarah was thinking deeply about her parents having sent her to Hill Murray High School, a private majority-white school, rather than to St. Paul’s Harding High, the racially diverse public school she otherwise would have attended. As she told me this, she noted having to be careful about politics at home, particularly with her father with whom she had only recently learned to debate in constructive ways for, among other things, “keeping me away from particularly black people” (Interview, January 26, 2012). While Stephanie and Sarah were the only ones who spoke at length about being directed away from racially diverse learning environments, their stories of having to be careful navigating the politics of race with white elders and other family members were common, with Alan, Monica, Steven, Anna, Lori, and Holly all bringing this up in interviews without my asking.
In a J-term class discussion on white privilege held early in the course, a faculty guest speaker and Dr. Lenz both recounted stories about growing up and having to be careful about the politics of race at home with elders (Fieldnotes, January 06, 2012). When asked by Steven about bringing her knowledge of white privilege back home to her parents, the guest speaker offered the reasonable response that “trying to fight every battle can entrench people against you and make them resentful if you give the impression that you think you know better than them” (Fieldnotes, January 06, 2012). Jennifer responded by saying she found this true after having returned from the white-privilege conference and “confronted” family members about race, adding it was difficult to know “how to choose which hills to die on” (Fieldnotes, January 6, 2012). As seen in the second round of wreath passing in Chapter 4, Jennifer repeated these sentiments and they bore a great deal of common-sense currency. No one questioned them in the white-privilege class discussion, nor did anyone offer alternatives when Jennifer recast talk of white privilege later in terms of war and combat like those above—“shock-and-awe campaigns don’t work” (Fieldnotes, January 24, 2012). These confessionals from influential speakers repeated the well-founded notion that to disrupt white family unity by trying to talk about race means to initiate war and maybe even die on a hill, a dynamic that has long entailed the very legitimate fear of rejection and abandonment among white children in the United States as a consequence for cultivating cross-racial friendships (Thandeka, 1999). In this context, Harwell’s charge to students early in the course to write their first drafts “as if you’re presenting it to your roommate, parent, or somebody who doesn’t have any prior knowledge about the topic” takes on special significance (Fieldnotes, January 9, 2012). By the time students received these instructions, this frame of simply coping with elders’ and other loved ones’ racism so as to avoid conflict (combat) had been established three days earlier.
I don’t want like the people in town, I don’t know, to like view us in the wrong light. And like, I realize that’s probably not the greatest reason because like (2.0) eh, I don’t know. It’s- It’s really easy for I think older people to dismiss our generation as being like a bunch of liberal like extremists who, I don’t know, believe in communism and stuff. Like don’t you think so? Like I get that like from older generations who are like, “You just think that way because everybody in your generation does.” It’s like, “No,” like, “not really. Racism’s kind of getting old.” So you know, it’s like sometimes that worries me. Like I don’t want people to view like the students at this school and my generation in the wrong light. I don’t know. (Interview, January 26, 2012)
Mitch remained silent and seemed to agree. Following the white compensatory work performed by the instructors, Holly’s view suggests that to interpret our work as pushing for anti-oppressive social change would be to look at it “in the wrong light.” St. Lucia student work, as Holly envisions it, should not be seen as aligned with discourses traditionally understood as threatening to the white-supremacist status quo. Even though “racism’s kind of getting old,” maintaining unity across white generational divides and across the corresponding town/gown political divide should take priority over “extremist” work that would otherwise confront racism, just as the goal of maintaining white family unity should more or less overrule straight talk about racism at home. As Holly provides her answer, she hints that she finds it morally dubious—“I realize that’s probably not the greatest reason because like (2.0) eh, I don’t know.” Still, deference to the perceived ideological demands of white community elders remains the reason, and a wise one for a student working for success in the political climate of the white public pedagogy I analyze. Should such elders come to see the Conflict and Remembrance exhibit and accuse the J-term students of leftist extremism, Holly and Mitch would presumably be prepared to correct them and demonstrate how their panel actually reflected the “right” kind of white “light.”
The Sense of White Justice in the Exhibit Narratives
Focusing on the panel narratives themselves as I have done so far in this chapter has left out conservative critique made public by at least one audience member, that the exhibit was overly Dakota-centric and therefore anti-settler. Throughout, the exhibit devotes an unequal number of images to Dakota people. Of 23 images showing people, 15 seem to highlight Dakotas. Each panel includes a large image at the bottom, providing a very professional-looking compositional anchor. Of 12 such images, 9 feature either Dakota people or Dakota settings. Only one shows every-day settler people. This combined with panel titles signifying white duplicity and oppression—“Broken Promises,” “Neglected Payments,” “Exile of the Dakota People”—all can give an immediate impression that the exhibit speaks in the interest of oppressed people and to the detriment of settler hegemony.
This reading of the exhibit found expression by a St. Lucia College newspaper reporter working alongside and sometimes taking issue on the job with Jennifer, the editor-in-chief. Soon after the panels were first shown in March, this student reporter used his column to share a familiar critique from the broader white public pedagogy—“With all the attention focused upon the plight of the Dakota before the conflict and the subsequent execution of 38 individuals after its end, we lose sight of the hundreds of white settlers who lost their lives in the conflict […] My ancestor survived the West Lake Massacre by hiding among the corpses of his slain family members.”5 As in other authoritative or official public perspectives on the history discussed earlier, this writer conjured white ancestors and their association with past racial violence in an attempt to counterbalance what he took to be critical-social-justice education. He felt exhibit designers had failed “to see the events of the past through as many lenses and from as many different viewpoints as possible.” Their exhibit showed they had “swung the wheel too far in the other direction.” The columnist used the occasion to pay homage to a St. Lucia College founder, “the second president of our fair school immediately following the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862,” phrasing reminiscent of defenses of “our fair and beautiful State” raised in regional indignation meetings when settler citizen groups once agitated to see 303 hanged in Mankato (“Removal of troops,” November 15, 1862). For this writer, the exhibit amounted to a case of reverse discrimination by not teaching equal empathy for whites.
Mitch and I were talking about that, and Mitch is like, “You know- you know I don’t feel like it’s biased at all.” He’s like, “I feel like this is a way more accurate portrayal than what I’ve ever gotten.” And I was like- and I was like, “Yeah, but think how long history’s been portrayed through the white perspective.” And so- but then he and I talked about the pendulum swing in terms of how history’s gonna have to be told and how this may seem like an extreme for some people right now but as- you know as- (2.0) as history progresses, and as hopefully we continue to talk about history and how we tell history, how this may seem mild(hhhh) compared- you know, and so how there’s kind of like this pendulum swing in terms of how things are portrayed.” (Interview, April 26, 2012)
I read two political orientations in this response. For Mitch, at least as Jennifer paraphrases him, the exhibit’s “accurate portrayal” (epistemology) ensured an unbiased presentation. While the Dakota-centric imagery on the surface of the exhibit may make this assessment sound progressive, the writing process Mitch had been guided through by the professionals cannot be underestimated in shaping this defense.
As shown early in this chapter, the narrative on the Treaties panel Mitch co-authored assigns agency only to Dakotas as they actively cede their lands. White agency is consistently obscured either by passive voice or depersonalized acting subjects like “illegal papers” and “broken promises,” phrases admittedly critical toward the government but actually in keeping with the early settler historiography which was nearly always anti-government. By writing zero-point narratives and sticking to “the facts” that obscure settler culpability, J-termers would always be able to point back and defend the exhibit against conservative attack. While Jennifer did not bring this up, her colleague and critic on the College newspaper staff had actually cast the exhibit in the wrong light; he simply hadn’t read Jennifer’s panel closely enough which states “By the end of the war, at least 450 — and perhaps as many as 800 — newcomers and U.S. soldiers were killed,” the latter number indicative of perhaps the most egregious assault on truth seen in today’s white public pedagogy, based as it is on extrapolations and guesswork as Corrine Marz revealed in her J-term lecture.6
For, Jennifer, who expressed optimism about maturing from her radical ways in our earlier interview, a bit of skepticism remains toward Mitch’s epistemological defense of the exhibit recounted in the block quote above. She suspects the exhibit might be mild in relation to where she senses the historiography might be headed—“…how we tell history, how this may seem mild(hhhh) compared- you know….” Despite this subtle difference between them, however, the metaphor of a shifting progressive balance seems to hold the two together, i.e., the metaphor Harwell offered them early on when he invited the class to “think of history as a pendulum. It’s never going to stop at the exact middle. You’re never going to get at the absolute truth. It depends on the time you’re in. Here the pendulum has swung from one direction to another” (Fieldnotes, January 9, 2012).
I suggest this central metaphor of the pendulum worked as a kind of symbolic point of mutual obligation for these students of presumably different political orientations—Jennifer, the self-proclaimed “far more of a radical,” and Mitch, the defensive farmer descendant—who assimilated to the white-justice-as-fairness perspective. Not only did these probationary knowledge workers build a sense of community (we-ness) in the course, but they acquired literacy skills in the regional white public pedagogy in the process, a highly binary language loaded with concepts like swung pendulums, tipped scales, and over-corrected wheels. Demonstrating her fluency with this language months later, Jennifer reveals the social (ontological) sense of white justice as fairness achieved through the exhibit-writing process, enabling buy-in to the idea of furthering a progressive multiculturalist paradigm7 as it simultaneously recruited students to carry out compensatory white public-history work. After all, with the pendulum swung so far to the Dakota side, it should only be fair to consult dated (racist) sources and reproduce some traditional history product together, following J-term logic. By relying almost exclusively then on conventional white strategies like the Carleyan ABCs, linear chronological display, and zero-point narration, exhibit co-authors fashioned their panels as representational devices that could assure fellow whites, even parents or white war descendants if it should come to that, that there was justice in them despite the multicultural veneer.
Historical Reenactment Revisited: The White Defense of (Intellectual) Property
She is a social activist and such and you can’t, you can’t- you can’t tell her something if she’s convinced. So if she’s convinced that all the settlers hated Indians, then you’re not going to- you’d have to show her definitive proof that there wasn’t- that they weren’t all. And that’s where I want to interject. And she- she like other people I know, won’t accept information from people they don’t view as scholars. And that’s something that I think is stupid because for a guy like me or anybody else my age or education level, you know, just because I don’t have five degrees doesn’t mean I don’t know anything, you know? (Interview, January 9, 2012)
I think because when you go to the white privilege conference, you- a lot of these ki- not that whites don’t have any responsibility. It’s a youthfulness that takes that message and turns it into a naïve battle cry and this self-loathing perception of “I’m white and I’m therefore responsible for all the crap that’s happened in this world that’s bad to other minorities.” (Interview, January 9, 2012)
I would want to press, and what I wish we were pressing more in the panels was what do we do now? Where is this history? What are we gonna do about it? And it’s your responsibility. You know, this issue of responsibility I think is huge and I think that’s something I’ve learned in my studies of white privilege is that you do, you have a responsibility to be questioning and to hold people accountable. And, um, I still don’t feel like that’s being done. (January 18, 2012)
Of course, Jennifer told me during this same interview that she liked her instructors’ neutral approach on genocide and that she hoped to grow into the balanced view. Such ambivalence suggests that student orientations toward either white justice as fairness or critical social justice depended greatly on the instructors’ commitments to pedagogical goals declared on the syllabus and discursive frames they constructed daily, especially on the fly, while either working to meet or abandon those goals.
I didn’t feel comfortable going in there and supporting her. I would have gladly supported the class and what we did because I feel like we had a very objective point of view on it. We looked at both sides. It wasn’t just, “This was- this was the atrocity, let’s just look at that.” I think we did a good job as a class to look at the big picture and look at it from both perspectives because a lot of people don’t know that not every settler moved in thinking “get rid of the Indians.” They didn’t know. They were just- said, “Here’s some land that you can prosper on. Okay.” Who’s gonna say no to that? (Interview, May 11, 2012)
For Tom, this memorable outcome of the J-term exhibit—providing understanding of the settler experience, especially their presumably unwitting (innocent) experience—had little to do with the College social-justice conference’s specific goal that year to “discuss the impact of colonization on American Indians, past and present.”
I wanted to sign up for both of them, but I only signed up for the Washington, D.C. one. Um, I hope that- I want them- I want them to pursue- or accept me to go on that trip because I feel like I have a pretty bal- not to sound conceited, but I feel like I have a pretty balanced perspective. (Interview, May 11, 2012)
All I got out was, “Well, when he declared war” because I was going to focus on the like sovereign nation thing. And then Pam [Wa Duta Winyan] was there and she cut me off, and she was like, “Don’t pin this on him. He was our- he’s our hero and he’s a great leader and he wasn’t picking a fight.” And I was like, “No! No!” you know. “That’s not what-!” She was really really upset because, you know, he’s her ancestor and she’s very offended. And it was, you know, like just the total disappointment that I have with the panel and having her like express that disappointment to me. So I just like burst into tears. I was like ((crying voice)) ↑‘I’m really sorry!”. (Interview, April 27, 2012)
For me, the most striking thing in Stephanie’s account is how her fears from January ended up materializing. Wa Duta Winyan—former Tribal Historic Preservation Officer at Lower Sioux Community and descendant of Tháoyateduta—did not take issue with the panel itself as Stephanie had feared Dakota audience members might do. Rather, she expressed disapproval of what Stephanie felt obliged to say in explaining its content. While Stephanie had strongly critiqued the way the drafting of the panel had been supervised, that supervision still had decisive influence on the way she would position herself later when attempting to account for it in public, that is, by starting out with the military frame she did not endorse or even really care about.
On the surface, it would appear Stephanie served at the workshop out of a sense of obligation for the panel she co-authored; after all, she was willing to “stand by it” in a literal sense and face the community. But the workshop offered an opportunity to do what she had wanted to do all along, get to know Dakota people, an experience her role as a student knowledge worker threatened to turn profoundly negative. To represent the panel meant to reproduce J-term discursive frames and engage in telling the history from above, an inherently divisive practice as she well knew. In recalling this episode, Stephanie summed up everything the panel-writing process had taught her—how to speak against her own critical judgment and not from the heart as Dakota speakers had encouraged her to do.
I was like, “We only had a month to put these together,” and you know, I was like, “the teacher-” I was like, “the professors did not influence us in any way. It was our creative license. Like, we chose what went on these.” So I was like, “that was me,” and like, “you don’t need to be taking it out on her [Dr. Lenz] now.” This is like, “I created this panel.” Um, I mean, so I wasn’t really that- like, I understand that he was upset, but there was nothing I could do at that point. (Interview, April 26, 2012)
Yeah, and he said that like our focus was completely wrong, and that like we needed to change the year on something, and we were kind of like standing there nodding our heads thinking to ourselves like, “I don’t know. Like people at the historical society looked over this, and like historians looked over it. I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” but …. (Interview, May 3, 2012)
Like Sandee loved them. She said they were all great. And, um, other people too who I had seen at some of the- at some of the lectures but I didn’t know who they were specifically, said that they all really liked them. So I was like, clearly this guy just has issues with everything because everyone else seemed to love them. (Interview, May 3, 2012)
Sarah expressed similar views, supporting the point that very little of what Wolfchild said had been heeded—“Um, but from like what I got from his criticisms is that he was angry that we did not make the panels he would have made which is not appropriate because we all had to compromise. Every single person had to compromise on this” (Interview, April 26, 2012).
I was very disappointed and empathetic because, you know, the whole month we were just learning about all this horrible stuff that happened. And it’s still happening. And so I just sort of sobbed on Pam for like the rest of that time. (Interview, April 27, 2012)
- 1.
Harwell was well aware of this dynamic in regional commemoration. In class one day, he critiqued a white spokesperson from New Ulm whom he had recently heard speak in a Minnesota Public Radio story. As Harwell told it, the person being interviewed claimed to want to hear multiple Dakota perspectives but then said he couldn’t understand why Dakota people weren’t joining in with ceremonies held at the town’s defenders’ monument (Fieldnotes, January 12, 2012).
- 2.
Mr. Wolfchild did the state a favor working for the 2012 reissue of David Nichols’s (1978) classic Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics through the Minnesota Historical Society Press. In paying credit to Wolfchild, Nichols (2012) writes in his new preface, “One day, reflecting on this story [of the 1862 trials and hanging], I remarked to Sheldon that I have now concluded that there was, in a sense, an American ‘holocaust’” (p. xiv).
- 3.
The datedness of videos seen at the Lower Sioux Agency and Fort Ridgeley on January 19 inspired some laughter and ridicule among students (Fieldnotes, January 19, 2012). The Fort Ridgeley video had a conspicuous splice between the end of the 1862 battles and the Mankato hanging suggesting the removal of inappropriate and perhaps overtly racist material. Stephanie, Sarah, Holly, and Mitch all laughed about this part in focus group, Stephanie wondering whether subliminal messaging hadn’t taken place (January 20, 2012). After visiting BLCHS, Jennifer gave a more sober assessment of the historical sites and museums, saying that the binders she saw there containing newspaper stories and white family histories symbolized the imbalance of local knowledge production—“[Dakota anger] doesn’t sit there in a history book for ever and ever. It doesn’t sit there in those binders for ever and ever and ever. I mean, the lasting influence of that hatred. Whites have the upper hand” (Interview, January 18, 2012).
- 4.
Examples of panels that have a relatively high number of passive to be constructions include Lori and Anna’s narrative on “Exile of the Dakota People,” which would have been the panel to address genocide most directly. It contains 13 to be constructions in 19 sentences. Rachel and Tracy’s panel “A Bitter End,” addressing the trials and hanging, contains 13 occurrences in 15 sentences.
- 5.
Author and title withheld to help protect participant anonymity.
- 6.
Professional scholars have long tended toward an estimate slightly lower than the first number on Jennifer’s panel, with 447 killed, a number including 90 military casualties (Folwell, 1924, p. 392; Chomsky, 1990, pp. 21–22). These figures are based on Satterlee’s (1923) extensive research around the turn of the twentieth century. By contrast, the larger number Jennifer lists reflects estimates made in public talks, self-published booklets, and letters to newspapers by regional lay historians like Corrine Marz (Lecture, January 24, 2012), Curtis Dahlin (2013), and John LaBatte (2012), all of whom rely heavily on early anti-Indian sources. These historians had significant influence on the J-term, seen across these chapters. But as University of Minnesota historian William Folwell (1924) wrote long ago, “Contemporaries in their excited imaginations not only exaggerated the numbers of the killed and wounded, but also circulated stories of atrocities of the most fiendish and horrible character” (p. 393). Accordingly, the 800 number shows the influence of anti-Indian sublime (Silver, 2008) discourses on public knowledge being produced today, both in Jennifer’s panel and in professional histories (Anderson, 2019; Wingerd, 2010, p. 307). For analysis of early-history material on current U.S.-Dakota War historiography, see Lybeck (2015).
- 7.
The victory Jennifer felt she won against Harwell’s editing in being allowed to retain the Jane Swisshelm material provided her powerful evidence that the pendulum had swung away from the settlers: “And I think that- I think that having it up and putting it out there and- and- and- cause I don’t think that’s ever gonna get into a history book. I doubt it. I doubt that anything that- that provocative is ever gonna get into a history book and it needs- people need to have the cold hard reality in their face, and that’s why- and that’s why I chose it” (Interview, April 26, 2012). While similar provocative material showing examples of the 1862 extermination campaign has been in history books for some time, including the Minnesota Historical Society’s sixth-grade textbook Northern Lights: The Stories of Minnesota’s Past (Kenney, 2003, p. 131), Jennifer’s point that it can be easily buried and should be in white people’s faces for critical purposes is important.